Impact Frontiers will become the home for the full set of resources developed by the Impact Management Project (IMP)’s community of practitioners. With this transition, Impact Frontiers will become a hub where investors can: learn about concepts such as the five dimensions of impact and the four investor contribution strategies; see how other investors are integrating these norms alongside financial risk and return into their investment practices; and find opportunities to engage with communities of peers.
The Impact Management Project (IMP), a forum for building global consensus on how to measure, assess and report impacts on people and the natural environment, is concluding its five-year term as planned at the end of 2021. The IMP Practitioner Community, active between 2016 – 18, brought together more than 2,000 practitioners to share their experiences and identify commonalities in their impact management approaches. The resulting norms – which include the five dimensions of impact, strategies for investor contribution, and the impact classes of investment – now inform the actions and decisions of many thousands of enterprises and investors. From January 31 2022, this content will transition from IMP to Impact Frontiers’ website.
Impact Frontiers, which originated at Root Capital and was incubated within the IMP, will continue independently following the IMP’s conclusion. In addition to its core work leading investor peer cohorts, Impact Frontiers will facilitate further consensus-building on topics, such as positive and negative investor contribution, in which standards and guidance do not yet exist.
Mike McCreless, Executive Director of Impact Frontiers, was closely involved in the IMP’s consensus-building efforts from 2016 in his capacity as Head of Impact at Root Capital. After launching the first Impact Frontiers investor cohort from Root Capital in 2018, he moved the initiative to the IMP in 2019 as a more natural platform for industry collaboration. From 2019 – 2021 he served simultaneously as Executive Director of Impact Frontiers and Head of Investor Collaboration for the IMP, working closely with the IMP team and partners on the Impact Management Platform, also launching today.
McCreless commented, “I participated enthusiastically in IMP Practitioner Community from its inception because it presented a new and collaborative way of identifying and sharing practices that would genuinely help investors to increase their impact. I am glad that Impact Frontiers can now play a role in ensuring that the content facilitated by the IMP continues to be available for practitioners on an open-access basis.”
The co-founders of the IMP, Clara Barby and Olivia Prentice, will continue in their current roles with Impact Frontiers, with Clara serving as part of the Steering Committee and Olivia serving as a Senior Advisor. Clara Barby commented, “IMP’s roots were in bringing practitioners together to push the frontier of best practice in impact management. We are delighted that Impact Frontiers, whose model has formalized how cohorts of investors can learn together, will continue to provide practical content, including these resources facilitated by the IMP, for any practitioner to use”.
