Aug 6, 2024 | Uncategorized
Impact Finance Veteran To Lead Investment Strategy for the Foundation’s Program-Related Investment Portfolio
Salt Lake City, UT — August 6, 2024 — Sorenson Impact Foundation (Foundation), a leading and 100% mission-aligned institution dedicated to investing in innovative social entrepreneurs to solve the world’s most pressing issues, has named Eliza Roady as Managing Director. An impact finance veteran with 20 years’ experience working across the venture capital, legal and international development fields, Eliza will lead the investment strategy and asset management for the Foundation’s program-related investment (PRI) portfolio, which is focused on achieving outsized impact and advancing innovation for low-income populations across areas including healthcare, education, financial inclusion, workforce development, and clean energy. As of 2023 the Foundation’s investments are reaching over 1.7 billion people around the world in all of the 17 UN Sustainability Goals.
Eliza joins the Foundation from the Sorenson Impact Institute (SII) where she was the Managing Director of Impact Investing and led the impact investing and venture capital training program for undergraduate and graduate students. In her new role with the Foundation, Eliza will be developing the investment and portfolio management strategy for the Foundation’s PRI portfolio, continuing the Foundation’s commitment to backing high-impact early-stage businesses while also building a strategy to deploy PRI capital in ways that create leverage and advance the Foundation’s goals to continuously drive innovation within the impact investing space. Eliza will also continue to support the SII Inclusive Impact Initiative, where she will provide ongoing leadership to the Initiative’s efforts to build a diverse talent pipeline for the venture capital and broader investment ecosystem.
“Eliza brings a long-tenured, diverse career in impact investing along with an impressive legal background that will play an integral role in helping the Foundation identify new ways to move more capital towards high-impact investment opportunities that can scale,” said Lindsay Zizumbo, Executive Director, Sorenson Impact Foundation. “Her passion for transforming opportunity access and outcomes for low-income populations through capital deployment to innovative solutions is reflected in her impressive track record. We are thrilled to have her join the Foundation and anticipate with her leadership that we will maximize the impact of the capital we deploy and further drive global systems change.”
“The Foundation has been a pioneer in impact investing and has continuously evolved to play new roles in the ecosystem as it supports innovation and experimentation. I am excited to join an organization whose north star is using its capital and platform to catalyze impact and move the entire space forward,” said Eliza Roady, Managing Director, Sorenson Impact Foundation. “As one of the earliest foundations to move all of its assets into impact, the Foundation demonstrates tremendous leadership and a bold, all-in approach that we need others to adopt. It has established itself as a standout supporter of high-impact innovation, and I am looking forward to bringing my experience and passion to help shape the Foundation’s next chapter as it works to shift systems to create greater opportunity and security for underserved populations.”
Prior to her role at SII, Eliza helped build and lead investing work for Acumen America, an impact venture fund focused on alleviating poverty and increasing opportunity for low-income Americans across the financial inclusion, workforce development and healthcare sectors. She formerly practiced corporate law at the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where she specialized in venture capital and M&A transactions and founded one of the first law firm practice groups in the country to work specifically with social enterprise companies and impact investors. Prior to her legal career, Eliza worked in a variety of capacities with international development, health, and human rights organizations in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Eliza holds a BA from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. An outdoor enthusiast, mountain lover and avid runner, she has been delighted to call the mountains of Utah home for her family since 2021.
About Sorenson Impact Foundation
Established in 2012, Sorenson Impact Foundation invests in innovative social entrepreneurs solving the world’s most pressing issues. We are proud to be one of the country’s few foundations that have 100% mission-aligned investment portfolios, and we seek to be a model for other institutions on how to use the tools of the capital markets to construct overall investment portfolios that achieve exceptional impact outcomes as well as compelling financial returns. Through our program-related investment portfolio, we invest in companies that have developed scalable, innovative, and potentially disruptive solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, including access to quality healthcare and education, financial inclusion, workforce development, sanitation, water, clean energy, and more. We deploy catalytic capital through investments to ensure early-stage impact companies are best-positioned to scale their reach and impact. With more than 67 active portfolio companies in 14 countries and across five continents, the Foundation is committed to investing in long-lasting systemic change around the globe. For more information, please visit https://sorensonimpactfoundation.org/
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Mar 26, 2021 | Uncategorized
Earlier this year, the Sorenson Impact Foundation announced the recipients of the 2020 Equitable & Resilient Recovery Grant program. In a time where access to employment and quality jobs is vital, we want to highlight the work of two of those grantees who are making strides in workforce development: First Step Staffing and Workforce Professionals Training Institute.
First Step Staffing has a vision to become the jobs solution for America’s homeless. CEO Amelia Nickerson described their work as “embracing the importance and dignity of work and believing that income is a critical component on the path out of poverty and homelessness.”
“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, homelessness was already on the rise, and is now expected to grow more than 40% over the next three years as Americans face job loss, eviction and more,” commented Nickerson.
The research is clear – men and women of color and those living in poverty have been disproportionately affected by the current health and economic crisis. Jobs will be an essential piece of our nation’s recovery.
As the largest alternative staffing agency in the country, First Step is prioritizing job placement and training for those that have been most disenfranchised from the workforce. Support from the Sorenson Impact Foundation this year helped First Step to launch a five-year effort to expand its mission into new markets while also increasing the supportive services offered to its clients. Over the next five years, First Step will reconnect thousands of men and women to the workforce, pay millions in earned wages, and empower individuals to become active members in their communities.
FIRST STEP’S WORK IN ACTION
After serving 24 consecutive years in prison, Mr. Hightower was released with a bus ticket to his last known address. In 24 years a lot had changed. The entire outside world was different from when Mr. Hightower remembered in 1996.
Not only did he not have a phone to call someone for help, he had no one to call. He roamed the streets for seven days searching for a place to rest his head at night. Someone he met along the way recommended he come to First Step. When staff arrived that morning, Mr. Hightower was waiting outside of our doors, soaking wet; he had walked six miles in the rain to get to First Step Offices “first thing in the morning.”
Both First Step’s job coaches and support services specialists met with Mr. Hightower, and they determined that he was not yet ready to work. He did not have an up- to-date state issued ID, he had some medical issues arise while incarcerated that needed to be further addressed, and he was still mentally reeling from the shock of the world around him being so different than what he remembered and knew.
Immediately, First Step’s Support Services team secured temporary shelter for Mr. Hightower. Next, they connected him with the First Step Disabilities Services team who helped him secure SSI benefits so he could support himself while getting back on his feet. First Step then gave him food and provided transportation to his temporary housing.
Over the next week, the First Step team worked with Mr. Hightower daily to assist him with getting a new ID, making medical appointments, helping him navigate public transportation and learning more about what he wanted to do once everything was sorted out. He said he wanted to work.
Four months later, Mr. Hightower came back to First Step, on his own, via public transportation. He had been moved to transitional housing and had spent most of his time getting healthy so he could get to work. He is coordinating with First Step’s job coaches on part-time employment and he is already talking about moving up into full time.
Workforce Professionals Training Institute
(WPTI), a workforce development organization in New York City, has teamed up with Salesforce.com and Arkus Inc. to bring digital transformation to the workforce development sector first in New York City, and eventually across the country.
“While online-training has long been the norm in many industries and for many job-seekers and employees, there have been tremendous lags in bringing these capabilities to lower income people often living in resource-deprived neighborhoods,” says Sharon Sewell-Fairman, CEO of WPTI.
During the pandemic, WPTI pivoted to remote operations and quickly adapted its face-to-face, experiential style for its training, consulting and systems building programs to a virtual format. As a result, they were able to respond to the immediate and changing needs of community-based workforce organizations in the short term. Now, Sewell-Fairman says that “[they] are providing training and capacity building to help other community-based workforce organizations adapt their job training and education programs and infrastructure to better serve low-income jobseekers in this new environment.”
Sewell-Fairman explained that the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York very hard with resulting unemployment rates nearly twice the national average. Several core workforce sectors, including hospitality, food service, transportation, and retail, were decimated. And approximately 69% of layoffs hit workers of color, who were already disproportionately clustered in lower-income jobs.
WPTI’s Digital Transformation Initiative will provide capacity building and training to community-based workforce organizations so they can assist unemployed New Yorkers by digitizing and delivering online training to build the skills and capabilities needed by displaced workers as they struggle to find their way back into labor markets.
“Our approach focuses on bringing digital training capacity – both training content and training delivery systems – to job seekers by leveraging our network of over 600 organizations in NYC spread across all five NYC boroughs and with deep community commitments to economic equity,” shared Sewell-Fairman.
The partnership and support from the Sorenson Impact Foundation is aimed at helping workforce organizations and their staff to adapt practices to meet the changing needs of jobseekers and employers in this new age and a digital economy. This grant not only contributes to the development of WPTI’s own digital infrastructure, but the digital infrastructure, digital fluency, and virtual service delivery model of New York City’s workforce development providers, as they work to better prepare and connect an increased number of low income individuals to quality jobs and careers that pay family supporting wages post COVID-19.
Dec 19, 2020 | Uncategorized
Inspired by the Women’s Peace Movement that ended Liberia’s ravaging civil war, social entrepreneur Chid Liberty — who was born in Liberia and raised in Germany and the U.S. — returned in 2010 to start the first fair trade apparel manufacturing company in Africa: Liberty & Justice. After a devastating outbreak of Ebola that virtually shut down the country and lost the company millions of dollars in contracts, see how Liberty and his workers pivoted their business model and kept the hundreds of precious jobs that Liberty had worked so hard to create.
Jul 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
The Sorenson Impact Foundation (SIF) is inviting potential grant recipients to propose solutions that can contribute to a more equitable and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis. SIF is specifically targeting solutions that enable recovery through developing and growing businesses, as well as the communities they are in, to equitably rebuild coming out of the current social, health and economic crisis. We are targeting solutions across the following three focus areas:
- Equitable Access to Wealth Creation Through Entrepreneurship: Solutions that enable and empower successful entrepreneurship for underserved or underrepresented communities such as people of color, women and entrepreneurs in rural areas.
- Democratized Access to Capital and Community Investment: Solutions that enable more equitable access to capital for entrepreneurs in underserved or underrepresented communities. This focus area includes empowering and expanding community investment activity.
- Workforce Development: Solutions to help communities develop the skills and training required for the jobs of the future in a post-pandemic world.
Please download the complete Call for Proposals, including process and submission requirements on the foundation’s website.
“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, homelessness was already on the rise, and is now expected to grow more than 40% over the next three years as Americans face job loss, eviction and more,” commented Nickerson.
Not only did he not have a phone to call someone for help, he had no one to call. He roamed the streets for seven days searching for a place to rest his head at night. Someone he met along the way recommended he come to First Step. When staff arrived that morning, Mr. Hightower was waiting outside of our doors, soaking wet; he had walked six miles in the rain to get to First Step Offices “first thing in the morning.”
WPTI’s Digital Transformation Initiative will provide capacity building and training to community-based workforce organizations so they can assist unemployed New Yorkers by digitizing and delivering online training to build the skills and capabilities needed by displaced workers as they struggle to find their way back into labor markets.
