FT Investing for Good USA 2016

James Lee Sorenson is Head of the Sorenson Impact Foundation, whose mission is to fund sustainable, scalable endeavours that maximise positive impact on people, families, communities and local economies.

Over his career, Mr Sorenson has built companies in industries ranging from technology and life sciences to real estate and private equity investment. Combining innovative and worthwhile ideas with talented management teams, he has produced growing new enterprises and has been instrumental in developing several new industry categories, including the digital compression software that helped usher in the online video revolution, through Sorenson Media, and video relay services for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, through Sorenson Communications.

Mr Sorenson has also helped establish programmes and organisations that improve the lives of the poor, build regional business communities and train the next generation of entrepreneurial and investment leaders. In addition to supporting self-sustaining charitable enterprises at the foundation, Mr Sorenson donates time, money and energy to institutions that help low-income people become self-sufficient.

In 2013, Mr Sorenson created the Sorenson Impact Center at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah with a $13m endowment. With 25 staff and more than 50 graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Utah and beyond, the centre helps communities in the US and overseas harness private capital, data and innovation to address complex social and public health problems.

Mr Sorenson has served on a variety of community service boards, including the University of Utah’s Board of Trustees, the David Eccles School of Business Board of Trustees, the University Venture Fund, Art Works for Kids, Gallaudet University’s Board of Trustees, the Utah Sports Commission, the National Alliance on Impact Investing and Village Capital, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board.

Allison Clark joined the MacArthur Foundation in 2006 to oversee investments made through Window of Opportunity, the Foundation’s $150m affordable rental housing preservation initiative. Since then, her responsibilities have expanded to include overall portfolio management for the Impact Investing program.

Ms Clark has worked in affordable housing, economic development and commercial real estate for over 20 years. Prior to joining the Foundation, she worked as a senior underwriting manager in the Community Lending Group (formerly the American Communities Fund) at Fannie Mae, where she underwrote and closed more than $150m in debt and equity transactions for affordable housing developments. She also worked for eight years at Bank One in a variety of departments, including Commercial Real Estate and Community Development Real Estate. Before moving to Chicago, she participated in the Urban Fellows Program in New York City, where she worked as a project manager at the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

Recently, Ms Clark served on Attorney General Lisa Madigan's task force charged with creating and implementing a program to deploy $100m in grant funds from a national mortgage settlement aimed at addressing the foreclosure crisis. She also serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Foundation for Women and the Chicago Chess Foundation.

Ms Clark graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College with a Bachelor’s degree in Government, and earned a Master of Management degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University with a concentration in Nonprofit Management and Real Estate.

Andrea Phillips is the co-founder and managing partner of Maycomb Capital, a new impact investing platform. She has more than 25 years of experience leading, designing and implementing large scale, public-private partnerships that harness private investment to address pressing social challenges. At Goldman Sachs, she launched and managed the Goldman Sachs Social Impact Fund, a $140m fund diversified across impact areas and geographies. At the same time, Ms Phillips led social impact bond investments for the firm including the investment in the Rikers Island Social Impact Bond (SIB), the first such transaction ever executed in the US market and by a financial institution.

Ms Phillips has been the lead investor in four of the 11 SIB transactions done in the US market, representing half of all senior capital committed to these projects. Transactions include state-wide expansion of a programme to reduce recidivism and boosting employment among at risk young men in Massachusetts and expanding access to early childhood education for low-income children in Utah and Chicago.

Before joining Goldman Sachs, Ms Phillips developed small business, workforce and community development programmes She was president of a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), which provided affordable capital to small businesses and non-profits in disadvantaged communities. She also managed performance-based contracts in workforce development totalling more than $100m.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Mr Kassoy co-founded B Lab with Bart Houlahan and Jay Coen Gilbert in 2006 in order to build a global movement of people using business as a force for good. Before co- founding B Lab, he spent 16 years in the private equity business as a partner at MSD Real Estate Capital, an affiliate of MSD Capital, a $12bn investment vehicle for Michael Dell, founder of Dell, and as a founding partner and managing director of DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners.

He serves on the Board of Echoing Green, is a member of the US National Advisory Board of the G8 Social Impact Investing Task Force and is a former board member of the Freelancers Union. Mr Kassoy is a 2001 Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute, a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and a recipient of the McNulty Prize.

Raised in Boulder, Colorado, Mr Kassoy graduated with distinction from Stanford University, where he was a Truman Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, and a President’s Award winner.

Andrew Zolli is vice-president of global impact programmes at Planet, where he oversees the company’s global social, climate, environmental and humanitarian portfolio. Planet is a global sensing company that is deploying the world’s largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites. Planet’s satellites generate new data sets that help businesses, humanitarian organisations and others to address issues of sustainable development, including poverty alleviation, food security, ecosystem monitoring, disaster risk reduction and public health.

Mr Zolli is also the author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. He writes and speaks widely on issues of resilience, complexity, systems-leadership and transformation. Mr Zolli is the former curator and executive director of PopTech, a network of scientists and designers known for its annual technology conference. He also advises a range of social enterprises, companies, governments and institutions. He is a board member of several leading enterprises and chairs the Garrison Institute, which explores the intersection between contemplative practice and engaged social change.

Barbara Buchner is Executive Director of Climate Finance at Climate Policy Initiative. Named one of the 20 most influential women in climate change, Barbara advises leaders on climate, energy, and land-use investments around the world.

Dr Buchner directs the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance (the Lab) and its sister programs in Brazil and India. The Lab’s public-private approach solicits, shapes, and tests cutting edge climate finance instruments that resolve financing barriers hindering alternative energy, adaptation, and land-use projects. Instruments from the Lab have mobilized over 1.4 billion US dollars for sustainable development in four years. She is also the lead author on CPI’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance, which has set the benchmark for climate finance tracking.

She is on the Advisory Board of the BCFN Foundation, the Evaluation Board of the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund, and a member of the One Planet Lab.  She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Graz and was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As managing director of risk, Candace Smith is responsible for the oversight of operations and portfolio risk management for MicroVest Capital Management and the funds and facilities it manages. Ms Smith joined MicroVest in 2005 as chief financial officer before becoming chief operating officer and, in 2014, managing director of risk.

Before joining MicroVest, Ms Smith advised clients such as the Inter-American Development Bank, Calvert Foundation and Corporacion para el Financiamiento de Infraestructura on due diligence, credit evaluation and other matters. As chief operating officer for Triodos PV Partners, she oversaw a $50m joint business development and equity investment programme to promote solar electric service enterprises in developing countries. Previously, Ms Smith served as senior credit officer and portfolio officer at the Inter-American Investment Corporation.

Ms Smith began her career in finance as a corporate lending officer with the former Continental Illinois National Bank. She holds a Masters in International Management from The American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) and a dual major Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an independent trustee of Praxis Mutual Funds, a registered fund complex with faith-based, stewardship investing criteria.

Chantal Line Carpentier is the chief of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) New York and an economist who specialises in sustainable agriculture, development, trade, and consumption and production. Unctad is convening the first Capital Markets Global Summit at the UN in November, bringing together global asset managers and wealth holders, each with more than $500m in assets under management.

Ms Carpentier, who joined UNCTAD in mid-2014, spent seven years managing the intergovernmental processes in the Division for Sustainable Development at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). During her tenure at DESA, she served as the Major Groups co-ordinator to enhance the engagement of non-state actors with the UN. She co-ordinated the participation of more than 10,000 non-state actors in the Rio+20 Conference and was involved in the successful negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At DESA, Ms Carpentier was the focal point for sustainable consumption and production, food security and sustainable agriculture.

From 2000 to 2007, she was head of the trade and environment program of the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation. From 1998 to 2000 she was policy analyst for the Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture and from 1996 to 1998 she was a post-doctoral scholar for the International Food Policy Research Institute in the Brazilian Amazon.

Ms Carpentier is among the nominees of the 2016 Ideagen 100 Individuals Empowering Women and Girls and is a 2006 Yale World Fellow. She has consulted to the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Department of Agriculture.

Mr Liberty is co-founder of Liberty & Justice, Africa’s first fairtrade-certified apparel manufacturer. After working in the US in entertainment, technology and finance, he returned to Africa in 2009 to co-found Liberty & Justice to provide economic opportunities for internally displaced women who were vulnerable to unemployment and economic exclusion. He is leading the company’s expansion in Liberia and throughout the region.

Mr Liberty served as entrepreneur-in- residence at the University of Liberia’s Business Start-up Center Monrovia (BSC) and manages the BSC’s Ignite Fund (Liberia), an equity investment fund that makes strategic investments in Liberian Pico-cap companies with high-growth potential. He works as an advisor and board member to organisations including the Global Impact Investment Rating System, The Liberia Marathon, FACE Africa and the Opportunity Collaboration. 

Mr Liberty is a recipient of the 2014 Salzburg Global Fellowship, the 2014 Global Innovation Summit Ecosystem Award, the 2013 New African Press’s 50 African Trailblazers under 50, Social Venture Network’s 2011 Social Innovation Award and the 2010 Cordes Fellowship. He is a Yoxi Portfolio Social Innovation Rockstar. In her 2011 State of the Nation Address, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia’s president, recognised Mr Liberty for his leadership in shaping trade policy and indigenous Liberian entrepreneurship.

David Wilkinson is director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. He leads White House efforts to identify and scale up more effective social solutions that strengthen communities and enable upward economic mobility through use of data and evidence as well as smarter use of federal resources and cross-sector collaboration.

Mr Wilkinson was previously senior policy advisor for social finance and innovation, assigned to the Office of Social Innovation and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). At the Office of Social Innovation, he led initiatives that included pay-for-success, evidence-based policy and impact finance. He led CEQ’s work on green finance, with a focus on market development, financial innovation and economic opportunity. Mr Wilkinson is the US Government Observer to the Global Social Impact Investment Steering Group, successor to the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce.

Before joining the White House, Mr Wilkinson was executive director of City First Enterprises, a federally regulated non-profit bank holding company and incubator of social finance solutions. He previously co-founded and helped launch a start-up community development bank in New Haven, Connecticut and was executive director of Common Cause New Jersey, an 8,000-member organisation fostering local civic engagement.

Mr Wilkinson has served on the board of the City First Foundation where he was a founding director. He was a Jane Addams Fellow at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School.

Eric Rosenblum has led Palantir’s work on Social Impact platforms, including Palantir’s work with Santa Clara County on Project Welcome Home, in which he developed a platform that will assist the county in implementing and evaluating a Pay-for-Success project aimed at improving outcomes for Santa Clara’s chronically homeless population.

Mr Rosenblum was previously director of product management for Google, where he was responsible for commerce products. He was also the chief operating officer for Drawbridge, a big data media and advertising technology company that was named the fastest growing media and advertising company in the 2015 Inc.5000 listings.

Before starting his career in technology in Silicon Valley, Mr Rosenblum spend 12 years in China, where he was founder and CEO of SmartPay, which was acquired by China’s Ping’an, financial services company. 

Mr Rosenblum is an alumnus of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frédéric Samama is Head of Responsible Investment at Amundi, the leading European asset manager. He joined Amundi in 2009 and is Founder of the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) Research Initiative. He co-edited a book on long-term investing with Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and has published numerous papers on green finance. 

Formerly, he oversaw Corporate Equity Derivatives within Crédit Agricole Corporate Investment Banking in New York and Paris. During his tenure, he developed and implemented the first international leveraged employee share purchase program, a technology now widely used among French companies. He has advised the French government in areas such as employee investing mechanisms, market regulation, climate finance and has a long track record of innovation at the crossroads of finance and government policy. Over the past few years, he has focused on climate change through a mixture of financial innovation, research and policy making recommendations. He is an advisor on climate change to Central Banks, Sovereign Wealth Funds and policymakers.

He is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program and holds a diploma from Neomia Business School, France.

Jeremy Keele is President and CEO of the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. At the centre, Mr Keele works to develop innovative and data-driven approaches to solving challenging social problems. So far, the centre has facilitated more than $100m in impact investments in social enterprises around the world and is currently advising on evidence-based social interventions (including a variety of social impact bonds) in more than a dozen state and local jurisdictions around the US.

Before joining the University of Utah, Mr Keele was Senior Advisor to Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams from 2013 to 2015. During his time at Salt Lake County, Mr Keele advised the mayor on key policy initiatives, including financing, transportation, homelessness, criminal justice, health, culture and the arts and economic development. From 2006 to 2013, Mr Keele practiced corporate transactional law in New York, London and Los Angeles with the law firms Cleary Gottlieb and Latham & Watkins.

Mr Keele received his Juris Doctor from New York University in 2006, a Master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 2006 and Bachelor’s degrees in biology and French from Brigham Young University in 2001.

Lauren Sepolen, is a research analyst for BNY Mellon Wealth Management. In this role she is responsible for tax-exempt and taxable fixed income security analysis. Lauren has seven years of investment experience including five years with the firm.

Prior to joining the fixed income group, Lauren worked as a sales assistant with Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, where she was responsible for co-ordinating trading and performance analysis for clients. Lauren received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and is a CFA charter holder.

Mark Tercek is president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the global conservation organisation, where he lead’s TNC’s impact capital initiative and serves as board chair of NatureVest, TNC’s impact investment unit. He is author of the Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.

Mr Tercek is a former managing director and partner for Goldman Sachs, where he spent 24 years before joining TNC in 2008. During his time at Goldman Sachs, he managed several key units, including Corporate Finance, Equity Capital Markets and Pine Street, the firm’s leadership development programme. In 2005, after two decades as an investment banker, he was appointed to lead the firm’s Environmental Markets Group and develop its environmental strategy.

In 2012, Andrew Cuomo, New York governor, appointed Mr Tercek to serve on the New York State 2100 Commission, created in the wake of Superstorm Sandy to advise the governor and the state on how to make state infrastructure more resilient. He is a member of several boards and councils, including Resources for the Future, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, the advisory board for Harvard Business School’s Social Enterprise Initiative and the Science for Nature and People Partnership.

Mr Tercek is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Williams College Board of Trustees. He earned an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Williams College. Until 2008, he served on the finance faculty of New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Dr Golnaraghi is the director of extreme events and climate risks at the Geneva Association, whose members are the CEOs of the world’s leading (re) insurance companies. With more than 20 years in international executive and senior advisory positions in government, industry and the United Nations, Dr Golnaraghi has been working at the forefront of facilitating strategic partnerships and developing strategies and policies for building socio-economic resilience to disaster and climate risks and developing pathways for the transition to a low-carbon economy with a focus on investment strategies and technological innovations.

From 2004 to 2014, Dr Golnaraghi was the chief of the international programme on disaster risk reduction at the World Meteorological Organization. She developed global, regional and national mechanisms and programmes for managing disaster and climate risks, using advances in earth sciences and technologies, with initiatives in more than 40 countries. From 1997 to 2004, as the CEO and president of Climate Risk Solutions, she worked with the US government and companies in energy, agriculture and insurance and worked to develop weather-indexed insurance.

Dr Golnaraghi serves on a number of international, regional and industry advisory boards. She holds a Bachelors degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, a Masters in applied physics and a PhD in physical oceanography from Harvard University.

Matthew Weatherley-White to co-founded the CAPROCK Group and leads its initiative in impact investing. Mr Weatherley-White is regular speaker on impact investing and serves as a strategic advisor to several impact investing funds. He recently successfully shepherded two pieces of legislation through the Idaho Statehouse, the first authorizing Pay For Success Contracting and the second awarding legal status to businesses structured as Benefit Corporations.   

Before to co-founding The CAPROCK Group, Matthew was a partner in The Owyhee Group, a boutique advisory team within Smith Barney. During his 14 years with the company, he was a member of Citigroup’s Leadership Development Program and helped craft the firm’s Private Wealth Management platform.

Mr Weatherley-White graduated from Dartmouth College, has competed internationally in five sports and serves as a director for the Lee Pesky Learning Center, an organisation he helped launch nearly 20 years ago.

Mr Kubzansky is a partner at Omidyar Network, where he leads the firm’s Intellectual Capital team, which is responsible for defining investment strategies and conducting market research and analysis. Mr Kubzansky’s work spans the firm’s five global initiatives – Consumer Internet and Mobile, Education, Financial Inclusion, Governance and Citizen Engagement and Property Rights – as well as broader developments in venture capital, impact investing and philanthropy.

Before joining Omidyar Network, Mr Kubzansky was a partner at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), where he spent more than 10 years covering a range of sectors including telecoms, satellite and internet services. In 2007, he co-founded and led the Monitor Inclusive Markets practice, leading a team that analysed market-based approaches to serving mass market and low-income customers, suppliers and distributors across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mr Kubzansky also led sector-based research and consulting efforts in financial services, healthcare, technology and business process outsourcing, energy livelihoods and impact investing for a range of corporate, investor and donor clients.

For more than five years, Mr Kubzansky worked for the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). At the World Bank, he was part of the East Asia management team and directed the bank’s flagship innovation programme, Development Marketplace.

Mr Kubzansky earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and has a Bachelor’s degree with honours from Brown University.

Nancy Pfund is founder and managing Partner of DBL Partners, a venture capital firm whose goal is to combine top-tier financial returns with meaningful social, economic and environmental returns in the regions and sectors in which it invests.
Ms Pfund currently sponsors or sits on the board of directors of several companies, including: SolarCity, Farmers Business Network, The Muse, Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Off-Grid Electric and Primus Power, and, prior to their public offerings, Tesla Motors and Pandora Media. Ms Pfund also sits on the Board of Trustees for National Geographic Society, is a member of the advisory council for The Bill Lane Center for the American West the US Impact Investing Alliance (formerly the National Advisory Board on Impact Investing) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  
Prior to founding DBL, Ms Pfund was a managing director in Venture Capital at JPMorgan, having started her investment career at Hambrecht & Quist in 1984. Ms Pfund’s earlier work included positions at Intel, the California Governor’s Office, Stanford University and the Sierra Club.
Ms Pfund received her Bachelors and Masters in anthropology from Stanford University, and her MBA from the Yale School of Management.

Ommeed Sathe is a vice-president and head of the Impact Investment unit in the Office of Corporate Social Responsibility at Prudential, where he oversees all underwriting, origination, pipeline development and portfolio management activities for the group. The Impact Investment unit manages a portfolio of more than $500 million in investments and Prudential recently committed to grow its impact investing portfolio to $1bn by 2020. The group typically originates $150m to $200m in transactions annually and invests in a wide range of assets and strategies that produce both financial and social returns.

Before joining Prudential in June 2011, Mr Sathe was director of real estate development for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA), a quasi-public entity that alleviates blight, redevelops residential and commercial properties and implements public projects in New Orleans. At NORA, he spearheaded the revitalisation of historic commercial corridors such as Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and redeveloped more than 1,000 properties. Previously, he was a real estate and land use attorney with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York City.

Mr Sathe has an undergraduate degree in neuroscience and urban planning from Columbia University, a masters degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Mr Sathe serves on the board of the Military Park Partnership, B Lab and Community Development Trust.

Richard Kauffman joined the office of Andrew Cuomo, New York governor, as the state’s first chairman of energy and finance or “energy czar” in January 2013. He leads Reforming the Energy Vision (REV), New York State’s energy policy. REV, which will enable greenhouse gas emission reductions of 40 per cent by 2030, includes modernising the energy and utility industry, a 10-year commitment supporting renewable energy and efficiency markets through the $5bn Clean Energy Fund, the NY-Sun solar programme and NY Green Bank.

Mr Kauffman oversees and manages the state’s portfolio of energy agencies and authorities: the Department of Public Service, the New York Power Authority, the Long Island Power Authority and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). He was appointed chair of NYSERDA’s board in June 2013.

Before joining the Cuomo administration, Mr Kauffman was senior advisor to secretary Steven Chu at the US Department of Energy. During his private sector career, he was CEO of Good Energies, clean energy technologies investor, a partner of Goldman Sachs, where he chaired the Global Financing Group, and vice-chairman of Morgan Stanley’s institutional securities business and co-head of its banking department. 
Mr Kauffman has served as chairman of the board of Levi Strauss, on the boards of organisations including the Brookings Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, a master’s degree in international relations from Yale University and a master’s in public and private management from the Yale School of Management.

As Managing Director, Saadia leads the Foundation's work on Innovative Finance, overseeing its ‘Zero Gap’ portfolio. Her responsibilities include developing next generation finance mechanisms and large-scale blended finance funds that mobilize private sector capital towards the SDGs. Her work directly supports the Foundation’s mission of promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world. 

She has been featured in numerous publications such as the FT, Bloomberg, BBC, and WSJ Live, among others, and frequently speaks at industry and finance events to advance the idea of innovative finance as a mainstream instrument of social policy. She is a frequent author as well, having contributed pieces to Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, Fortune.com, Business Insurance, and many other publications.

Before joining The Rockefeller Foundation, she was Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Prior to NYCEDC, she was an Associate Principal at McKinsey & Company

Ms Madsbjerg holds a Master of Science in Applied Economics and Finance from Copenhagen Business School, and George Washington University and she has a Bachelor of Science degree in International Business from Copenhagen Business School and Boston College.

Timothy Stiles is the global chair of the International Development Assistance Services (IDAS) practice at KPMG. Mr Stiles has responsibility for the global delivery of KPMG’s services to organisations that are operating in the development sector. He is located in the firm’s New York office.

In addition to his responsibilities at IDAS, Mr Stiles is also the national practice leader of KPMG’s Development and Exempt Organizations practice and is a member of KPMG International’s governmental steering committee. He also serves as the global executive partner for the United Nations.

Mr Stiles has more than 25 years’ experience in providing services to development and tax-exempt organisations. His clients have included social service organisations, institutions of higher education, hospitals, governmental entities, museums, foundations, bi-lateral and multi-lateral organisations and other entities that have local, national and multi-national operations.

Tracy Palandjian is Co-founder and CEO of Social Finance, an impact investing non-profit that is leading the development of pay-for-success financing and social impact bonds, an innovative public-private partnership that mobilizes capital to deliver measurable and lasting impact on our communities. For more than a decade, she has worked to re-imagine the role of capital markets in enabling social progress. In 2011, to build the social impact bond field in the US, she co-founded Social Finance in Boston, which has been the catalyst for more than $100m to address a range of social challenges in criminal justice, early childhood, education, workforce development, health and homelessness. 

Prior to her work at Social Finance, Tracy was a Managing Director for 11 years at The Parthenon Group where she established and led the non-profit practice and worked with foundations and non-governmental organizations to accomplish their missions in the US and globally. Tracy has also worked at Wellington Management and McKinsey. 

Tracy is co-author of Investing for Impact: Case Studies Across Asset Classes, and serves as Vice Chair of the US Impact Investing Alliance. She is a trustee at the Surdna Foundation (where she chairs the Investment Committee), and a Director of Affiliated Managers Group. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Community Development Advisory Council. Previously, Tracy also served as Board Chair of Facing History and Ourselves, co-Chair of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights and Trustee of Milton Academy. A former Vice Chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers and a 2019 recipient of the HBS Alumni Achievement Award, Tracy continues to serve on various Standing and Visiting Committees at Harvard University.

Mr Varadarajan is a principal in the energy finance programme of the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI). His work at CPI has primarily focused on strategic analysis of clean energy policy, finance and business structures.

Mr Varadarajan was previously a programme examiner in the US White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). At OMB, he oversaw the $2bn budget for the energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes of the US Department of Energy (DOE). He was also responsible for overseeing the assessment of the cost to government – the credit subsidy cost – of the first $8bn in loans of the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.

Before joining OMB, Mr Varadarajan was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, working first as an advisor on carbon sequestration programs to the Under Secretary for Science at the DOE and then on detail to the staff of the US House of Representatives, Appropriations Committee.

Mr Varadarajan was a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University.

Sarah Murray is a Specialist Writer on Sustainable Development and a Non-fiction author and editor. A former Financial Times journalist and long-time Financial Times contributor, she also writes for Stanford Social Innovation Review as well as for universities and foundations. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Economist, The Guardian, and the South China Morning Post. She has edited two books on philanthropy and is author of two non-fiction books, Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre, How We Dignify the Dead, and Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat.