Mike Van Patten, a 20-year veteran of Wall Street, recently launched a platform for impact investing, defined broadly as making money while also making a difference. Mission Markets is a brilliant idea–a gift to the future really. It is also the first of its kind… An emerging, disruptive innovation, the kind we claim we want. Innovation is often not created, but recognized. We should recognize this opportunity and make it not just an adjunct to “real” investing, but drive it to be a mainstream strategy for economic and community development.
“This is new infrastructure”, he says, “but it needs content at all points of the investment opportunity. It is designed to build on the trend of impact investing that Rockefeller Foundation, JP Morgan, and the Global Impact Investment Network believe will reach 400bn to 1trillion in the decade.”
Mike presented to the NW-LNII group in Portland, Oregon, a new group that includes a wide range of professionals, from the Mayor’s Office to academia, nonprofits, business incubators and funders. It was exactly the kind of cross-sector, cross-pollination we must cultivate in order to grow hybridized, multiple-return enterprises. Amy Pearl opened the session my sharing the five critical gaps we must fill, and then introduced Mike and Mission Markets as filling one of those five. One seeded, four to grow.
Mike and his team will be here in March for ReVV2011. They will offer a two-hour session on how to engage on the Mission Markets platform–a how-to rather than an overview. ReVV2011 is designed as a how-to conference on this kind of change, and Mission Markets is only one of many sessions that will help us integrate innovation.
Imagine you’re a business that makes a better window that saves energy, or an investment firm that only invests in organic, sustainable agriculture, or an accredited investor wishing to explore a wide spectrum of impact investing opportunities. Mission Markets is for you. Join us at ReVV to dig into making this vision a reality.
[...] “Mission Markets Founder Presents to NW-LNII“ [...]