After graduating from Yale University in 2008, Berry Kennedy moved to Mexico to work with the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature, Latin America’s largest national environmental fund. She returned to graduate school to get a dual degree MBA-MS in business and environmental science from the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. During this time, she did summer internships with the Sustainability Department at Walmart and with the consulting firm The Cambridge Group. For the past three years, Berry has served as an associate and director of Social Venture Fund, the US's only student-run impact investing venture capital fund. Berry's interests include impact investing, market-based mechanisms that promote conservation and sustainable agricultural systems.
A newly released scorecard by the Cornucopia Institute, a self-proclaimed organic watchdog group, attempts to call into question the role of corporate lobbying in shaping the USDA’s organic policy.
As the market for organic food grows in the U.S., sustainable farmers who are going beyond the organic label struggle to educate consumers about their practices.
Courses about food and food systems are showing up in course catalogs in grade schools, graduate schools and Internet mega-classes.
“Not to mean to insult anyone,” says Paul Sanford of the private investment-management company TriLinc Global, “but it can a bit myopic.”
Ask someone at TBLI 2013 for a definition of impact investing and you’re unlikely to get the same answer. Berry Kennedy listens to another part of the long conversation defining the impact investment field. There must be “clarity between philanthropy, CSR and investing efforts. They are not all impact investments,” stressed Ximena Escobar de Nogales, head of social performance management at Bamboo Finance, an inclusive-finance private equity firm. It was a bold opinion in a presentation to a room full philanthropists and corporate representatives who consider their work to be exactly that: impact investing.
TBLI 2013 is full of experts advising banks and individual investors on how to make sustainable or impact investments. But where do the experts put their own money?