Purpose Future Fellows: Emerging Fund Manager Cohort
We are so excited to announce the launch of our Purpose Futures Fellowship for emerging fund managers. The program brings together 11 incredible fellowship projects and 25 fellows working on capital vehicles for shared ownership of business, real estate, and equitable investments. The fellowship will last up to a year, and will be focused on practically supporting these initiatives in designing and implementing funds and financing solutions that support shared ownership. You can find a full list of fellows and their projects here.
Although they vary in focus, size, and region, these funds share a common goal: the redistribution of wealth and power through capital. They are all leveraging new ownership, governance, and finance models to drive systems change and create intergenerational impact, with the goals of bridging the racial wealth gap, preventing displacement and extraction, and fostering ecologically compatible economies.
Core to our mission at Purpose is to be in service of innovative, high impact projects that need support in executing on their ownership strategies, which is why we are so excited to be supporting this incredible cohort of visionaries. Beyond the program itself, we believe these projects will help mobilize capital at scale for shared ownership, helping to move the field at large. We look forward to updating you on the progress of the program and the fellows’ projects over the course of the next year through our webinars, small gatherings, and publications. (If you’re interested in staying in touch, please sign up for our newsletter here.)
Responsive to market demand
Each Purpose Futures Fellowship is designed in response to market demand. Over the course of the first half of 2021, we were contacted by more than a dozen fund managers and investors interested in integrating shared ownership into the thesis and structure of their next fund or investment. Many who reached out to us had proven track records as investors, but were struggling to put their shared ownership fund concepts into practice, running up against both structural limitations and issues in finding capital partners. Executing on new models remains hard, which is why our programming and services focus on practical support and technical assistance.
Co-designed programming
The program was co-designed with fellows and will specifically focus on practical support, technical assistance, and legal innovation. Combining our team’s unique knowledge of shared ownership models with the deep domain expertise of our partners like Social Capital Partners and the Housing Lab, we intend to help take our fellows from concept to legal implementation and successful fundraising.
Selecting for diversity
When we opened applications in the spring, we were overwhelmed by the quality and diversity of the applicants and their projects. What had started as a simple prompt for capital vehicles (~$10-100m) focused on shared ownership for stable assets was immediately met with creativity and complexity. We received proposals from every corner of the country, with focuses ranging from energy sovereignty to affordable housing, direct community investments, domestic manufacturing, employee-ownership, and rematriation. Excited, we felt a great responsibility in selecting fellows and crafting a diverse yet strategic cohort. We approached the selection process with a high level set of decision making criteria, seeking to select projects that:
Demonstrated stakeholder inclusion and governance participation.
Move capital into shared ownership investments.
Created scalable solutions for inclusive, equitable models.
Incorporated racial equity and wealth redistribution.
Provided opportunities for legal innovation.
Create opportunities for sharing and learning, without fostering internal competition.
As we reviewed the applications, we were struck by the inherent complexity of the first three objectives. In selecting fellows, we wanted the complexities of these questions and diversity of potential solutions to be reflected in the composition. To ensure this, we selected fellows across an additional three spectrums:
Diversity of approaches to stakeholder inclusion & governance - Stakeholder inclusion in economic benefit can take many forms from ‘market rate’ direct investments to catalytic loans, rent to own schemes, and much more. The same can be said for stakeholder governance, the process and designs of which vary broadly based on the project, community it serves, and intended impact. We sought to select projects for the cohort that demonstrate the plurality of approaches to stakeholder inclusion and their impact.
Scale: Replicable models <> place-based approaches - The applications highlighted the tension between creating replicable models for shared ownership and more community-centric, place-based projects. In the former, projects seek to create out of the box solutions to be implemented in communities across the country. In the latter, projects emerge from their unique community context. We intentionally selected projects that represent both approaches. Our goal is to demonstrate both the potential of scalable, replicable models and the innovation and creativity of place-based projects. We also want to create opportunities for initiatives across this spectrum to cross-pollinate.
What kind of money is moving: Commercial capital <> catalytic capital- With the fellowship and our other programs we seek to move more investment capital into shared ownership models. We measure the success of this goal both in terms of the number of dollars mobilized as well as the diversity of funds and types of capital (e.g., philanthropy, private equity, pension funds, etc.) participating in investments. This is why we intentionally selected fellows working across the market with the goals of creating viable examples for investors of asset types and of illustrating the impact capital has on project outcomes.
Join the journey
If you’re interested in learning more about the fellowship or would like to support the program, please reach out to us, and be sure to sign up for our newsletter to get updates. We look forward to sharing the progress of the program and our fellows with you over the coming months.
