The Rockefeller Foundation & Kellogg School of Management Sustainable Investing Fellowship

The Kellogg School of Management is putting forth this proposal for a grant to support the creation, execution, and evaluation of a pilot launch of the Rockefeller Foundation & Kellogg School of Management Sustainable Investing Fellowship and for field-building in the area of sustainable investing including support for the Sustainable Investing Challenge (the Challenge) as well as an inaugural convening of top impact investing faculty for field-building purposes. The fellowship will last for 9 to 12 months, and will be awarded to a team based on an application process. The awarded team will spend the period of the fellowship working within a partner impact investing institution and will focus their efforts on further developing their impact investing plan, details and opportunity assessment. By the end of the fellowship, the team will have torn apart and re-formulated their initial investment hypothesis and modeled a vehicle that nears market readiness for early stage investment. The product of the fellowship will be a white paper that informs the field of the processes, learnings, and dynamics inherent to the development of the vehicle. For field-building in the field of impact investing, two initiatives will take place through this grant. The first will be a thought leadership retreat which will be a one-day gathering of selected impact investing academics in New York. The product of this retreat will be improved education content, outcomes, and reach of impact investing instruction in business and professional education. The second initiative is support for the Challenge hosted by the Kellogg School of Management. With this support the Challenge will be able to expand its reach, encouraging more students from around the world to submit to the challenge, as well as provide vital resources to improving the Challenge. The overarching impact and outcome of this work and of this grant support will be the expansion and further professionalization of the field of impact investing. By supporting a team of budding impact investing innovators, fueling the thought leadership of the field, and initiating a global competition focused on spurring new ideas and products for the sector, this project will lead to increased investment and to increased and improved social and environmental outcomes resulting from those investments. Further, this sponsorship will grow the relationship between The Kellogg School of Management and the Rockefeller Foundation, potentially leading to more collaborations in the future.