In partnership with Wendy Moomaw, founder and President of Conscious Capitalism of Central Maryland and The Conscious Collaboratory and Tracy Turner, Campus Director with 1776 @ Greencourt Innovation Center, Startup Grind, Columbia is excited to present a highly educational virtual fireside chat, webinar, and panel discussion with Catherine Griffin, Aaron Velky, and Wendee Wolfson to talk about using conscious impact as part of their selection and due diligence process. 

Catherine Griffin, founder and CEO of Impact.able Analytics and Managing Director of GoodCompany Ventures, a social entrepreneurship incubator/accelerator in Philadelphia. She is a powerful force in the social entrepreneurship ecosystem, building organizations, and companies that are addressing our biggest global problems. 

Wendee Wolfson is the founder of Brickworks Advisors and serves as a leadership coach and consultant to corporate executives and entrepreneurs;  Wendee is a lead investor for Next Wave Impact Fund, an early-stage fund that invests in women-led for-profit social enterprises, as well as building capacity in their limited partners, all women, and its predecessor pilot fund, Rising Tide. She helped Next Wave create the Founders of Color Showcase in May 2020, to highlight several companies across the country being led by women and men of color seeking early-stage financing, and to bring together potential investors to work collaboratively to bring capital to those entrepreneurs. 

Aaron Velky co-founder and CEO of Ortus Academy. The world they imagine is full of individuals and businesses that are Financially Intelligent - making financial decisions that support their values, goals, and communities because they understand their beliefs, emotions, habits, and mindset. Ortus Academy is a member of Conscious Capitalism of Central Maryland and graduates of the Conscious Venture Lab.  Aaron will be providing real-world examples of how they implement conscious capitalism in their business.

Impact.able Analytics' mission is to drive capital and innovative energy towards the greatest good. Their approach is to use a few simple assumptions about a company's business model and technology, then using data and AI, the Impact.able platform draws from leading data and research to build a powerful, forward-looking model of its impact metrics, outcomes, values, and multiples.  Impact.able Certification ensures a standard of consistency, clarity and caliber of impact measurement, analysis, and reporting.

Catherine, through GoodCompany Ventures, and Impact.able Analytics has helped portfolio companies increase their valuations by 8X within 2-3 years of graduation. They have gone on to raise more than $75MM in early-stage private capital from leading impact investors and VCs including Kleiner-Perkins, Kapur Capital, a16z, and thirty5Ventures. Most importantly, however, they've gone on to serve critically vulnerable populations, preserve limited resources, and demonstrate meaningful contributions within new, emerging markets.

Catherine says "If we're really going to address our biggest global problems, we're going to need our most powerful technologies delivered via business models with massive potential to scale. We need to drive innovative and financial capital towards solutions with the greatest potential for meaningful, material impact from the very beginning.

Of the hundreds of founders I've served, nearly all of them have great aspirations for impact. Their passion for their mission drives them at a fundamental level, yet they crave a deeper understanding of how exactly, and to what degree, their work materially affects our resources and vulnerable populations and contributes to the resolution of our greatest challenges. They crave data to validate it and speak to its potential over time."