CFFP's Pursuit of Deeper Impact

As Cascadia Foodshed Financing Project works at the intersection of food, finance, and philanthropy to transform the Pacific Northwest regional food system, we ask the question, “how good is good enough?” with regards to individual investment opportunities. Does the investment meet a need expressed by the community? What ripple effects might the investment have? Social impact advisor Katherine Pease of KP Advisors asks this critical question of the impact investing field at large.
 
In a recent report, In Pursuit of Deeper Impact, Pease challenges the status quo of impact investing as “conventional impact investment practices often fail to incorporate an analysis of the root causes of inequality”. As a result, impact investing works often as a series of isolated transactions that yield measurable positive social and environmental outputs, but fail to contribute to the transformation of deep and systemic causes of inequity.  This is a tension that resonates with the logic and model gap between investment for enterprise success and systems change that CFFP uncovered through market research analysis with Ecotrust in 2016:

So what can we do, as impact investors who are serious about laboring towards deep and lasting transformation in our food system?

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