Where are the emerging career opportunities in triple bottom line finance?
Executive Director Ed Church offered some of the answers on a panel with RSF Social Finance President Don Shaffer and New Resource Bank VP Bill Peterson, January 23, 2011 at the David Brower Center. They spoke at the Progressive Opportunities Career Fair, organized by the East Bay Express newspaper. The panel spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at an event attended by hundreds of people.
Both RSF and New Resource provide loans to businesses whose products and services help to achieve environmental and social, as well as financial returns. Ed spoke of the newly emerging field of “impact investing,” which can generate these triple bottom line results. Impact investing goes beyond the relatively well known approach called socially responsible investing. SRI uses investment screens to avoid companies that produce things the investor regards as harmful, but impact investing seeks to invest in companies whose products or services make the world a better place. All three speakers asserted that, as impact investing increases in popularity, career opportunities will follow.
The Progressive Opportunities Career Fair was sponsored by the Bay Area Green Business Program – Alameda County, the City of Berkeley, the City of Oakland, the Green Chamber of Commerce, and the Sustainable Business Alliance.