Feb 26 2018 23 mins 4
CASE Smart Impact Capital is a toolkit that helps you to raise capital that aligns with your needs.
In 1992, Cathy Clark had a conversation with Lloyd Morrissett, the co-founder of Sesame Workshop. Lloyd told her “Change happens when the right people with the right idea and the right capital come together at the right time.”
This idea stuck with Cathy and has guided her career since. When Cathy first appeared on Social Entrepreneur in January 2016, she said. “It isn’t enough to have a good idea, to want to help people, but you have to have an organization to do it, and eventually that organization needs capital. And that has become the theme of my career.”
Cathy Clark is the faculty director for the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Duke Fuqua School of Business. She runs the Initiative on Impacting Investing.
Cathy and the team at CASE have developed a resource to help social entrepreneurs to be more efficient and effective in raising investment capital. The solution is called CASE Smart Impact Capital. It is a toolkit that contains short videos, downloadable resources, spreadsheets, and more. The modules are bite-sized and flexible. You can jump to any section at any time to match where you are on your fundraising journey.
CASE Smart Impact Capital was developed over a two-year period, while working with partner organizations such as MIT, Stanford, USAID, Uncharted, and Spring.
In this interview, Cathy takes the listeners from the theoretical basis of impact investing through a description of CASE Smart Impact Capital. If you want to jump ahead, leap to 15:50 in the interview. We didn’t get to everything we wanted to talk about, so we’ve put together a short Bonus episode, which you can find here.
Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Cathy Clark
“The term impact investing was coined almost ten years ago.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“Anyone who is investing is taking their dollar and putting it into a capitalist system, where that dollar has an impact.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“It’s basically, people voting with their dollars.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“Anyone who has an investment account is already investing in an outcome.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We live in a finite set of resources. The planet earth is not infinite.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“Unlimited growth within a resource-constrained environment simply does not make sense.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We have to tilt capitalism in a slightly different direction.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“I teach at a business school because I believe business has the largest leverage point.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“At CASE, we call it leaping the chasm. Other people call it the pioneer gap.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“I’ve been looking at this for over 20 years.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“What I saw was completely demoralizing.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We really wanted to build this around the needs of entrepreneurs.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We have a template or a tool, where you make a decision, and you move on.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We wanted to make this modular and easy.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“We created a triage process.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“Most of our entrepreneurs had the wrong list.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
“The stakes are really high.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact
Social Entrepreneurship Resources:
- CASE Smart Impact Capital: https://casesmartimpact.com
- The Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University:https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/
- Cathy Clark on Twitter:https://twitter.com/cathyhc
- Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book
