Working Groups
Impact Capital Forum’s mission is to advance the micro-finance, impact, and social enterprise sectors by providing a platform for innovation, collaboration, and thought leadership. As a field-building platform, the Impact Capital Forum facilitates dialogue as well as action. Towards this end, for certain influential and fast-evolving impact themes, we will convene Working Groups, which emerge from Impact Capital Forum events. These working groups will serve as a forum to foster and deepen dialogue and share learnings through monthly meetings.
What will be the focus of the Policy Working Group?
The goal of this group is to educate participants on timely and impactful means to advocate for and shape policy issues that advance impact investing, which they seek to influence.
Impact investing has reached a point where public policy, primarily through regulatory actions rather than legislation, will materially affect its path forward. This Working Group will focus both on education around regulatory developments at the SEC, Department of Labor (DOL) and other parts of the federal government and on encouraging advocacy and participation in rule-making processes. Policies and even enforcement actions by the NYS Department of Financial Services and/or mandates of various European and international entities may also become part of the group’s purview. Note: Proposed legislation in Congress will not be ignored but currently is not where the most tangible activity is in Washington.
The focus of our first gathering will be the DOL’s recently proposed regulation -- comments thereon due December 13 -- that is intended to “remove barriers” to ESG considerations in investing and proxy voting. Future gatherings will cover a variety of policy topics subject to the interest of the working group. For example, the SEC is expected to propose Climate Disclosure regulations early next year, Human Capital and Board Diversity regulations possibly this fall and Fund Management Disclosure regulations (anti-impact washing) in the spring.
In addition, the US Impact Investing Alliance together with B-Labs formed a “Coalition Calling for a White House Initiative on Inclusive Economic Growth.” ICF joined this coalition in April 2021. Since then a policy agenda has been developed around two main pillars: 1) community investing and 2) the transition to stakeholder capitalism , each pillar having six policy elements. The Working Group may decide to do deeper educational dives into these, particularly the stakeholder capitalism elements: e.g., mandatory ESG reporting for public and large private companies; ESG transparency by asset managers; ERISA regulations related to fiduciary duty; elevating the importance of workers; aligning executive and investment advisor compensation with stakeholder impact markets.
For additional information please feel free to reach out to Kim Leslie Shafer who will be leading the Group kimleslieshafer@gmail.com.
Connect with other members to discuss areas where the group can support and further advance various policy initiatives within our community, potentially as well as through outreach to aligned professional groups.
Who can join?
The working group is open to new members and additional ideas.
Speakers:
Login instructions for this Zoom video conference will be emailed after your registration is completed.