You’ve built the knowledge. Now build the practice.
CSP’s Investing Lab is where knowledge becomes practice; an alumni-only experience built around learning to make real impact investments together.
Participants work in a small, intimate group of peers meeting monthly via Zoom for live, interactive sessions. Together, they evaluate real investment opportunities, conduct due diligence, interact with actual founders, and present recommendations to a real Investment Committee that deploys capital from a live impact fund.
Enrollment in the Lab covers twelve months of live sessions, real deal flow, and active engagement with the Investment Committee. You can re-enroll annually for the next set of experiences.
This is not a course, there are no simulations, and the participation itself is the training.
What you’ll gain
Move from theory to practice with real stakes: The lab focuses on investment decisions you help shape, through a live fund, real due diligence, and actual capital deployment. There is no substitute for learning by doing.
Build confidence through repetition, not just exposure: A workshop can shift your perspective. Monthly sessions — analyzing deals, debating tradeoffs, and presenting to an Investment Committee — build the kind of judgment that only comes from practice.
Learn alongside peers who share your context: This is a protected, confidential space for wealth holders and capital allocators. No uninvited pitches. No conflicts of interest. Just honest conversation with people navigating the same questions you are, supported by world-class practitioners.
By the end of the year, participants will be able to:
- Evaluate whether an impact investment is credible — assessing additionality, impact thesis, and ESG risk
- Conduct structured financial and impact due diligence on a direct company deal
- Apply an Investment Policy Statement as a real decision-making tool, not just a reference document
- Articulate a formal investment recommendation to a decision-making body and defend it under scrutiny
- Understand how an Investment Committee makes decisions — what a credible recommendation looks like, what questions get asked, what tips a decision
- Monitor a live portfolio and maintain context for private markets investment decisions
This program was built for you if…
You want to manage your own impact carve-out, make the case for doing so, or sit on a family IC one day, — and you need to point to real experience
You’re considering becoming an LP by investing in an impact fund and want to understand how a fund actually runs from the inside.
You want to draft or refine an Investment Policy Statement (IPS) for your own investment team, and you need to see how an IPS guides real decisions, — not just in theory.
You want access to impact deal flow to bring back to your own investment team or family office.
You’re interested in catalytic and innovative financial tools and want to be at the leading edge of how capital can be deployed for impact.
What the experience looks like
The full experience mirrors the real investment process: learning, analyzing, debating, deciding, and reflecting. Between sessions, dive deeper in small teams supported by expert coaches. After all, the best way to learn impact investing is to do it.
How the year unfolds
Participants gather on the first Tuesday of every month (8:00–10:00 AM PT) for live, interactive sessions that build progressively over the course of the year, moving from foundational frameworks to hands-on investment analysis to live recommendations before the fund's Investment Committee.
For time commitment, expect a minimum of 2 to 3 hours per month for monthly sessions. During active due diligence cycles, those who opt into the full experience can expect an additional 6 to 12 hours as part of a small team conducting research, analysis, and preparing investment recommendations.
How the investment process works
The program is structured around the real investment process; not a simulation of it. Here's how it flows:
Deals are sourced from CSP's expert network with an eye toward inclusion and impact. You don't have to start from scratch, you engage with pre-identified opportunities that have already cleared an initial screen.
From there, if you opt in, the work is yours. Small teams conduct due diligence: researching the company, stress-testing the impact thesis, analyzing financials, and speaking directly with founders. Teams then prepare and present a formal investment recommendation to the fund's Investment Committee, the body that makes the actual capital deployment decision.
You can expect the opportunity to work through a small number of live deals across the year. The opt-in structure means you can go deep on the deals that matter most to you, while still staying connected to the full portfolio through monthly sessions.
How the cohort works online
The program runs entirely virtually, which means cohort connection is intentional rather than incidental.
The year opens with a session designed to build relationships and knowledge across the group before the investment work begins. From there, you form small due diligence teams, typically around 4-6 people, to work on specific deals together between monthly sessions.
Team formation is self-directed: you will express interest in specific companies and choose your roles within the team. We'll do our best to accommodate preferences, though popular deals may have limited spots. The monthly sessions bring the full group back together to share progress and learn from each other's work.
Guided by practitioners who’ve done the work
CSP’s Investing Lab is led by experts who bring decades of experience deploying capital for impact, not only studying it. Our coaches and advisors have built impact strategies at the institutional level, and bring that depth and rigor to every session.
By grounding participants in real diligence, real decisions, and real accountability, the Lab builds the confidence to move capital with intention and to engage families thoughtfully around impact and purpose
Justina Lai
Impact Investing Coach and Chief Impact Officer, Laird Norton Wetherby
In Partnership with ImpactAssets
CSP's Investing Lab uses a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) held with ImpactAssets, an impact investing trailblazer dedicated to changing the trajectory of the planet’s future and improving the lives of all people. The DAF is the fund that participants will use, with guidance from the Investment Committee, to deploy capital into real investments.
Founded in 2010, ImpactAssets increases flows of money to impact investing in partnership with its clients through its impact investment platform, philanthropic solutions, and field-building initiatives, including the IA 50 database of private impact fund managers. ImpactAssets has $5 billion in assets, working with purpose-driven individuals and their wealth managers, family offices, foundations and corporations. ImpactAssets is an independent 501(c)(3) organization.
Learn more at www.impactassets.org
Where knowledge becomes practice
CSP’s Investing Lab is open exclusively to alumni of the following CSP programs:
- Impact Investing for the Next Generation
- Integrating Philanthropy & Investing to Maximize Impact
- Investing for Systems Change
- How Leading Family Offices Grow Future-Fit with Impact
- Designing Multicapital Strategies for Impact
The Lab has limited spots available, and it all kicks off in September 2026
You might also be interested in
October 26-29, 2026 At Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), California, USA
Peer-led deep dive into the inner workings of impact family offices. A blueprint to integrate impact into your investment and governance model.
Moving beyond single investments to transform entire systems. A framework for deploying capital strategically to create lasting, systemic change.
