Leveraging Your Capital to Drive Impact
An increasing number of our clients have multifaceted and interwoven goals for the legacies they want to build today and leave behind for their families, workplaces, and communities. This evolving focus area reflects the growing complexity of today’s global challenges and the expanding toolset individuals can use to make an impact. Our findings indicate gaps in financing net zero, clean energy, and infrastructure goals, as well as decades-long runways for global economies to address challenges, close gaps, and unlock opportunities to advance climate transition and drive inclusive growth.1
Approaching your legacy holistically by leveraging various capital sources can help your impact goals maintain momentum in the short- and long-term. Our definition of “capital” encompasses five distinct, yet complementary levers that can drive meaningful change: consumer capital, social capital, business capital, philanthropic capital, and investment capital.
Many clients default solely to philanthropic capital to create an impact and fail to realize the full potential of all the tools at their disposal. By leveraging multiple types of capital at once, you can deploy more resources to achieve desired positive outcomes. For example, US charities received almost $500 billion of donations in 2022, yet total US consumer spending was ~3,100% higher at approximately $16 trillion dollars, a considerably larger pool of capital that can also influence impact goals.2, 3
To help you maximize your impact, we encourage you to explore each type of capital below. Each page will help you identify the unique skills and capabilities at your disposal, how and when to leverage various types of capital, and provide you with real examples of how each type of capital helped other individuals reach their impact goals.
We believe addressing environmental and social challenges requires a holistic approach, and we encourage you to leverage capital opportunistically throughout your lifetime to achieve your desired impact goals. Read the complete Leveraging Your Capital to Drive Impact paper to learn more.
Last Revised: August 2024
1 Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. GS SUSTAIN: Green Capex U.S. Inflation Reduction Act: Latest views on capital mobility, timing, U.S. budget-related risks 2023, May 2023.
2 Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy, June 2023.
3 The World Bank Group, World Households and NPISH Final consumption expenditure (current USD), 2021.
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