Alumni Build a Legacy in Impact Investing

Last week, Nan­cy Pfund ’82 and Adri­an­na Alter­man ’19 were hon­ored by Impact Cap­i­tal Man­agers, a lead­ing pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion for impact investors. The awards illus­trate the cen­tral role that Yale SOM grad­u­ates have played in the grow­ing field.

Nan­cy Pfund ’82 didn’t real­ize she would be help­ing to pio­neer a new way of invest­ing when, work­ing at the invest­ment bank Ham­brecht & Quist in the ear­ly 1990s, she launched a fund that pro­vid­ed finan­cial back­ing to fresh juice mak­er Odwal­la. She was just try­ing to make a dif­fer­ence in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, where she had been liv­ing since she grad­u­at­ed from Yale SOM.

And she did make a dif­fer­ence: With that par­tic­u­lar invest­ment, which brought much-need­ed jobs to California’s Cen­tral Val­ley, but also by suc­cess­ful­ly test­ing the idea that invest­ments could have an impact beyond finan­cial returns. On Feb­ru­ary 1, Pfund was hon­ored for her com­mit­ment to that idea—now known as impact investing—by the pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion Impact Cap­i­tal Man­agers, a group Pfund helped start in 2018.

To read the full arti­cle, please vis­it: Yale School of Management