Jenna Nicholas is a member of LISC’s Emerging Leaders Council and a co-founder of Impact Experience, a social enterprise that aims to build bridges and relationships of trust between impact investors, foundations, entrepreneurs, artists and local leaders. In the process, participants forge solutions together support people and communities that historically have been overlooked and underestimated by outside funders and lenders.
In light of the country’s ongoing racial reckoning, funders, businesses and other organizations are increasingly turning to enterprises like Impact Experience to help guide conversations around how to drive impact in ways that center community voice. Participants have arrived at commitments through Impact Experiences that change the ways the organizations involved operate—from hiring practices to vendor choices to investment strategies and other decision making. Jenna sat down with Anna Alekseyeva, VP of Strategy at LISC, to talk about what led her to this work, and how Impact Experience facilitates meaningful dialogue around challenging topics such as inequality, bias, and structural racism.
Can you start by talking about the history of Impact Experience and how you came to found it?
I was working with Calvert Special Equities, investing into socially responsible businesses and funds in a pretty broad range of sectors and geographies – financial inclusion, renewable energy, education technology. Previously, I helped to build a coalition of foundations that were divesting from fossil fuels and investing in new economy solutions. As I was doing that, I kept observing how disconnected so many of the funders and companies that we were working with were from the communities they were looking at investing in. In addition, there was a lack of a focus around diversity, equity and inclusion as part of investment decision-making and broader decision-making processes.
The goal for Impact Experience was to create intentional spaces to build bridges between investors, foundations, entrepreneurs, CDFIs, artists, academics and communities that have been overlooked and underestimated. We wanted to create an intentional space to build more trust, to ground in the historical context of how we got to where we are right now, and what we're inspired to commit to as next steps.
Can you give a few examples of Impact Experiences you've organized?
Each Impact Experience involves pre-curriculum, pre-calls, a two-day virtual or in-person experience, and follow-up after the experiences. We have worked in over 30 communities and engaged over 2,000 people. We've been doing a lot of collaboration with community partners in Montgomery, Alabama. Before COVID, we were bringing groups to Montgomery, and since COVID, we have translated that into the virtual context. A big part of our work in Montgomery has been providing Impact Experience participants with historical context as it relates to structural racism and what we can do from here to ensure that there is a deep focus around racial and gender justice in hiring, promotion, supplier engagement, and investment decision-making processes.
We've also worked very closely over the last six years with partners in West Virginia, with a Federally Qualified Health Center and other organizations in the community there as well as across the country. We did a lot of work in Puerto Rico and Houston after the hurricanes there and in Sonoma, California, after the fires, focusing on inclusive resiliency and recovery.
The question of how to connect philanthropy, investors and funders with the communities they aim to invest in is, of course, an evergreen topic. It feels, though, like a particularly relevant question in this moment. Have you seen an uptick in interest in Impact Experience over the last year?
Definitely. We have seen an uptick in engagement – particularly over the past year – as many organizations have been engaging around what they can do as it relates to racial and gender justice in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. I have seen organizations really seeking to do this in a way that is sustained over the long term and not just reactionary – actually shifting decision-making processes within their organizations. Organizations are thinking about how to ensure that there is strong community voice in the design of their engagements. This has certainly been a commitment of ours over the six years since our founding, and it has been really powerful to see how interest and engagement in this question has deepened and amplified.
How do you measure success? Do you have examples of how organizations that have gone through an Impact Experience have incorporated the feedback that they've received through the process into their decisions or initiatives?
A big part for our design process is spending time with local partners and participants at the beginning of the process and understanding what the core goals and areas of focus are for different stakeholders. By doing that, we’re able to design and curate the Experiences and the metrics that we use based on community partners’ input. Before and after each Experience, we do surveys to understand how people are integrating insights from the Experience back into their organizations and their work.
We have seen shifts in investment allocation on the part of funders who participate in Impact Experiences into more women- and people of color-run companies and funds, and we’ve seen companies hiring and setting up operations within the communities that we're working in.
I imagine that one of the challenges of this work is bringing a diverse set of perspectives together and having them engage in constructive dialogue. What have you run into in bringing people with different points of view together, and how does the Impact Experience methodology work to address potential challenges?
This is a big part of the reason that we spend time upfront with our participants before they come into the Experience, so we can have the opportunity to engage with people around the biases that they may be bringing to the Experience, as well as to their life and work. A big part of the focus of our work is around implicit bias. We partner with Illumen Capital, which is an impact-oriented fund of funds focused on implicit bias, as well as with Stanford researchers, to build mechanisms into our process that help people to understand their own biases.
During the Experience itself, we spend time establishing the norms for our time together, to create an opportunity for people to engage very proactively, but also recognize that there may be instances where harm is caused. We have two norms that we find to be really powerful on this point, which are to assume good intent, but also to remedy harm. The power of those elements meshed together is an important aspect of the work for us, so that we are creating an open and engaged dialogue, but also realizing that there may be harm that comes about. And if that does happen, then we have the mechanisms to reflect and to engage around this harm.
I participated in an Impact Experience that your organization hosted recently, focused on capital access for small businesses owned by women of color.* It was notable to me that the Experience felt almost like a consciousness-raising exercise. Is that an intention behind this work for you?
Yes, 100%. That has been, from the beginning, a focus for us – to design spaces where there is a possibility for consciousness raising to take place. The Experience aims to provide participants with both the inspiration to want to dive deeper into this work, but also the tactical tools to be able to engage.
That is why we always engage artists and musicians as part of all of our Experiences. This comes from a recognition of the arts as a mechanism through which consciousness raising takes place. We also engage “provocateurs”—professionals who have deep expertise in the areas that we're discussing, such as impact investing. So participants are able to really educate themselves about the topics being discussed. We also build in time for personal and group reflection. So the process is about internalizing information, but also being able to have that intentional space to reflect on where we go next. We are also looking at a tactical level how this plays out within our lives and organizations.
How do you think about the power dynamics that are inherent in any relationship between a funder and community participant?
One of the elements that we're intentional about in the design of each of our Experiences are the inherent power dynamics that exist between funders and community partners. That was actually a big part of the inspiration for designing Impact Experience in the first place, because so often the way in which engagements take place between investees and grantees and funders is very transactional, where the investee or grantee is pitching to the funder in a limited time setting.
We think this is really about building a relationship of trust that is rooted in understanding the context and narrative that each person is bringing to the table. So we design our Experiences as opportunities for people to understand the stories and personal context that everyone is bringing to the conversation to build a foundation of trust that hopefully leads to both direct investment opportunities and opportunities for ongoing collaboration.
But this is also a lifelong commitment to continuing to deepen together, with ongoing collaboration, helping to make introductions and so forth, so that it's not a one and done experience, but a deep investment in the broader arc of people on their journey. So, both naming and recognizing where those power dynamics are playing out and creating the opportunities to level the playing field are really important to us.
* The Experience that I attended (pictured at top) included an introductory performance by a musician, followed by a discussion with an impact investing industry expert (‘provocateur’). Participants then broke out into small groups to do a ‘lifeline’ exercise, in which we shared our life trajectories and discussed how bias has affected our trajectories. The participants, who included some 30 lenders and women of color borrowers, then split into discussion groups to talk through the barriers that the entrepreneur participants had faced. The Experience ended with an ‘asks and offerings’ exercise, in which every participant shared an ‘ask’ – i.e. a request – of the group and an ‘offering’ to the group – i.e. something each participant could offer to support others in the group.