New Frontiers | Our WorkAdvancing Social Equity Through Impact Management

While social movements for greater equity have spurred corresponding efforts among investors, as investors increasingly deploy strategies to advance social equity, best practices for managing and disclosing the impact of those strategies have not kept pace. Impact management for social equity is at a nascent stage because the necessary expertise tends to be siloed across disciplines.

In 2024, Impact Frontiers is working to break down these silos by collaborating with the following expert partners to build consensus on impact management practices to advance social equity:

Cathy Clark	Erika Seth Davies	Heather Krause
Faculty Director at The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University	CEO at Rhia Ventures and Founder of The Racial Equity Asset Lab	Pstat, Founder of We All Count project for equity in data science
Rebecca Fries	Tynesia Boyea-Robinson
CEO and Co-founder of Value for Women	Founder, President and CEO of CapEQ

Specifically, we are synthesizing knowledge across the domains of racial equity, gender equity, and data equity alongside our disciplinary grounding in impact management to advance social equity through the following two workstreams:

• Raising the social equity “floor”: We are conducting a social equity audit of the Norms of impact management facilitated by the IMP and now stewarded by Impact Frontiers. After receiving feedback on a discussion document summarizing proposed social equity changes to the Norms via public consultation we will publish revisions to the Norms on our website in Q4 2024.
• Raising the social equity “ceiling”: We are developing guidance on emerging impact management practices for investors who aim to advance social equity. We invite feedback on a discussion document summarizing proposed social equity changes to the Norms via public consultation through December 2nd, 2024 and will publish the final guidance document in early 2025.

Through this initiative we seek to center social equity, a fundamental element of impact, in the practice of impact management as it continues to grow and mature. By optimizing impact management for social equity through both avenues, we ultimately aim to facilitate better outcomes for historically and / or currently marginalized communities.