Laying the groundwork for a regional approach to impact investing

NEW ENGLAND IMPACT INVESTING INITIATIVE (NEIII)

Business Need
New England had no shortage of investors, intermediaries, community organizations, and entrepreneurs interested in using capital for social and environmental benefit. What it lacked was a shared view of how those participants fit together. The ecosystem was fragmented, potential partners were difficult to find, and promising initiatives could remain unfunded even when aligned capital existed elsewhere in the region.

The New England Impact Investing Initiative set out to establish the foundation for a more connected regional approach: a resource that could help practitioners understand the ecosystem, find one another, and eventually see where capital was flowing—or getting stranded.

The Space Between
Creating that resource required more than compiling a list of organizations. The team first had to make sense of a field that did not always use the same language or definitions. Investors varied by geography, asset class, return expectations, mission, and willingness to be publicly identified. Investment opportunities were often found through personal relationships and word of mouth, making the system especially difficult to navigate for organizations without established networks.

Even the word impact prompted nuanced debate. Some practitioners viewed impact investing as a distinct category; others argued that all investments create social and environmental consequences and should be evaluated accordingly. Those conversations became especially relevant as sustainability and mission-aligned investing faced greater political scrutiny. The challenge was to build a useful framework without forcing a complicated and evolving field into categories that did not reflect how its participants actually worked.

Working in System
An 11-person fellowship team researched organizations across New England and conducted nearly 30 interviews with investors, advisors, fund managers, foundations, and other practitioners. My contribution included four interviews exploring how organizations defined impact, evaluated opportunities, structured portfolios, and connected investors with capital seekers.

The findings shaped a regional taxonomy with three distinct roles: impact investors, intermediaries and aggregators, and investment partners and system supporters. The team also identified the information users would need to judge fit—including geography, sector, asset class, check size, investment stage, expected return, term, deployment status, and prior investments.

The research culminated in a hybrid workshop for 108 participants, where practitioners reviewed the preliminary model, discussed lessons from similar efforts in Georgia and New Mexico, and considered what a useful regional resource would need to become.

Impact
The project organized 251 ecosystem participants into a documented starting point: 130 impact investors, 43 intermediaries and aggregators, and 78 investment partners and system supporters. It also produced a preliminary map design and a roadmap for turning the research into a living public resource.

Recommendations included building a minimum viable map, verifying the data through direct outreach, creating a process for ongoing updates, using the taxonomy to broker introductions, and eventually tracking relationships and capital flows across the region. The work did not complete that future system, but it laid the groundwork for one—giving New England a shared structure from which to build a more visible, connected, and collaborative impact-investing ecosystem.