Have you ever felt like the world’s biggest problems are just too massive to solve—that there isn’t enough capital to truly make a difference? Prepare to have your financial perspective transformed. In this episode of Women Advancing, we sit down with Dr. Stephanie Gripne, founder of the Impact Finance Center and a true force in impact investing. She challenges the very foundation of financial thinking, shifting us from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance. With powerful data and inspiring stories, Dr. Gripne shows how even seemingly insurmountable challenges—like housing entire communities—are within reach and shaped by every dollar we spend. Discover the “magic money” approach that delivers both market-rate returns and vital community support, and learn how women, in particular, can reclaim their power to shape the future of finance. Get ready to ditch outdated systems and embrace a new era of values-aligned, actionable investing. This isn’t just about money—it’s about purpose, community, and unlocking the immense potential within us all.
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Democratizing Impact Investing: Dr. Stephanie Gripne, Founder Of The Impact Finance Center On Unlocking Capital For Good
What if we thought about money, not just as a transaction, but as a real true tool for transformation? This episode, I get to sit down with Dr. Stephanie Gripne. She’s the Founder of the Impact Finance Center and she’s often been described as both a force of nature, but also the master capital disruptor in the world of impact investing. You’ll see why.
Stephanie’s made it her mission to democratize impact investing by helping people from everyday people to wealthy families align their capital with their values, and also to shift their thinking from one of scarcity to one of this change, it’s all in reach. She’s trained hundreds of new impact investors unlocked billions of potential capital for good and built platforms that make investing in social change so much more accessible and actionable.
In our conversation, we’re going to talk about the why and how of putting money to work for purpose and how again, you really can’t do this. The role women can play, in particular in shaping the future of finance and how we can really get these stodgy old systems not built for innovation shifted. Stephanie brings the fire, the humor, and the clarity and the brilliance. I’m just going to say that we need to rethink what investing can really do. Plus, she shares a little bit of her upcoming book, so be sure to read to the end where I share my KB Takeaways. Believe me, there are plenty. Let’s see what Steph has to say.
We have got a terrific conversation set up for you I’m joined by Dr. Stephanie Gripne, who’s the Founder and CEO of the Impact Finance Center, and soon to be author, a little something we’ll be learning about shortly. Welcome, Stephanie.
Thank you, Kate. It’s wonderful to be with you.
You have always got so many fabulous things going and the thing that I love most about you is your desire to improve things, make things better. When you see something’s janky and not working, it’s like, “Huh?” One of those obviously is the capital system. Let’s go back to the beginning. What made you even look at the whole capital system and think, “This system needs a serious redesign?” I can think of a few things, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
It makes sense when I think about it now, but along the journey, it was really growing up in a small town in a ski resort in Idaho. I grew up in Haley, Idaho, which is just outside of Sun Valley, Idaho. I currently live in another ski resort most of the time. I’m based technically out of Denver, but I spend a lot of my time in Breckenridge, which is a lot like Haley, Idaho, Sun Valley, where I grew up.
Growing up in a small town, what’s great about a small town is you hang out with people that are different than you. When you end up in a big city, you can find your people a little bit more easily. When you grow up in a small town, you hang out with a wide variety of humans. In the town I grew up in, we had two controversies growing up. We had one over an endangered salmon, the spring summer chinook salmon, and the other one was over introducing wolves in the Yellowstone.
It might sound benign when you talk about what could possibly go wrong with an endangered fish, an endangered wolf? What happened in my community is when I was 15 years old, I worked for the river guides, and then when I was 19 years old, I worked for the fisheries biologist who was, had to make the call on wind to shut down the river to stop the river guides from floating boats down because the salmon had to reproduce.
In a classic case of man versus nature, for lack of a better framing of it, my friends, the river guides, threatened the lives of the fisheries biologist, and the ranchers threaten the lives of the wildlife biologists to reintroduce wolves. I just remember, I love all of them. I love the ranchers, I love the river guides, I love the fisheries, biologists, wildlife, biologists love the fish and the wildlife. I just remember thinking, “I’m surrounded by just extraordinary resources, private and public resources, and yet we’re in this false myth of a game where if the fish wins, I lose my livelihood.” It even hearkened back to my phd advisor led the Spotted Owl project the Pacific Northwest Forest Plan, Dr. Jack Ward Thomas.
It was like, “It’s me or the critter,” from that perspective. It was always around the wildlife, so I thought, “I need to become a wildlife biologist.” What I discovered on the journey midlife or in my twenties is my interest was less about the fish and the wildlife and the wolves and more about the community flows of capital in my system.
The short of the long journey is I discovered I just luckily had a skill and aptitude to do transactions for good. I got to do them the last three and a half years with my dad when he got a real estate license and mortgage broker license, he’d been a successful workout guy. Instead of giving my dad an allowance as I was caregiving for him in his 50s, I would buy a house.
Next thing you know, we had 3, 4, 5, 6 houses in the land of Wyoming. That money, my dad would get the fee for the real estate fee and the mortgage broker fee. On house number 3 or 4, he came home one day and he said, “There’s all these people with really bad credit, but some of the people with really bad credit were paying their bills. They just didn’t have the proper medical insurance. Now they’re in a thing called a medical bankruptcy. I think on the next house, we should go buy it, lease it to them so they get to move into their home 3 to 5 years early.” We decided to set aside part of the rent for equity. If the house appreciated above a certain amount, 10%, we said we’d like to give them that upside.
We got a job for my dad, the joy of philanthropy, an amazing tenant, a 10% return, and they got to have dignity and equity upside. I was like, “This is what I want to do.” I was just finishing a PhD in Force Economics and luckily, I was in a peer fellowship and that person’s Sonya Newhouse in Wisconsin, she said, “I’ve been watching you with this real estate. You need to switch your career.” I just lost my mom and my dad then. They’re 56 and 58 years of age and I was tired and I listened to her.
The next chapter of that journey was I did transactions and the Nature Conservancy, and I joined the Eco Products Fund, the first $100 million private equity fund in carbon, water, wetlands and biodiversity. This chapter started when I became a professor at University of Colorado. I know we both share the love of the academy. I got there and I was like, “Why is it so hard to raise money? There’s no place to teach people about money that doesn’t turn around and want something from them. We need a bunch of academic centers that teach financial innovation to impact investing.”
Now I say I’m a restoration ecologist in the financial markets. I would say like I didn’t start out to solve fixing the problems. I started solving this knowingness that there was enough money, private money, public money in my community to solve our problems and our community was hurting. I just been on that quest.
I love how you just stated that you’ve started from a place of enough because it’s there, so it’s uncovering it. When you’re having been called the great disruptor of capital, what does that even mean and what are you trying to disrupt the most?
Redefining Scarcity & Abundance
We do a lot of investor trainings to this date. We had a Vail workshop. We did a workshop in Northern Colorado. It doesn’t matter if we’re doing investor training in Alaska or North Boston or Jackson Hole or the Central Valley in Yosemite. I think the first piece there is that there is enough. What we do now is, this was Northern Colorado and Fort Collins, they picked the topic area and they picked housing. That’s the most common topic that people pick right this minute. I say, “How much money would it cost to house everybody?” That’s when you take the number of units times the amount of money, and it’s a really big number. I’m like, “The banks don’t give us 80% of that really big number, so we just need 20% the down payment. What’s that really big number?”
It was $740 million. There’s wealth screening tools and like donor search and wealth engine and I can look your name up and my name up and we can buy the records of those wealth screening tools. I look up how many people have $1 million in Northern Colorado and how many people have $5 million. This isn’t the government wealth or the philanthropic wealth or the corporate wealth. This is just wealth like us. I get the number of people of $1 million in assets and $5 million in assets and I put it into my AI and I say, “Calculate the private wealth in that community,” and it turns out to be $180 billion.
I say, “How much is it to house everybody?” “$740 million.” “How much private wealth do you have?” “$180 billion.” “Can somebody divide those two numbers for me?” “Yeah.” We would have to mobilize less than 1% of the wealth, 0.4% of the wealth in Northern Colorado to house everybody. To your point, Kate, like you said, enough, but we all structurally live in scarcity. We started the conversation with how many people have too much budget in their personal lives and their professional lives, who’s like, “I just had too much money to spend this year.” Said no one ever.
The concept that we’re flooded with resources, we have more resources than we possibly need to solve our problems is there, and so then the interesting part of it is, I had a call with this amazing community foundation leader and she had said through our conversations, she hadn’t realized what she was doing when she was in a trust banking office.
I said, “I think the issue is that there’s a lot of really good-hearted, big-hearted people who want to make the world a better place, but we do our job, what we’re designed to do with what the system has been designed to do.” I think the beautiful part about that is if you understand where the capital is stuck, why that capital isn’t flowing into a community. I joke sometimes and say, “I am a journey woman plumber.” I could say I’m a restoration ecologist in the financial markets, but it’s really understanding where it stuck, what the incentives are to unstick it and then redesigning the system so capital can flow.
Along those lines, you were just talking about families and such. I’m sure dealing with quite a few foundations and family foundations, and I know, as we were just discussing, helping them move capital forward, what’s one surprising insight that changes people mind about what their money can do? That math exercise is fabulous, but I’m sure before even going through that math exercise, it’s because the purpose of that is to say, “This is so within our reach.”
We’re all humans and we’re doing it a certain way right now. Now I’m asking you to expand your mind. Expand your mind and then imagine that there’s enough. I’m asking you to go to your community leaders and go, “What do you need,” and then having you reverse engineer the capital. That intellectually sounds fine, but that’s not what makes it click for people. The click for people happens when I have you tell me about your favorite organization that you love and you go and tell me all about it.
I was like, “What if there was a way to unlock more resources for the organization you already support and love?” We could reduce their expenses, we could increase their revenue. When you make it personal, when your love that you have for the entity is greater than your fear of learning, a new way of doing it, that’s when magic will happen.
Question, impact investing, because that’s literally what this is. Let me step back and allow you, how would you define impact investing, and going along with the same thing, what are some myths that you wish people realize fake news?
I once got an opportunity to support a family in Memphis and they said, “Is there somebody in Memphis that can teach my family how to invest in Memphis, the way you teach families how to invest in Denver?” I said, “I’m going to be in Memphis on Tuesday.” They said, “Our family foundation meeting’s on Tuesday.” This is the Kemmons Wilson Family Foundation. It’s very diverse. Education diverse, politically diverse. You’re dealing with a big bullseye, for lack of a better word.
What’s the message that you can do? I was like going down to Memphis and their dad and grandfather was a son of a single mom. During the Great Depression, he hustled and he was selling popcorn out in front of a movie theater to make money. He once had a trip from Memphis to DC and realized there needed to be a hotel. He didn’t come from means in the same way that other friends did. He found a money partner.
Impact Investing As “Doing Positive Things”
They had a picture of the two of them. I said, “Who’s this?” They’re like, “That’s my dad granddad’s really good friend.” I said, “Did they have a contract in their first transaction? Do you know what we call that? We call that relationship investing.” They did deals for generations together. It was a billboard and it was a picture of Kemmons Wilson pointing up to his own billboard that said, “Keep doing positive things in Memphis to keep it growing. Kemmons Wilson.” I said, “Impact investing has a lot of jargon and words and you’re going to get a bunch of different definitions, but its heart and core is doing positive things in your community, in relationship with each other. That’s what it is.
Impact investing comes with jargon and varying definitions, but at its core, it’s about doing positive things in your community together. Share on XEvery dollar that exchanges hands has a positive impact and a negative impact, whether you’re at the grocery store, in your investment portfolio, whatever that is. It’s about understanding the impacts, the positive ones and the negative ones, and really trying to push your dollars into having more and more positive ones. I think we can complicate it a little bit when, in fact, it can be pretty simple.
Talk about human. That’s probably the most human thing.
We make it more complicated. The first question, that piece of it was just really focusing on the heart and the people from that perspective. You asked me a second question, which was about impact investing. You said, how would I define it? What was the second one?
What are some of the myths?
Myth Of Market Rate Returns & Full Spectrum Capital
Here’s my favorite one. This is advanced 110. I also want to acknowledge that it might not make sense if you’re hearing what I’m about to say for the first time. I just got back from Oxford, England, and I was at employee ownership conference. There are two myths. One myth is that if I invest my public resources, my stock portfolio, my investment, my retirement and impact, am I going to get the same if not better returns? There’s a myth that you won’t. That’s interesting. The data has shown for the last several decades that you can get the same if not better return. That’s interesting. Plus one on that piece of it. The fact is, some of the biggest problems of our humankind require what we call full spectrum capital. It requires a different type of capital.
When you start from the place of what does the community need to heal their community, what does that nonprofit need, what does that startup need, what does that housing project need, it shifts the whole dynamic. Almost everything in our society starts with what does the investor want? We shift it and we say, “What does the community need?”
At the beginning of this session, I said, “I attended lots of the great first day sessions here, and there were several funds that kept talking about market rate returns.” I got to do the same session two days in a row. I said, “I’ll bet everybody a pint in this room that wants to take me on that I can give an above market rate return for the asset owner in the capital steward while providing below market rate concessionary returns to the community.”
Everyone’s like, “No.”
I said, “Before you like take my bet on, know that when I teach corporations, I’m known as Dr. Stuff ESG and magic money. There’s the magic trick here.” That’s what we talked about of why the capital is serving the system versus serving the community. It’s been designed to do it that way. I don’t know who created asset classes, but I have a beautiful piece of a presentation we give. I say, “Two hundred years ago, all the water in the Colorado River flowed in the Colorado River and all the money flowed on Main Street.”
“In the name of efficiency, we created canals both in the Colorado River and on the main street capital. The main street capital canals are called asset classes. The canals in the Colorado River were for irrigation and drinking water. We did that in the name of efficiency. We’re like, “We need to be more efficient with our capital flowing water and our physical capital.” What happens when you take too much water out of a stream, you’ll kill the stream goes. It goes dry. How do people save streams? They shut off the canals.
What we’re talking about right now is that what if I, a human, instead of breaking my capital into what I would donate over here, cosign another place, put my debt even in a third place, and my equity in a fourth place, what if I put my dollars in one place? You would take $1, I would donate $1, I would get a 4% return on my bond or CD and I’d get my 8% return on in my retirement?” If I gave those $3 to a nonprofit, the blended rate of that would be negative 29% interest rate. That’s a lot of capital to do a lot of the things our communities need. When you’re willing to do blended finance internally in a beautiful way, magic can happen.
How can women especially start reclaim some of the power in these capital flows?
Empowering Women In Capital Flows
We haven’t even written this down, but we’ve talked about it in a little bit. The first thing I would do is I would do a money over dinner conversation. There’s a movement called Death Over Dinner, and you get family and friends together and you have a really intimate dinner about dying and what it means and what your fears are and all of those things. We reached out to them and said, “Could we do a money over dinner?”
The first thing to do is get some friends. Get a couple girlfriends together and say, “Ket’s do a money over dinner.” To your point, Kate, have the conversation of what is enough? What will make me feel safe? When do I have enough? Can I use the money that is my anchor to have enough to do good in the world or is it only after I have enough? Start having those conversations? What don’t you know? Do you have an investment advisor? Are they a fiduciary? Where’s your money sleeping at night?
Start in those conversations on dinner. We have friends and colleagues that haven’t invest for better chapters. I think of it as a preschool. Preschool is the money over dinner, and then kindergarten is invest for better. The next thing after that is we’ve run getting ready to run our fourth one with the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, do an impact investing giving circle.
Get a group of people together. We have curriculum for seven classes. Donate the money and together, learn how to invest by doing in a safe, fun way. $2,500 donation in this case, we’re getting $80,000 back and we get to learn about trust-based investing equity. Are you designing it for what’s right for you? Are you designing it? What’s right for the community from that perspective? Evaluate your investment advisor.
Sorry for all you investment advisors, but it’s really true. Actually, I think it would be good for the investment advisor. It keeps them on their toes as well.
The funny part is, so many times, we’ll be talking about to somebody like going back to employee ownership and the investment advisor is like, “Apus and Heritage, this amazing employee ownership investment fund out there, could your clients be interested in investing that investment fund?” The investment advisor says, “My client isn’t demanding that. There’s no demand for my clients for that.”
My question back to the investment advisor is, “Aren’t you the educator for investing? Aren’t you the one that should be teaching them about if they care about workers and employee ownership, that you would be the one teaching them about this?” There’s this chicken in the egg issue that happens where you have all these amazing emerging managers and fund managers and intermediaries doing these life changing work, but they’re in a gatekeeper situation with an investment advisor.
One of my biggest things is why is it that things like ESG and impact investing hasn’t taken off to the degree? It’s getting better now than it was, but why? Literally, I had a lot of people tell me it’s because people have been doing what they’ve been doing for a long time and they don’t want to change it. The advisors don’t want to necessarily learn new tricks, as it were. They just want to just ease out and do their thing. I don’t think that’s true to the same degree that it perhaps once was. I think younger generations are probably clamoring a lot harder for it and not taking it.
It’s overwhelming, though. If you’re an individual in this space, it’s a new language, new jargon, new organizations and it’s broken in so many places. It’s difficult to figure out, to use your analogy of the lane you’re going to walk in and the role you’re going to have on the stage like, “What is my role to do this?” We’re actually getting ready to launch. For the last few years, I’ve been trying to explain this full spectrum math and complicated and explain why the system is broken. I’ve come to the conclusion that most people don’t want to really understand why it’s broken. They just want it fixed and they want the easy button. We’re getting ready to start the first independent trust company, 100% focused on impact investing called Trustworthy Impact. It’s going to be a state-chartered bank.
We’re not going to manage any money unlike institutional trusts. We’re going to only custodian the money. That way, if you know the $100 trillion wealth transfer that’s coming, if a woman or youth that hears about like, “There’s going to be a trust,” and that wealth transfer is happening, it’s not going to women and girls, the wealth transfer’s going to their or women and youth, it’s not going to them themselves is going to their trust.
What if there was an easy button trust company where, “I care about climate, I care about the South. I care about people of color. Can you just make that happen? Can you be the guardian of the resources that is going to hold all the people in the supply chain of my resources accountable? There are some people who want that easy button and others want to learn and help fix and they want to become teachers. That’s great. We need to acknowledge that we won’t get another solution until we design another solution.
What’s the hardest part of the work that you’re doing? You bridge so many specific sectors, any one of them alone could be mind numbing and, to your point, overwhelming. What’s the hardest part of that and then what’s the most thrilling part? You’ve seen fraction and shifts post-COVID.
Community Foundations & Existential Risk
I deeply care about civil society. One of the tools or pieces of infrastructure and civil society that I think is really important for us to support is community foundations. If you end up making it, like you have a business and you sell your business and for $40 million and it’s in November, your accountant might say, “You need to give away $7 million before the end of the calendar year for taxes.” You’re exhausted. You’ve just sold your business. If they’re a really great accountant, they’ll say, “You could go to these national donor-advised fund providers, or you could open it up in the Summit County Community Foundation where you live in Breckenridge.”
From that perspective, you might pay more fees just like a community bank or credit union, but you also have community and be connected in that space of it. To me, this is the place where people of good faith of, on both sides of the aisle come together to make their community better. I think of it as the root system of civil society. A few years ago, we started really ramping up our commitment to educate community foundations because it’s not just the money they have in their foundation, it’s all the mini foundations people have when you set up your accountants, like, “You could set up a mini foundation under this community foundation and pay a fee until you’ll have a donor-advised fund.”
The Gilson Family Foundation, a private foundation we’ve worked with a lot in Colorado, came to us a few years ago and said, “Can you bring all that you’re doing in Colorado to Massachusetts?” I said, “Are you willing to give grants to Community Foundation so that they can develop their strategic plans for impact investing?”
They said yes. The Bar Foundation gave a grant to Essex County Community Foundation, Metro West Community Foundation, which we’re doing right now. As part of that work, we published a peer reviewed report of nine community foundations, and then we also surveyed and did a second report for women’s foundations and funds. Some of the work that the community foundations are doing around the country is just miraculous.
Part of it is understanding the different types of risk. You’re now seeing Van Wert County in Ohio, Boreal Waters Community Foundation based in Duluth, Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska Conservation Foundation in Anchorage. They’re having the question of that’s great that my endowment is going to be around in perpetuity, but is my community going to be around in perpetuity? Am I facing existential risk? Should that be in my investment policy statement?
What good is having $20 million, $100 million, $200 million in the bank if we’re not using it to save our community? Even without my pushing, you’re seeing these foundations go, “We should add existential risk into our investment policy statement of losing our community.” An example of what Van Wert County Community Foundation did is they acknowledged that their endowment was doing great, but their community was severely struggling. If they didn’t do something, their town was going to die.
What good is having $20 million, $100 million, or even $200 million in the bank if we’re not using it to save our community? Share on XThey took money out of their endowment and bought 55 buildings on Main Street to redevelop their main street buildings. That inspires me greatly to see these community leaders. In our webinar we had in 2024, we had 232 of the 900 community foundations on that webinar. You’re seeing everyone takes a different journey. All journeys are the right path. You’re seeing a commitment for these civil society organizations to deeply activate themselves and their donors and their nonprofit leaders and housing leaders and capital stewards and their community to do amazing work.
That’s heartening to hear. I’ve been saying everything’s going to be so hyperlocal, the importance of it and everyone really understanding what being a citizen is and being a truly contributive community member, and we really are all in it. You are impacted. Everyone is personally impacted. It’s just a matter of how quickly it hit you.
The Importance Of Civic Engagement & Understanding The Government’s Role For The Health Of Democracy
There’s a really interesting talk that in 2012 by Justice Souter, and he said, “I’m not afraid of a coup, I’m not afraid of being invaded, but I’m afraid that the average American does not understand the role of our government, the role that they play in our government, and because of that, we are susceptible for when things go bad for somebody to come along and go, ‘I alone can fix your problems.’” to me, it’s like we have a really cool organization in, in Denver called The Warm Cookies of the Revolution, which is a civic health club.
The idea is that you come to learn how to do things together and how things work across differences and from that perspective. A lot of us have committed our whole life to doing good things, but that’s different than my contribution to democracy and civil society. I’ve personally been living on my credit card with that, and I didn’t have that muscle really developed. I have a responsibility. It’s a democracy, if you can keep it, famous words of Ben Franklin, and it’s all of our responsibility whatever side of the aisle we are to develop that civic muscle and do that hard work.
Steph, now let’s talk about your book. Do you want to peek a little bit there, share a little bit about it?
Sure. A few years ago, I went through a really bad breakup and a mass shooting and had some really great folks who just encouraged me to have a grief process. They said, “How’s your grief work and your grief process?” I said, “It’s a little rusty since I lost my parents.” I decided to really focus on that grief. Out of it came multiple proposals and I was like, “I’m going to spend the rest of my days.” My parents passed at 56 and 58. I said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my days building investor communities for the communities I love.” I love music, I love region Ag, I love democracy. I love LGBTQ.
I started thinking about that and out popped a bunch of book proposals. I put it on the shelf for a couple years and ended up making some investments that changed the course of my life so I can retire. It puts a very different lens over how you spend your time. When you’re like, “How much money do I have to make every year? How do I want to spend this precious life on the days you have left?”
I met the love of my life. We spend a lot of our time in the mountains. We have a cute little rescue dog. I love music. I write songs and deeply, deeply love music. I remember thinking, “It’s not enough to give a community the education tools, the infrastructure and the playbook on how to do this. You also have to give them the money to do it, and then you have to create a movement. I thought it was enough to create the playbook.” When I say that, I mentioned Duluth earlier, that’s led by Sean Fluky, who is a former district judge.
He blew up my phone a couple years ago when we did this community foundation report. He’s like, “You figured this out, haven’t you?” I was like, “Yes, we have.” He’s like, “Why isn’t everybody doing it?” I’m like, “It takes courage.” He’s like, “Stephanie, I’ve had to put single moms in jail. If you can solve my housing crisis and my wealth and achievement gap, I will have the courage to do this.” They just allocated 25% of their mission to that.
Using Movement Builders To Rally Around Impact Investing
To me, it’s about a movement. In 2012, we received a small grant to do a little video on how foundations can do investing from the Packard Foundation. We did it on Second Harvest Food Bank. It’s a food bank in California. The book came about because Taylor Swift was doing an Eras tour through the United States, and she’s donated to food banks.
One of them was Second Harvest Food Bank. I did a tweet and I said, “Imagine if Swifties understood impact investing.” The other creatives are the chefs, then we have the athletes and we have the journalists. I’m like, “They know how to build movements. All of them individually struggle with their own investing.” They struggle as a group of musicians and a group of creatives and artists. The infrastructure struggles, the fans struggle. I was like, “What would this happen?”
I was late to the party. I was not an active Taylor Swift listener at that point, but my partner asked me what I wanted to do for my 50th birthday. I said, “I really want to go understand these Swifties.” In 2024, we were speaking at the same employee ownership conference in Oxford and they had the Black Lives Matter moment where a man stabbed ten little girls at a dance recital.
Our darkness keeps us from understanding our power, our agency, and our fear. I would tell my younger self: it’s all going to be okay. Your only regret will be not trying harder, not facing fear more directly. Share on XThe theme that month was Taylor Swift and four of were killed. Part of me was thinking, “We’re here for employee ownership as dignity and work. Did that person not have enough resources? If they’d been the US, they would’ve had a semi-automatic and firearm and way more girls would’ve passed.” We went to the concert in Vienna, which another angry man did a bomb scare. I basically convinced my partner, as we hit the streets in Vienna with 80,000 sad Swifties, I said, “Let’s pretend that there’s a Swiftie Venmo and a Swiftie crowdfunding site.”
We asked every Swiftie we met. We’re like, “How much money are you out because this person did a bomb scare? How much money would you give another Swiftie? How much money would you receive from another Swiftie? How much money would you lend another Swiftie? How much would you borrow from another Swiftie? By the way, would you like to refinance your personal debt, increase your wages, and buy a home?” We only had a sample size of ten, but I can tell you, the love of that group is way stronger than the fear of learning something else.
Had there been a magical Swiftie financial system, they would’ve totally taken care of each other and had money left over to take care of the rest of us. As a first-time author, you don’t want to get ahead of your skis, but a series of books, The Swiftie Guide to Save the World, The Chef’s Guide to Save the World, The Athlete’s Guide to Save the World, and The Journalist Guide to Save the World. The first book is going to be The Swiftie Guide to Save the World.
What beautiful timing based on recent changes of life. It’s interesting. I’ve got a person, I will be interviewing her, Tanisha Patterson Brown. She’s a very accomplished lawyer and does a lot with sports, with athletes. She is also the president of the Off the Field NFL Wives Association. She would be a very important person for you to speak to.
Absolutely. What people don’t realize is none of us know how to do investing well because we’re not taught. The number of cases of athletes or musicians that I’ve taken advantage of because they don’t have a fiduciary agent and a fiduciary investment advisor, to me, I’m like, “We can apply it to help out the creatives and then they can help us build a movement around it.” I love that very kind offer.
I will. She’s a terrific person. There’s so much depth and breadth. She’s amazing. In closing, with all of that life that’s in all fabulous you, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger self?
I met somebody on the journey. He has passed. His name was Tom Clark and he was the head of economic development for the state of Colorado. I was nervous that I was going to go bankrupt for my nonprofit experiment years ago. We’re walking back to his office and his first thing he says out of his mouth is, “Do you write songs?”
I just started writing songs because I’d taken a test that told me I had an aptitude for music and had no aptitude to become a scientist. It was like somebody had to tell me that I loved music. I said, “I love partner dancing.” He’s like, “Did you know my wife and I are the amateur ballroom dancing champions?” Speaking’s like drama. It’s like getting on stage. I said, “I was the scholar athlete, I don’t even know where the tryouts were for drama choir or etc.”
We spent the first 45 minutes just talking about discovering dance and music in your 40s. At the last few minutes, I was like, “Tom, I think I really made a mistake. I might go personally bankrupt over a nonprofit.” He looks at me and he is like, “Everyone should go bankrupt once.” He ended up becoming one of the top economic development leaders. Our darkness keeps us from understanding our power and our agency, our fear. I would’ve told my younger self, like, “It’s all going to be okay and your only regret will not be trying harder, not be taking more fear. Let people say what they’re going to say about you if they don’t understand just yet.”
I think I would’ve given myself permission earlier to go for it. I also, honestly, the other thing I would’ve done was, which I finally did midlife, is I applied that affordable housing transaction to myself. I’m doing it to my team right now. My expenses aren’t that much. I have a small little real estate portfolio that subsidizes my nonprofit habit. I wish I would’ve done that a little sooner because I could have taken better care of my health along the way. I’m also a person who believes in, if you like where you’re at, then all the pieces helped make you who you are. I would say take more risk. It’s going to be okay, fall on your face, break a bone or two. Just try. Go for it.
You know what it’s like when you don’t. If you’re not happy, you have the ability to do exactly that, to try something differently. Either way, you get information and you’ll get a little farther on, to your point, all of those experiences, what get you on that journey and make that journey so rich. It scarred, bruised and wisened me, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
That’s hard to say in some moments, but it’s also a beautiful thing to be able to say.
You will be able to say it eventually. Sometimes, the only way through it is just slogging through it.
It is like Rumi’s quote, “The wound is where the light enters,” and Rilke of, “In the difficult are the hands that work on you.” If you can allow that darkness, that fear to become something you love and a beautiful part of yourself and understand where the lessons are and have it be the birthplace of something beautiful and new, that’s everything.
On that note, philosopher, we’re going to add that to your list of accomplishments. Seriously, Dr. Stephanie Gripne, thank you so much. What a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you making time and also fantastic suggestions. Readers, be on the lookout for that book, for sure. We’re going to be having links for people to reach out to you who want to learn more and start changing life the way as you suggest.
Let’s do it one person ahead of time.
Awesome. One little move, away we go. Thanks so much.
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I’ve got to say, Dr. Stephanie Gripne is probably one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and makes my head spin, but there’s a lot of brilliance and so many pearls in what she shared. For my KB Takeaways, here are the key that I see. One is our entire financial system has always been structured in scarcity. We’re always coming from a place of not enough when actually when we do the hard math, as Stephanie did right in front of us, it is possible.
Some of these big problems like housing, entire communities, are all within reach. We just have to come from a place where there’s actually enough, we just have to put it to work together. Second, somewhere along the lines, we got things mixed up. We started looking at what’s good for the investor versus what’s good for the community. Oftentimes, what’s good for the community is in the long term good for the investor as well. Start taking a look at that when you’re thinking about, “What should I be investing in next?”
Third, every dollar has negative and positive impact. Make sure you know which one’s ears is doing. There were two organizations that she talked about death over dinner whereby folks get together and they talk about their plans for when they pass and how they would like their funds distributed. Really important conversation. Dear friend Janine Firpo’s organization, Invest for Better. This is a group throughout the US who are putting together well funding circles, but it’s very good, very educational. With that, thank you so much for reading and let me know what you would like to read about next because I’ll do my best to find the smart voice behind it. Until next time.
Important Links
About Dr. Stephanie Gripne
As Founder and CEO of Impact Finance Center, Stephanie is the creative force behind the National Impact Investing Marketplace with a goal to catalyze $1 Trillion in investment capital into social ventures by replicating and scaling infrastructure that was piloted in Colorado.
By providing nonconflicted education, Impact Finance Center identifies, educates, and activates individuals and organizations who want to become impact investors and develops community infrastructures such as Impact Days (an impact investing marketplace), Impact Investing Institute, Who’s Who in Financial Innovation & Impact Investing (directory), Impact Investing Giving Circles (investor accelerators), and Impact Investor Collectives (investor clubs). The three-year pilot CO Impact Days has resulted in over 70 new impact investors, sourced over 550 social ventures, and catalyzed over 260 direct impact investments totaling $260M to date.
Stephanie’s vision is driven by over 20 years of combined experience as an applied academic, investor, and practitioner at University of Colorado Real Estate Foundation and Center, the $100 million Eco Products Fund, The Nature Conservancy, USDA Forest Service, DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Journal of Wildlife Management, and several universities.
She received her Ph.D. from the Boone and Crockett Wildlife Conservation Program at the University of Montana, and has a B.S. in Biology & Wildlife Management from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point and a M.S. in Ecology from Utah State University.
Stephanie serves in a variety of other roles: State of Colorado Employee Ownership Commission; Visiting Scholar at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School in New York City; Virginia Tech Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability Associate; Aspen Institute Environment Forum Scholar; Boone & Crockett Fellow; Denver Foundation Impact Investing Committee Member; Environmental Leadership Senior Fellow; Property and Environment Research Center Fellow; Ford Foundation Community Forestry Fellow; Boone and Crockett Professional Member; LegacyWorks Group Board Member; International Women’s Forum – Women’s Forum of Colorado Member and Trustee Emeritus; Realize Impact Investment Committee Member; Integrated Capital Institute Advisor; Full Spectrum Capital Partners Principal; and Net Impact’s Innovator in Residence.