Advocacy
-
Measuring the deeper impacts of your impact investments can taste both sweet and sour. Sweet because it informs us whether our investment is driving positive change, and sour when it comes to the realities of collecting it. At SK2 Fund, impact measurement has always been a focus of our work with our programs providing…
-
The proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to talking about endowment impact portfolios is public equities—commonly traded stocks and bonds. With few exceptions, most foundation endowments are overwhelmingly comprised of them. Even the small minority of impact-focused foundation endowments often hold significant allocations of public equities, including SK2, but we are steadily…
-
By Erik Schultz May 2022 – I believe in the fundamental premise that in exchange for privileged tax-advantaged status, private foundations like ours should do everything they can in pursuit of their charitable missions. Until just a few years ago I thought we did that, by often exceeding the legal requirement to give away…
-
We are pleased to read about more and more foundations declaring their intention to invest increasing portions of their endowments in alignment with their missions. The vast majority however do nothing of the sort. In 2020, only 16% of “small” foundations (<100m) like SK2 reported engaging in mission-related investing or impact investing. The biggest…
-
Until last year, our charitable work focused on supporting disadvantaged and underserved entrepreneurs internationally (and much of it still does). But over the years, people often asked us why we don’t do the same here in the US? We would mostly respond: the need is so much greater and our scarce dollars go so…