Millennials and Impact Investing

There’s a wonderful story here, and two brand new concepts

When I read an article with this tagline, I felt a deep, warm and happy feeling within, and I realized it’s because I was feeling wonderfully ratified at one level, plus, a cause I feel strongly for was the positive recipient. The cause itself, most of you know about from reading about my Selco stories, but what’s with the ratification?

Firstly, what are these two new concepts?

Millennials: A term for people born between 1980 and 2000

Impact Investing: A term coined in 2007 ‘denoting the idea that private capital can be deployed to alleviate pressing social needs like access to electricity, clean water, affordable housing, preventive healthcare........ while returning a financial profit’

Now, what is the connect?

While impact investing, more familiarly called social entrepreneurship, is being seen as the largest way to bring about social change, it is still slow to catch on, as the world has gotten used to considering any effort towards social change as an act of philanthropy. And philanthropy is considered mostly the domain of the rich with a willingness to donate, which is hugely limiting. This is set to change.

Excerpt from the article by Vilas Dhar and Julia Fetherston

Impact investment continues to suffer from limited transaction flow and anemic dollar commitments. Most relevant to stunted growth, is cultural resistance — the inertial apathy of traditional financial players who are wary of novel, risky investment structures and skeptical about trading some amount of profitability for social return. 

Enter the Millennials who conceive of financial return differently, and more expansively, than their elders. 

For Millennials, pressing social problems are not just the preserve of philanthropists or governments. Millennials consistently cite social impact as one of the most important roles of business. Of all the generations alive today, millennials are the most willing to trade financial return for greater social impact, according to a study from Merrill Lynch’s Private Banking and Investment Group.

Where I personally feel ratified, is in my faith in this generation. While the world is busy being critical of them (the millennials) for their excesses, liberties, consumptions, focus on self, bold (im)morals……at a much deeper level this shows that they have their basic thinking in a ‘righter’ place. 

You see, we all have a limited amount of energy and time, and to optimize output…… actualize potential....... we need to be at peace and fulfilled internally. But we live with so much conditioning, lack, restrictions by default, that most of our energy is spent in resisting, fighting, suppressing, working around, fulfilling what we can of those. 

The Millennials, I think are essentially those who have been allowed a freer flow to be themselves, and that is what enables them to transcend limits and think beyond themselves. When the world points a finger and says ……selfish generation…..I think they’ve actually cracked the secret of first being nice to themselves, and that’s what enables them to think beyond themselves. Selfish? Really??

If they can think social impact and then, also be willing to trade financial return for social impact, it in itself speaks loudest. Kindness and Compassion are to me among the highest on the scale of evolution. And that’s where the nice feeling :)