Capital Institute Blog

A recent New York Times article on program-related investing highlighted the $10 million equity stake the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took in Liquidia Technologies. Some in the foundation world are concerned that the investment blurred the line between profit-making and charity. We and our Braintrust advisor Stephen Viederman say foundations should blur those lines—as long as they deploy their endowment assets when they do so.  We would…

We spoke last week with Ted Howard, co-founder with Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative and a key strategist of The Evergreen Cooperatives, the subject of our second Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy study.  Evergreen is a remarkable experiment in anchor-institution-based cooperative enterprise, rooted in sustainable practices and dedicated to true wealth building in inner city Cleveland. Ted told us…

July 2, 2012 update—TIAA-CREF’s Global Social and Community Investments Group was created in 2006, after a survey TIAA-CREF conducted of its clients indicated that the core values that guided their investment-decision-making turned out to be human rights, community investment, and environmental sustainability. Since we posted the profile of TIAA-CREF’s Global Social and Community Investment Group in June 2010, Amy Muska…

Economics, Finance, Governance, and Ethics for the Anthropocene, a working paper of the Capital Institute-housed Third Millennium Economy project, was released last Thursday for public review in advance of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. As the civil society groups and grassroots activists meet now and world leaders arrive later this week, the paper is a flag in the…

While on a panel with John Fullerton last week at the BALLE conference, Gar Alperovitz offered a powerful thought on the importance of ideas which we subsequently asked him to capture in writing.  Here is his response: “Rarely do important new ideas matter in politics. What usually matters is the momentum of entrenched power…. But not always! Sometimes–when the old ideas no…

If the Rio + 20 Earth Summit demonstrated little else it was that national, regional, community, and company initiatives are fast filling the vacuum left by the dismal failure of global leadership to effectively address climate change and other ecosystem emergencies.  These ad hoc approaches present opportunities as well as challenges to the institutions and economies that are the first…

In researching our soon-to-be-released Field Guide study of the Manufacturing Renaissance Council we discovered an illuminating 2011 Brookings Institution white paper, “The Federal Role in Supporting Urban Manufacturing,” co-authored by Joan Byron and Nisha Mistry.  The paper focuses exclusively on the emergence of Small Urban Manufacturers (SUMs) as a trend that is transforming the American manufacturing landscape.  SUMs are defined as urban…