About the Lab:
We often emphasize that the work of discerning, defining, and practicing “faith-first finance” takes all of us.
Over the past two years, we’ve had 170+ visionary investors, social movement leaders, entrepreneurs, and financial advisors come together to collaborate, reflect, and deliberate serious questions related to faith and investing:
- What is faith-first investing?
- What makes a CST-embodied investment deal?
- How do we activate more Catholic impact investors?
- What is my most important work?
These questions – along with the curiosity and leadership capacity of this community – remain in their remarkable potential.
To advance the leadership of this community, we’ve launched our second CST Investing Lab.
The Lab serves three main purposes:
- To cultivate new leadership in the faith-based impact investing space
- To offer a meaningful opportunity to meet, collaborate, and build relationships with other Livable Future Investing alumni on a time bound and focused project
- To generate thoughtful papers, approaches, and frameworks that will advance the leading edge of Catholic impact investing
The questions structuring our current Lab include:
- Moving Money Together: Deal-Sharing and Investor Circles. How can the CIIC / FC deal-sharing platform for CST-aligned private market investments be truly useful? What CST investing criteria are you already using in your work, and what criteria might our community begin to coalesce around? What would it look like to lift up a particular deal each month and practice “right relationship” (genuine support) with these CST-aligned capital seekers?
- RIA Landscape. How might we map the RIA landscape through the lens of CST investing? How do we build a practical resource for our community to identify investment advisors with capacities to support CST-embodied impact investing?
- What is Catholic Investing? What are the theological and philosophical foundations of Catholic investing? How do we apply CST criteria to whole portfolio construction, drawing on and evolving the faith-first investing spectrum in particular?
- Moving Money from Global Church North to the South. How do we create channels to shift investment capital from the Global North to the Global South, with a particular focus on the role of religious congregations? What capacity building and accompaniment is critical for this work to be successful?
- Congregations. What are the opportunities for religious congregations to deepen or strengthen their impact investing work? What tools are needed for education and to build awareness? Where might there be areas for collaboration (sharing deals, diligence, fund infrastructure etc.)?
- CST & Personal Investing. What does it mean to be a faith-first investor with our personal portfolios? Can we design a curriculum or pilot an individual investor circle focused on CST and personal finance?
- Moving Money Into Employee Ownership. How do we support the emergence of scalable ways to invest in employee ownership and preserve depth of impact?
- Mobilizing Next-Gen Leadership. How do we intentionally unleash the leadership of young adults in the faith-first investing movement?
Our Lab Co-Conveners
Yichen Feng
Yichen is an impact investor and operator with 15 years experience building and advising businesses creating new alternatives in entrenched systems. She is on a continuous journey to widen her heart, guided by the unconditional love and redemption offered by Jesus.
Tim Macready
Tim is based in Colorado and works with Brightlight, an investment advisory firm that supports institutional and family investors in aligning their faith and their portfolio, supporting with governance design, policy development, product research & diligence, portfolio construction, investment & impact performance monitoring, screening, and advocacy, across public and private asset classes.
Rob Stewart
Rob is the Executive Chair of Social Enterprise Asset Management (SEAM), an organization focused on launching a radically inclusive co-operative ecosystem that empowers all households to participate in the transition to a Net Zero economy.
Rob is especially interested in the intersection of spirituality and business. He believes our faith tradition(s) have the resources to empower a culture of radical freedom and love in the face of the fierce resistance from our established cultural norms and paradigms.
Carol Tarr
Carol Tarr is originally from the South Side of Chicago and works for Phenix Capital Group in Amsterdam where she is responsible for the Impact Investing Academy, programs and collaborations.
Carol received a Master’s of Theology degree focusing on World Religions from Harvard Divinity School and studied History of Religions at the University of Chicago School of Divinity. She spends a lot of her free time rowing and sees the small boat in big waters analogy as a constant in faith-first impact investing.
Join a Welcome Call!
Friday, April 17, at 12pm EST Register here
Our Livable Future Investing mini workshop will be held:
- Wednesday, May 20th at 12pm EST register here
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