PF Whiteboard

Ten minutes ago, a man just walked in to our office. He was wearing a slightly weathered Panama hat and kind of looked like he’d stepped right off a sailing boat in the Caribbean. He pulled out a bright blue padded envelope. ‘This is for Dave Peery’.

Dave was sitting opposite me at the time, so the guy swiftly handed Dave the envelope and hotfooted it out the door. The blue envelope had snowflakes on it and was marked with a black sharpie: ‘Private and Confidential’. Given the unusual drop-off and the intriguing presentation we were both pretty anxious to see what was inside. It was a printed slide deck pitch for a youth organisation seeking funding. We can only assume the anonymous delivery man was the founder of the org.

I’m not suggesting this is how everyone get in touch with us, but this definitely wins the award for most mysterious first impression. And we will, of course, get back to them.

I realised today that we never blogged about our impact investing -or social investing. A new tab appeared on our website a few months ago, which we still need to populate with some descriptive text, and that was about all we did to announce the beginning of our impact investing. There was a little bit more to it than that, but still not any intense planning or strategising. We’re not aiming to build a big portfolio, and if anything our impact investments may just merge with our other portfolios.

Here’s a little more on our decision to start impact investing, from a recent blog post with Social Velocity:

“Nell: The Peery Foundation is one of few foundations that do mission-related investments. How did you decide to move into that realm and what do you think holds other foundation back from MRIs?

We’re still at an early stage in developing our capacity to provide debt and other funding outside of philanthropy. In our philanthropic funding we’re not paper heavy and our agreements are very trust-based. It was definitely daunting to explore this new realm of traditional investment due diligence and contractual agreements. So far we’ve found the kind of support we need to help us make the leap fairly painlessly through the Toniic Network, and from sources such as Silicon Valley Community Foundation and University Impact Fund, and still feel like we’re able to retain our low-paper, trust based partnership approach to the extent that makes sense.”

Here is the full interview on the Social Velocity website, which covers a few other topics too, like social media and transparency.