Investor's Guide to Integrating Philanthropy and Investing

What is capital for? And what happens when we stop treating philanthropy and investing as separate questions?

This guide maps the many ways wealth holders and foundations are already bringing their giving and their investing into relationship with one another, and offers a way to see your own capital, and its purpose, as a whole.

The Investor's Guide to Integrating Philanthropy and Investing is a collaboration between the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP), University of St.Gallen (CCSP-HSG), and Stanford PACS. Together, we are looking at a question we hear constantly from wealth holders, family offices, and foundation leaders: the field is full of tools but how do they actually fit together, and where do I start?

At its core, integration is more than dollars. Combining a grants budget with an investment portfolio is a start, but real integration also means attending to stakeholders, governance, time horizons, and the fit-for-purpose tools and terms. These dimensions are present whether you're a single family office aligning your own capital, a group of allocators structuring a fund together, or a coalition working toward change at the scale of a whole system: the three levels of integrated practice this guide walks through in depth.

Drawing on existing research and original interviews with practitioners across philanthropy and private wealth, the guide considers what integration means at each level, why allocators might pursue it, how it takes shape in practice, and the challenges and opportunities each level presents.

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