Product Overview

In October 2007, Antony Bugg-Levine, managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, brought together an international group of investors to discuss an ambitious proposal: using global capital markets to effect meaningful social and environmental change. After the first day of this conference, the investors had provided abundant suggestions for how best to achieve this goal, based on their wide range of perspectives and experiences. However, this meant that Bugg-Levine now had to unite the group in narrowing its focus to a concrete solution that the Rockefeller Foundation could support. The case asks students to take on the role of Bugg-Levine as he determines how to manage vastly different points of view and facilitate meaningful discussion among the investors. His task was to help the group decide on the most effective way to rapidly increase the investments flowing to solve social and environmental challenges—an approach that would later become known as the modern impact investing movement. The case recounts the events leading up to the conference that Bugg-Levine arranged at the Rockefeller Foundation’s famous Bellagio Center in Italy, where the movement originated and where, perhaps most notably, the term “impact investing” was coined. The conference also brought together many of the people who would go on to become pioneers in a field that, 15 years later, had grown to more than $1 trillion. At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, this case is used to introduce and frame the second-year elective “Introduction to Impact Investing.” While it was written with that audience in mind, it is equally suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses covering impact investing. It can also be used as a stand-alone resource in related courses on the history and evolution of impact investing, or even in a nonprofit-focused course on field building in philanthropy.