An Education in Possibility: Reflections from Our First SOCAP

This month we had the privilege of attending SOCAP for the first time. The conference gathered October 12 to 14 at Convene Willis Tower in Chicago, and we returned home inspired, pleasantly overwhelmed, and certain that we had found a community worth coming back to.

SOCAP brings together the full breadth of the impact economy. Funders and founders, investors and entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, scientists, bankers, government officials, and community organizers all gather around a shared conviction that capital can be put to work in service of people and planet. For more than eighteen years the conference has been a leading convener in this field, and this year marked the first time it has been held outside of San Francisco.

The Value of Breadth

What struck us most about SOCAP is how wide it opens the door. Many conferences go deep on a single strategy or a single sector. SOCAP does something different. It lays out the entire landscape at once, and for a foundation standing at the very beginning of this work, that turned out to be exactly what we needed.

We have been describing it to colleagues as a crash course, and we mean that as the highest compliment. Three days of sessions gave us a working map of a field we had only glimpsed before, drawn by practitioners who have spent their careers building it.

So Many Ways to Put Capital to Work

We arrived thinking of impact investing as a fairly narrow set of choices. Align the portfolio, find a fund that reflects your values, and hold it. What we found instead was a field of remarkable range, including a great many approaches we did not know existed.

We learned about capital structured to absorb the first loss so that more conservative investors will participate. Revenue based financing for enterprises that will never fit a traditional venture timeline. Guarantees a foundation can provide that unlock traditional lending for worthy upstarts. Community investment notes, recoverable grants, place based funds, and lending through community development financial institutions that know their borrowers personally.

Each of these answers a different question and carries its own risks and responsibilities. Hearing them described side by side, by the people who actually use them, gave us a sense of the whole that no amount of reading on our own would have produced. Just as valuable was the candor. Presenters spoke openly about what has worked, what has not, and what they would do differently.

A Journey We Intend to Take

We want to be clear about where we stand today. We are not yet an impact investor. We are executives of a foundation that has become convinced it should become one, and those are different places on the same road.

Our grantmaking already reflects our values across Education, Environmental Science, and Human Services. It becomes harder each year to argue that the rest of what we hold should sit outside that conversation. The logic of aligning the full balance sheet with the mission is one we find genuinely compelling.

Getting there will take time. This decision belongs to our board, and we are shepherding that conversation thoughtfully and without rushing it. A family foundation runs on trust and real agreement. We would rather move deliberately and arrive with everyone truly alongside us than move quickly and arrive alone. We expect this to be a journey of years rather than quarters, and we are at peace with that.

Gratitude and Forward Momentum

Our thanks to the SOCAP Global team for building a conference that welcomes newcomers as readily as veterans, and to the Chicago institutions that hosted this year's gathering so generously. Thank you as well to everyone who met with us and answered our beginner questions with patience and real openness.

We left with a clearer map, a longer list of questions, and a stronger conviction that this work is both achievable and worth doing. We look forward to returning, and to sharing more as our own journey unfolds.