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Geared primarily towards investors, funders, and government actors, our advisory services support our partners to develop programs that align capital with social justice outcomes.
Each engagement generates learning opportunities for the field as a whole, sharing practices with others and amplifying the tools, models, and stories that create transformative change.
The areas of work we address through our advisory services correlate with our program areas.
Learn about the different kinds of advisory services we've done in the past, with examples of partners we've worked with and developed transformative investment strategies with.
The Transform Finance Impact Methodology seeks to operationalize a social justice-informed approach to investments. As a holistic tool for analysis, it examines systemic and structural impacts of investments for individual deals, entire portfolios, and investment strategies. Through our advisory services we help our partners explore whether their initiatives and investments achieve their maximum transformative impact.
We worked with Acumen Colombia on developing an investment strategy that uses our Impact Methodology tool, but could integrate the specific community’s own impact vision and theory of change. The approach was applied across post-conflict regions in Colombia and resulted in the development of a set of due diligence parameters for the portfolio.
"Our partnership with Transform Finance helped us develop a way to truly center community aspirations in our investments in post-conflict Colombia. The team brought just the right mix of social justice-informed values and a pragmatic approach rooted in knowledge of deal-making."
Virgilio Barco, Acumen
As a part of our work in thematic investments, we support investors who seek to understand their existing portfolio or new investment opportunities in relation to a social justice theme or impact sector. This work can include performing field scans to understand the landscape of investable opportunities, translating research into an investment thesis, and providing the guidelines for the creation of an investment pipeline.
We worked with the Ford Foundation to develop an understanding of the opportunities to invest to advance Equitable Media. The engagement built on research and interviews with leaders in the media and racial justice spaces to create a vision of the needs of founders and the opportunities to allocate capital. The recommendations were incorporated in a public facing report.
As a part of our place-based investment work, we support investment ecosystems in various ways. Capital Coordination work can include supporting governmental actors understand the private capital levers at their disposal, supporting the alignment of development with the communities they serve, developing impact recommendations for different capital actors involved in place-based investment work.
We are supporting the Just and Equitable Transition (JET) team at the state level in Colorado to support investments into post-coal communities in rural Colorado counties. To do so, we will help bring community leaders into the conversation with state leaders, funders, and impact investors to ensure that investments are in alignment with those most affected by the transition to a renewable energy-based economy.
As a part of our work on Tools for Transformative Investment, we support investors to analyze and implement alternative financing structures, enterprise models, or fund models that can better further an impact goal.
We worked with Sida and the Media Development Investment Fund to analyze the impact of a guarantee structure on crowding in investor capital for a fund that seeks to promote democracy by supporting independent media organizations. Our work helped MDIF understand the role and usefulness of the guarantee structure and determine whether to continue using a guarantee in future funds.
“We engaged Transform Finance for a specialist evaluation of whether the structuring of an impact loan fund with a guarantee succeeded in attracting new investment and to identify lessons for structuring a future fund. The final report was superb and directly led to our decision to extend our first fund.”
Harlan Mandel, Media Development Investment Fund
