Key leaders unveil groundbreaking joint guide on systemic investing

Investors seeking to tackle the world’s greatest challenges now have a new road map – the Center for Sustainable and Private Wealth (CSP) Investor’s Guide to Systemic Investing, drawn together in a community effort with the key networks in systemic investing in private wealth, the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan, the TransCap Initiative, The ImPact, and TWIST. The groundbreaking seminal report empowers investors to explore systems thinking, transforming the current approach to impact investing. Building on a decade of firsthand experience working with wealth-holders, academic research, and interviews, the guide approaches the potential for capital to transform systems to produce the best long-term outcomes for both people and the planet.

“It is increasingly clear that conventional approaches to investing cannot fully address today’s most pressing ecological and social issues,” said Dr. Falko Paetzold, CSP's managing director. “If we are serious about change, we need to listen, rethink, and embrace bold, systemic solutions together. This guide invites wealth holders to be open and brave by stepping back in order to move forward.”

The TransCap Initiative, an open innovation space at the forefront of building the field of systemic investing, has been deepening the conceptual and practical foundations of this new investment logic. "Systemic investing is a hugely promising, yet nascent field. We need many more capital holders applying these ideas on the ground and collaborating to create waves of learning and impact across industries and geographies," said Dominic Hofstetter, its executive director.

An Actionable Framework

Developed as a community effort based on literature, interviews, and fieldwork, the guide provides wealth holders with actionable practical steps to begin their journeys: defining and understanding systems; identifying potential roles in coalitions; and building portfolio strategies that leverage synergies across asset classes. 

Innovators in impact investing reshaping global systems profiled include:

1) The Good Investors, a network of families mobilizing capital to transform essential systems like food, water, energy, and biodiversity through systemic investing.

2) CO_, a collective expanding its mission beyond Mexico and Latin America to align capital with transformative change.

3) The Tara Health Foundation, which combines multiple investments and philanthropic disbursements to better serve at the intersection of race and gender.

“These early examples of systemic investing illuminate some of the practices and possibilities that we hope to expand through the Investor Guide,” says Jason Jay, Senior Lecturer and Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. Quoting science fiction author William Gibson,  “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Spotlight on Systemic Investing in Ensuring Reproductive Health and Gender Equity

The guide examines how the Tara Health Foundation evolved its approach to systemic investing in reproductive healthcare. Recognizing that limited and unequal access to reproductive healthcare stems from deeply rooted systemic barriers, including artificial constraints on capital flows and fragmented delivery systems, the foundation developed innovative financing solutions. These include combining low-interest loans with unrestricted grants to support independent abortion providers and establishing the Reproductive Health Investors Alliance to expand the ecosystem of investors committed to reproductive healthcare.

“Systemic investing began for us by asking a different set of questions”, said Elise Belusa, Executive Director at Tara Health Foundation. "Instead of 'How do we fund more clinics?' we started asking 'Why isn't capital flowing to reproductive healthcare in the first place?' Building trust with on-the-ground advisors helped us understand where capital was truly needed and how traditional investment approaches were often reinforcing the very barriers we sought to address."

Transforming Wealth into Impact

Wealth holders have an extraordinary opportunity to drive systemic change, but it requires looking to community leaders, NGOs, think tanks, academics, and growing investor groups and service providers. Wealth holders are uniquely positioned to support ‘backbone’ organizations, that bring together actors to effect change in a given system – often nonprofits established exactly for this purpose. Investors seeking to partner with public funders should focus on key areas such as R&D, international development, community finance, and climate adaptation – sectors where collaboration can drive transformative impact.

This guide highlights how a systemic approach can revolutionize investing, serving as both a blueprint for transformative strategies and a cornerstone for training future cohorts of wealth holders. 

About CSP Trainings

CSP has trained thousands of wealth holders and their advisors from the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Middle and South America and has moved over $30 billion in assets towards impact across several continents. CSP will hold its second-ever Investing for Systems Change program for investors and philanthropists from May 21-23 and wealth holders can sign up here.

About the Investor Guides

A decade ago CSP documented investors’ uncertainty about creating impact with capital. Since then, CSP’s investor guides have brought topical, research-backed insights to thousands of wealth holders and decision-makers across sustainable finance, impact investing, and wealth management.

About CSP

The Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) works at the intersection of scientific research, wealth holders, and investment professionals to empower investors to move private wealth toward sustainable development.

By generating and sharing state-of-the-art knowledge on impact and sustainable investing, and training next-generation and self-made investors, intermediaries, and financial institutions, we bridge science with action to create a movement of informed, motivated, empowered investors who use all their forms of capital to contribute to a more just and equitable world.