The California Endowment has announced the release of a report detailing its experiences in more than a decade of impact investing.

Based on a review of internal documents and data, interviews with stakeholders, and team meetings, the report, Building Trust & Equity: What The California Endowment Has Learned from Over a Decade of Impact Investing, (43 pages, PDF), details lessons learned and progress made throughout the endowment’s impact investment journey. According to the report, the majority of the endowment’s $250 million impact investing allocation consists of program-related investments (PRIs), and since 1999, it has issued a total of 56 PRIs into 41 organizations totaling $179 million in commitments for social determinants of health broadly defined. While the majority are loans, four PRIs were guarantee commitments. In 2015, the endowment added aligned grants with a goal to amplify and enhance PRI success, and now allocates between $4 million and $6 million annually for PRI-aligned grants.

In addition, the report details that the foundation’s PRI framework aims to meet goals by way of advancing racial equity, conducting trust-based impact investing, centering community priorities, and strengthening ecosystems. In all, the endowment has identified three critical areas of learning throughout this process: moving from statements and commitments on racial equity toward operationalization at every level of PRI making, including programmatic review, due diligence, and monitoring; moving from the exclusive focus on financial risk toward a shared focus that prioritizes programmatic risk and social impact; and moving from staffing, culture, and structures built around deals and transactions toward learning and innovation, which requires an aligned board and executive leadership, collaborative and knowledgeable staffing, a culture of learning, flexibility across financial tools, and developing and institutionalizing practices and policies to ensure that learning is codified.

“Our commitment to advancing health and racial equity in California is an organization-wide commitment that includes our Impact Investing,” wrote managing director of impact investing Amy Chung. “Our partners have told us that our support of their racial equity journeys has helped deepen their organizational capacities toward building a world of more inclusive capital. We will continue to be unwavering in our commitment to advancing racial equity as a key social determinant of health.”

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