The Marguerite Casey Foundation endowment is a vehicle for achieving the Foundation’s mission. MCF ceaselessly looks for ways to increase justice in the world. That includes influencing the corporations that our endowment sponsors — using our voting power as shareholders to force corporations to make good on long overdue commitments to racial justice.
But we must do more. Our investment strategy involves more than leveraging our shareholder power and the more typical practice of screening out investments that result in negative impact for the communities our recipients serve. We also take a proactive approach to investment. Our Program-Related Investments (PRIs) and Mission-Related Investments (MRIs) put our endowment to work — ensuring we invest in opportunities to increase wealth for communities that have long been denied the means of wealth-building and to provide capital to entrepreneurs that have long been denied the investments that other entrepreneurs freely access. We aim to invest in organizations that address the systemic social and economic challenges facing Black and Brown communities, including value extraction and wealth inequality.
Initial investments aligned with the MCF impact investment model in 2020 and 2021 include:
Authentic Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that brings together a diverse set of founders, subject-matter experts, and organizational leaders to help companies succeed. Authentic Ventures invests in all kinds of people who share its values, but most of its investments are in companies led by women and people of color.
Canary is a mission-driven enterprise contributing to the evolution of the 21st century social safety net. Canary exists to ensure that in times of financial need, individuals can access emergency support with dignity, giving them the peace of mind and confidence to recover quickly. Canary’s software platform makes it easy for organizations to offer an emergency relief fund.
More Perfect Union is a first-of-its-kind, media, education and advocacy journalism organization devoted to telling the stories of the working class and holding corporations accountable. More Perfect Union combines journalistic storytelling with advocacy of national and state progressive policy priorities for the goal of affecting political and social change. More Perfect Union is building a progressive digital communication hub on YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and other social media content distribution channels to attract a large audience of regular working people. Simultaneously, More Perfect Union works with elected officials/influencers and issue advocates to produce videos and other digital content that seeks to accomplish progressive change.
VamosVentures is a venture capital fund which invests in early-stage, tech-enabled companies led by Latinx and diverse founders with compelling products and solutions. Its mission is to empower diverse communities through wealth creation, talent pipelines, building social mobility, and unique tech-driven solutions to challenges persistent in our communities. VamosVentures will focus on several high growth industries that are disproportionately influenced by diverse consumers. Among the fund’s priorities are health and wellness, future of work, consumer packaged goods, and financial technology.
