Small business advocates in Illinois this year succeeded in getting the state Senate to approve a “small business bill of rights” to ensure business owners know the true interest rates on their loans – only to see the legislation die in state’s general assembly.
“Oh my god, wait,” Liesel Pritzker Simmons recalls telling proponents of the reform measure. “We know people that could help if that’s something that you’re interested in.”
Pritzker Simmons and her husband, Ian Simmons, are the principals of Blue Haven Initiative, their family office that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in climate and clean energy, education technology, financial services and healthcare. The couple also advocates against corporate money in politics, for greater voter engagement and – notably for a wealthy family – for higher taxes on the rich.
But they have generally kept their investing activity and their policy advocacy in separate silos. No more.
Pritzker Simmons and other investors this week launched Policy-Enhanced Impact Investing, a community of family offices and other impact investors that are leaning into advocacy, lobbying and, yes, politics, as a key component of portfolio management, an effort to create favorable conditions for achieving beneficial outcomes.
“Corporate lobbying is as old as time, and usually is meant to lower the risk and enhance the balance sheet of whatever corporation is doing the lobbying. Impact investors have often stayed away from that,” Pritzker Simmons told ImpactAlpha.
“I’m not interested in enhancing the balance sheet of the things that we are investing in. I’m interested in enhancing the impact of the things that we’re investing in.”
Too political?
The supercharged political environment makes it perhaps unsurprising that investors are becoming more active in working the levers of power at the city, state and federal levels. None other than the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr. has joined a venture capital firm with the explicit intention to back conservative founders targeting conservative-leaning consumers (see, “Donald Jr. turns impact investor to bet on an overlooked market: Trump voters”).
And many impact investors have long pursued policy objectives on an ad hoc basis. The Sorenson Group’s Jim Sorenson was an early advocate for Opportunity Zones, which were created by the 2017 tax bill. Sorenson collaborated with policymakers and leveraged his network to build bipartisan support for the legislation, according to a case study on the Policy-Enhanced Impact Investing website.
More recently, Sorenson has pushed for bipartisan legislation to expand financing for business conversions to employee ownership (disclosure: Sorenson Impact Foundation is an investor in ImpactAlpha).
Other impact investors active in policy work include Candide Group,…
Read More: These investors are raising their lobbying game to enhance their social
