Impact Investing: Putting Our Money Where Our Mission Is

April 8, 2026

By: Michael Brannan

When I was asked to write about our impact investing efforts at the Bainum Family Foundation (BFF), I couldn’t help but smile — it’s not every day that a Chief Financial Officer is invited to talk about something other than budgets, audits, and payout requirements. Those responsibilities still matter (deeply), but they’re usually not the stuff people seek out for light reading.

Impact investing, however, has added a new dimension to my work. It has made the financial function more collaborative, more forward-looking, and more directly tied to advancing our mission. It’s been a refreshing shift from focusing solely on preventing surprises to helping create meaningful outcomes.

Impact Investing: An Extremely Condensed History Lesson

Impact investing gets a lot of headlines. Probably because it promises two things people love: making money and helping others. While folks in the United States have been doing versions of this in many different ways since the 1700s, here are three tactics it’s important to know about for our purposes today:  

• Negative screening investing: Don’t put money into alcohol, tobacco, gambling, sex-related industries, or weapons. Basically, anything your grandmother would frown at. 

• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing: Put money toward companies that do nice things for the planet and society. Think fair trade coffee and businesses that don’t pollute rivers. 

• Total portfolio activation (TPA): Look at every asset in the endowment and ask, “Is this supporting the advancement our mission, or is it only making money?”  

With that key terminology in mind, here’s the rundown of BFF’s own impact investing journey in our pursuit of a society where all children thrive. 

BFF’s Impact Investing Journey

Cleansing the Portfolio

Impact investing at BFF started before I showed up. When I joined as CFO in 2023, our amazing Board and Investment Committee (made of Bainum family members and subject matter experts) were already fully engaged in impact investing, seeing it as a tool to answer their favorite question: “What more can we do to benefit our young children and communities?” While BFF was far from the first, and is far from the only, philanthropy to use impact investing to further their mission, our focus on early childhood does set us apart. Currently, there is a lack of impact investment resources that go into early childhood, making our leadership team even more committed to driving and demonstrating progress to pave the way for others. 

As early as 2016, our leadership was fully engaged in negative screening and positive ESG tactics (as well as a few forgivable loan program-related investments). Our BFF teams worked with our Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO), Rock Creek, to implement these efforts — out went the industries that didn’t pass our negative screening test, in came more ESG-compatible funds. As part of this portfolio cleanse, we also wanted to ensure we were working with a diversity of investment managers, and shifted to more funds supported by racially- and gender-diverse staff. With Rock Creek’s guidance, we were off to a solid start, but leadership quickly realized we had room to be more ambitious. 

Moving From “Do No Harm” to “Do the Most Good”

The Board’s next move, in 2021, was to approve BFF’s entry into the world of TPA. We gained wisdom from Kathleen Simpson at the Russell Family Foundation, who, frankly, set the bar high for the rest of us. In 2024, we were smart enough to invite her to join our Board — thank goodness she accepted. Kathleen is a champion of TPA investing. Under her leadership, the Russell Foundation has aligned almost 100% of her foundation’s assets with its mission. With her guidance, we’ve moved closer to that model ourselves, shifting away from conservative “do no harm” investing towards a more intentional, ambitious strategy to use our investments to uplift the early childhood space. This strategy includes a dedicated impact investment carve-out of the endowment, which we are planning to introduce in the spring. But this type of strategy shift isn’t something you do on spreadsheets alone (believe me, I’ve tried). To actually make this transition a reality, our financial team is partnering with our program experts: the people who know early childhood inside and out.  

Where Impact Investing Meets Early Childhood 

In 2025, our Chief Program Officer and Chief Impact Officer teamed up with expert consultants to create “rules of the road” around this new impact investment carve-out. The resulting impact thesis serves as the strategy that ties those carve-out dollars directly to early childhood outcomes for kids, families, and the practitioners who care for them. Heading into 2026, this thesis will be our financial team’s roadmap. It will help us decide what to invest in, why it matters, and what “return” should look like, both in terms of financial and social impact. It also equips us with financial tools not conventionally used for social impact (e.g., low-interest loans and guarantees to early learning centers) we can use to drive towards positive systems change: 

More to Come

As we move into the next phase of this work, our goal is simple: make sure every dollar in our endowment is working just as hard as our grants to support young children, families, and the people who care for them. This isn’t a short‑term project, it’s a long‑term shift in how we think, collaborate, and measure success. We’re excited for what comes next and committed to sharing what we learn along the way. If our progress helps even one other organization take a step toward mission‑aligned investing, then this work is already paying dividends.

We’ll share more about our next steps and tactics in future blogs. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your own impact investing questions, wins, and lessons learned. We believe in learning and sharing as we go, and are eager to learn from those further along in these efforts. None of us are doing this in isolation, and the field moves faster when we compare notes.