2019 Mission Investing Institute

Rini Banerjee has two decades of experience in philanthropy. An Integrated Capital Fellow at RSF Social Finance, she has served as Executive Director at Foundation for a Just Society, Program Officer at the Overbrook Foundation, and Program Director at the New York Women’s Foundation. She is a trustee of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and Board member of Funders for Reproductive Equity, and has co-created or served on groups including the NYC-based Asian Women’s Giving Circle, Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights, the Groundswell Fund, and the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing. She was a past Board Chair of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) and past Board member of South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!). She holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University and a BSc in finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Dana K. Bezerra is the president of Heron. Bezerra began her career in agriculture in California. Her family owned a dairy farm in the San Joaquin Valley, where she bore witness to the bankruptcy of a local creamery, the formation of an independent milk producers’ cooperative, and the provision of a local tax abatement package to a multinational food company. Those experiences left Bezerra with a lasting impression about the importance of social cohesion within a community — and the complicated relationship between communities and capital markets. Bezerra proceeded to work at Merrill Lynch in the Private Banking & Investment Group, where she specialized in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Management. For the next decade, Bezerra managed client money, where she earned an appreciation for the nuances of intergenerational wealth and learned to navigate complex financial transactions and markets.

 

In 2006, Bezerra joined Heron. As a program officer, Bezerra engaged with nonprofit and community leaders who were operationalizing Heron’s mission on the ground in communities that had been waylaid by globalization, mechanization, and disintermediation. It became clear in that role that Heron’s responsibility was to feed the agency of local leaders by supporting them and their enterprises.

 

Over the next 10 years, Bezerra played a key role in rotating Heron’s entire portfolio (including debt, equity, and grants) to better reflect Heron’s mission. Bezerra became responsible for sourcing deals, identifying and developing relationships across a spectrum of investors, syndicating capital when possible, and cultivating opportunities to deploy the full range of Heron’s philanthropic and market-rate toolkit. As president, Bezerra hopes to build on Heron’s history and leverage the lessons it has learned over the past 25 years — both on the ground in communities and within the capital markets.

 

In addition to her role at Heron, Dana has been active in the leadership of several national and local philanthropic organizations over the last two decades, including the Board of Capital Impact Partners, the Steering Committee for Mission Investors’ Exchange, the Innovation and Selection Committee for the Nature Conservancy, and as a reviewer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of its Grand Challenge Exploration Program.

 

Bezerra also participates actively in the Weantinoge Land Trust. Bezerra has a Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Business and Public Policy from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Jim Casselberry has over 30 years of experience in impact investing, investment management and investment consulting.

 

Jim is currently, the Chief Investment Officer at Sarowitz Family, LLC, with the primary focus being on impact and mission related investing. Jim is a board member at the Julian Grace Foundation and chair of the investment committee. Jim is also a board member of Arc Chicago, LLC, the appointed board of Benefit Chicago. Benefit Chicago is a collaboration between The Chicago Community Trust, the John D, and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Calvert Foundation. Jim has written several white papers, most recently “Why Not the Best? Capturing Alpha from a Long-Neglected Market.” Jim has held senior roles at NexTier Companies, LLC and Dearborn Park Group, LLC (DPG), these firms offered strategic consulting advice to investment management and financial services firms. Prior to DPG, he was a principal at Ennis Knupp and Associates Inc. (Ennis Knupp, currently known as AonHewitt Investment Consulting, Inc., an Aon Company) and served as the primary consultant and managed consulting assignments. Jim also served as the leader of Ennis Knupp’s Emerging Manager Advisory Council and was a member of the firm’s global equity research group, private equity research group as well as the fixed income advisory council.

 

During his career, Jim has held leadership positions with Trias Capital Management, LLC, Wedgewood Capital Management, Inc. and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He began his career at First Chicago Corporation and Arthur D. Little Valuation, Inc. Jim has been an adjunct Professor at Valparaiso University teaching in the College of Business MBA program and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Jim received a BS degree in economics from the University of Illinois and an MBA degree from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.

Daryn Dodson is the Managing Director at Illumen Capital, the world's first private equity firm dedicated to reducing implicit bias across financial markets to unlock impact and returns. Illumen Capital invests in the world’s top impact fund managers and applies research-based interventions in partnership with Stanford University to help fund managers to see past race and gender bias to value.

 

Daryn previously led the Special Equities Program as a consultant to the Board of the Calvert Funds, a $12 billion pioneer of the impact investing field. Through this vehicle, Calvert maintains a portfolio of more than 40 funds on five continents, representing over 350 underlying portfolio companies.

 

Prior to serving as a consultant to Calvert, Daryn served as Director of University and Corporate Partnership for The Idea Village, where he created a platform engaging leading private equity firms, business schools, and Fortune 500 companies to invest over 100,000 hours and $2 million into more than 1,000 New Orleans entrepreneurs post-Hurricane Katrina.

 

Mr. Dodson currently serves on the Board of Directors for Ben and Jerry’s. He earned his M.B.A. from Stanford, where he serves on the Dean’s Management Board, and his A.B. from Duke University.

Mandy joined the Bush Foundation in October 2011, where she created and now leads the Foundation's Community Innovation programs. The programs allow communities to develop and test new solutions to community challenges, using approaches that are collaborative and inclusive of people who are most directly affected by the problem. In their six year existence, having invested over $50 million across a wildly inclusive issue portfolio, the programs are transforming the way the region approaches problem-solving. She is also part of the Foundation’s Social Business Ventures initiative that aims to foster a powerful social business ecosystem in the region. She is particularly passionate about using the resources and position of the Foundation to shift capital structures to better address our toughest problems - in particular wealth inequality, climate change and chronic health issues. In 2018 RSF Social Finance named her a Fellow in its Integrated Capital Institute.

 

Never one to leave her field of practice untested, she looks for opportunities to discuss how to transform philanthropy and support social innovation in big and small ways. She has had the opportunity to speak nationally and locally on many of these topics.

 

Mandy came to the Bush Foundation from Grassroots Solutions, a national grassroots organizing consulting firm where she worked on legislative advocacy and led some of Minnesota’s early experiments in crowd-sourcing, including the inaugural “Minnesota IdeaOpen” idea contest. She got her start in community change work by working on domestic violence issues with several Twin Cities nonprofits. A first generation college student, Mandy holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in community organizing, and a B.A. degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. She is also a licensed social worker and a trained nutritional therapist. In her spare time she dotes on her fermentation projects almost as much as she dotes on her children and her dream is to transform the healthcare system to be oriented around gut health.

Tomer J. Inbar is a partner in Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler’s Tax-Exempt Organizations Department. He represents U.S. and international tax-exempt organizations (and for profit organizations that deal with them) in a broad range of structural and operating matters, including obtaining and maintaining tax exemption, tax and corporate issues, impact and charitable investing, regulatory compliance, governance, operational policies and procedures, IRS audits and state attorney general investigations, unrelated business income tax issues, and executive compensation matters. He regularly advises on an array of transactions and structures involving tax exempt organizations, including joint ventures and the establishment of for-profit subsidiaries, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, program related investments, charitable fund formation, establishing accelerators and incubators, hybrid structures and licensing and service arrangements.

 

Among Mr. Inbar’s clients are private foundations and public charities, including colleges and universities, environmental conservation groups, economic development organizations, advocacy groups and museums and cultural institutions, many of which are active worldwide. Mr. Inbar is a regular speaker at programs for tax-exempt organizations. Recent topics have focused on structuring program and mission related investments, charitable investment funds, lobbying and political campaign activities, the fiduciary aspects of program and mission relating investing, aggregating capital for social good, charitable issues relating to energy and the environment, crisis management and communications, and board governance considerations and liability concerns.

 

Mr. Inbar is Co-Chair of the planning committee for the University of Texas Nonprofit Organizations Institute.

Nicole Kamaleson is an executive specializing in global social impact, human capital, organizational development, governance and human resources. Starting this fall, she will lead global development initiatives as managing director at Koya Leadership Partners, named one of Forbes’ top 15 “Best Executive Recruiting Firms of 2018.” Koya is dedicated to placing exceptionally talented leadership at mission-driven organizations.

 

Focusing on serving organizations that have a transformative impact on society, Nicole is passionate about identifying, engaging with and securing human capital solutions and results in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. Nicole serves as a board member for the Global Fund for Children and holds a BA in Business Administration/Marketing from the University of Sioux Falls and an MA in Human Resources Development from Azusa Pacific University in California. Her work has spanned the globe from Thailand, Mozambique, India, Haiti to Bosnia and many places in between. She has worked and lived abroad for over 17 years in Romania, Kenya, Hungary, London and presently resides with her family in Chicago. Given this experience, Nicole understands that getting the human capital equation right is not only her day job, but her vocational call.

As a seasoned investment banker, charter school executive, and senior leader of a large philanthropic organization, Anand is passionate about solving educational inequalities, creating efficient financial markets, optimizing school financial models to send more resources to classrooms, and using philanthropy to do so in a scalable and sustainable manner.

 

Prior to founding Charter Impact Fund, Anand led the Structured Finance group and ran the Facility Fund for the Charter School Growth Fund, where he helped identify the nation’s best schools and invest in them. Prior to CSGF, he served as chief financial officer of KIPP Austin Public Schools. Prior to KIPP, Anand spent more than a decade in senior investment banking roles, financing more than $10 billion in public projects including state revolving funds and K-12 schools with a specialty in credit ratings & quantitative structuring.

 

Anand is a graduate of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Education Pioneers Fellowship.

As executive director of the Walton Family Foundation, Kyle Peterson leads all foundation operations and, with the board of directors, guides program strategy and grantmaking of more than $300 million annually. He has more than 25 years of social sector experience leading initiatives related to education, workforce development, domestic and global health, economic development and the environment.

 

Before the foundation, Kyle led global engagements for FSG as managing director and board member and managed more than 100 consulting projects in the areas of strategy, program design, operations and evaluation. He has advised leading private and public funders and corporate philanthropies including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, Eli Lilly & Company and GE. As a thought leader on the future of international NGOs, Kyle has worked directly with such organizations as Save the Children, Mercy Corps, and TechnoServe. He has also authored and contributed to several reports and publications, such as “Extracting with Purpose: Creating Shared Value in the Oil and Gas and Mining Sectors’ Companies and Communities” and “Lobbying for Good.”

 

Before joining FSG, he was a strategy consultant at the Monitor Group and a country director in Zimbabwe and Rwanda for Population Services International.

 

A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Kyle holds an MBA and MPA from the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business and Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and a B.A. in international studies from American University.

Christine Ryan is the Sr. PRI Analyst at TCE where her work focuses on programmatically aligning capital investments to support the growth of healthy, sustainable communities. Her responsibilities include portfolio management, compliance, underwriting, due diligence, and supporting new business development. Christine has financial and portfolio management experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

 

Prior to joining TCE, she was a portfolio manager with the Office of Development Credit at the US Agency for International Development. She holds a B.S. in Finance from Fordham University and a Master’s in International Relations and Economics from the University of California, San Diego.

Mark helps clients make an impact through strategic planning, collaborative inquiry, group facilitation, influence strategy, and tool and visual design. His past clients have included the United Philanthropy Forum, Blue Shield of California Foundation, Headwaters Health Foundation for Western Montana, Philanthropy California, Meyer Memorial Trust, the Center for the Health Professions, Mission Investors Exchange, Collective Impact Forum, and a range of Philanthropy-Serving Organizations, including the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers, Funders Together to End Homelessness, Grantmakers Concerned about Immigrants and Refugees, Northern California Grantmakers, San Diego Grantmakers, and Southern California Grantmakers. Mark’s passion is to help leaders in the social sector develop and spread good ideas and champion the causes they care about.

 

Mark has been a consultant to foundations, nonprofits, and philanthropy associations for the last dozen years. Prior experiences include directing the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative; serving as The James Irvine Foundation’s first director of communications; working for a public affairs agency; directing projects for the civil liberties group People For the American Way; stints with government agencies in education, the environment, and community development; and a failed attempt to go English-free for six months as a way to learn Spanish while living in Sevilla in the early 90s.

 

He has a bachelor’s degree in government and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University, resides in Chicago, and will talk about his son, Dash, for as long as you will let him.

Fran Seegull is the Executive Director of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance. The Alliance works to increase awareness of impact investing in the United States, foster deployment of impact capital across asset classes globally, and partner with stakeholders, including government, to build the impact investing ecosystem.

 

Seegull was the Chief Investment Officer at ImpactAssets where she headed investment management for The Giving Fund—an impact investing donor advised fund. Seegull also oversaw product development and managed the Global Sustainable Agriculture and Microfinance Plus Notes.

 

Previously, Seegull was Managing Director at Funk Ventures, an early-stage impact venture capital firm. She also served as Vice President of Business Development at Novica, an online retailer of products made by artisans in developing economies.

 

Seegull has a BS in Economics from Barnard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She serves on the Investment Committee of Align Impact and on the Investment Advisory Committee of RSF Social Finance.

Shuaib A. Siddiqui serves as the Director of Impact Investing at the Surdna Foundation where he manages Surdna’s impact investing portfolio, leading an effort to better align the foundation’s investment policies and practices with its mission. He works with the program teams to investigate ways to realize both social and financial returns through program and mission related investing.

 

Prior to Surdna, Shuaib spent 9 years at Acumen where he most recently was the Director of Global Portfolio. He managed the organization’s global investment process, management of its global investment committee, and helped manage is $100m portfolio. He also directly managed a portfolio of companies and represented Acumen’s investment on several boards. Acumen, an impact investing pioneer, raises charitable donations and investor capital to invest in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty. Prior to Acumen, Shuaib worked for two years in the Quantitative Alpha Generation Group at Citadel Investment Group, a hedge fund based in Chicago, where he focused on developing trading strategies utilizing fundamental company data. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Vice President at Merrill Lynch working on The Global Analytic and Thematic Research team. He holds a BA in Economics from New York University.

Roy Swan leads the foundation’s Mission Investments team, managing Ford’s portfolio of mission-related investments (MRIs) and program-related investments (PRIs), and working to expand and strengthen the impact investing field.

 

Before joining Ford, Roy served as managing director and co-head of Global Sustainable Finance at Morgan Stanley. During his time at Morgan Stanley, Global Sustainable Finance committed over $13 billion in community development transactions. Among his prior experiences, he was the founding chief investment officer of New York City’s Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), a federal initiative to bring new resources to distressed urban communities which played a key role in Harlem’s economic rebirth. He also served as CFO at Carver Bancorp, a Harlem-based publicly traded financial institution and the nation’s largest African American managed bank. Over the course of his career, Roy has worked in corporate law at Skadden Arps, investment banking at The First Boston Corporation, Salomon Brothers, and JPMorgan, and finance at Time Warner.

 

Roy serves on several nonprofit boards, including the Dalton School, Enterprise Community Partners, Low Income Investment Fund, and the Partnership for After School Education. He also serves on the advisory boards of several private equity funds. Roy received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a JD from Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review.

Ben Thornley is a Managing Partner at Tideline and co-leads the firm’s client engagements and business development. Ben brings his creative energies to research design, strategic planning, program development, impact evaluation, and thought leadership. He has domain expertise in US community finance and public policy.

 

Prior to Tideline, Ben was a Managing Director at Pacific Community Ventures (PCV), a non-profit Community Development Finance Institution. Ben was responsible for growing PCV’s research division, InSight, into one of the world’s leading impact investing consulting practices, including through partnerships with Duke University, Harvard University, and the World Economic Forum. Ben created the Impact Investing Policy Collaborative at PCV: a network of researchers, investors and policymakers from over 30 countries. This work led to an invitation from the White House to make the first expert presentation to the Social Impact Investment Taskforce, convened under the UK’s G8 Presidency in 2013.

 

Ben also led PCV’s work evaluating the social and economic impacts of over $25 billion of targeted investments on behalf of clients that included the $300 billion California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), Citi, and Hamilton Lane. His funders at PCV included the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the UK Cabinet Office.

 

Ben started his career as a financial journalist, working as the New York correspondent and Managing Editor for a number of prominent investment magazines in Australia. He later moved into government, directing Australia’s efforts to promote trade and investment in financial services out of the New York Consulate-General.

 

Ben holds a Master of Public Policy from University of California, Berkeley, where he taught leadership and political economy as an assistant to the former US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. He also holds a Bachelor of Communications from University of Technology, Sydney, and a Certificate of International Affairs from New York University. Ben is the co-author of The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism (Jossey-Bass, 2015), and sits on the advisory committee of the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS).

 

A New Zealand native, Ben was raised in Australia and now calls his wife’s home home, in the Central Valley of California. Ben’s abiding joy – and biggest project – are his two irrepressible young daughters.

Brian is a Partner at Bridges Fund Management, an impact investment fund with $1B under management entirely dedicated to impact and sustainable investing. Brian joined Bridges in the fall of 2012 to invest in businesses located in underserved communities in the United States in the areas of health, education and sustainability.

 

Prior to Bridges, Brian was the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen, a pioneering impact fund investing in companies in underserved emerging markets delivering critical health, water, energy, agriculture and education services. Brian has been a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a program officer at the Corporation for National Service and has been involved in several for-profit and non-profit start-ups.

 

Brian has a BA from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford University, and a Masters in City and Regional Planning from UC-Berkeley. He teaches graduate courses at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and Harvard Business School on social entrepreneurship, social innovation and impact investing. He is a Kauffman Fellow and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Ken leads impact investments at TechSoup and also serves as Vice President of Development for the organization. He was previously General Manager of NGOsource, a project of the Council on Foundations and TechSoup, which reviews NGOs and certifies them as equivalent to US public charities through a process called Equivalency Determination.

 

Ken’s career has included management roles in nonprofit organizations, VC-backed technology start-ups, and leading global firms. Prior to TechSoup, he served as executive director of the Sager Family Foundation. He worked as the Executive Director of Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) Peace Action Network, a nonprofit initiative that mobilized YPO's global network of 20,000 business leaders to make an impact on regional conflict and poverty.

 

Ken worked as Vice President, International at OffRoad Capital, where he was responsible for international business development. Ken has also worked in Japan with Sanwa Research, Sanwa Bank's Tokyo-based strategy consulting group. Ken earned an A.B. with honors in Physics from Harvard University, and an M.P.P. degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Maria Santos Valentin has been with the Soros Economic Development Fund within the Open Society Economic Advancement Program since 1998 working on structuring the fund’s innovative program-related investments.

 

James Wahls is a senior investment analyst at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Wahls works on the foundation’s social investments portfolio that comprises of mission-related and program-related investments. Previously, Wahls served as the impact investing manager at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation where he co-managed the foundation’s impact investments across various asset classes. Through both roles, Wahls has designed or led impact investments nationally to support access to capital for entrepreneurs, quality job creation, foreclosure prevention, education technology, school construction, and community economic development.

 

Wahls holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and received his juris doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School. He is a member of the bars of Michigan and the District of Columbia.

Ms. Wahl joined The Barra Foundation as a Program Officer in 2010 and became President in 2013. Prior to joining Barra, she worked at The Pew Charitable Trusts as a Senior Associate and then as a Program Officer. She also served as Managing Director of Marketing and Development at the Transitional Work Corporation, which at one time was the largest urban transitional jobs program in the country. After graduating from La Salle University, Kristina joined the Vincentian Service Corps and served as a volunteer at Covenant House in New York City. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

 

Currently, Kristina serves on the Boards of Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia and the Center for Health Care Strategies. She has served on the Board of Trustees at La Salle University, Gwynedd Mercy Academy High School and La Salle Academy, an elementary school for at-risk youth located in North Philadelphia. She has been a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Campaign Cabinet and Villanova University’s Department of Public Administration Advisory Board. Kristina grew up in Ambler, PA and feels a strong allegiance to the Greater Philadelphia region.