Beyond Capital
We believe every resource available to the Foundation has the potential to contribute to positive change. Our ambition is to mobilize the resources we steward as effectively as possible to help create lasting prosperity and sustainable societies in which communities can live healthy and active lives.
We look beyond traditional distinctions between grantmaking and investment. Through our Total Impact approach, we bring together capital, partnerships, expertise and influence to advance entrepreneurial solutions that generate lasting social and environmental impact.
This approach is rooted in a long-standing conviction that capital can do good while doing well – and that responsible entrepreneurship can turn resources, ideas and opportunity into sustainable impact at scale.
To act responsibly means to think long-term. Entrepreneurs should ask themselves: what impact will my actions have on future generations?
— Urs Wietlisbach
Our ‘Total Impact’ approach
We align our investments, partnerships and actions around a common purpose. This is our Total Impact approach.
Our endowment is more than the financial engine that enables our grantmaking. It is an instrument of impact in its own right. Our experience demonstrates that measurable social and environmental impact and market-rate financial returns can go hand-in-hand.
But our resources extend beyond capital. We also draw our partnerships, networks, expertise and influence to support the change we seek.
By aligning all these resources around a common purpose, we aim to create an integrated approach in which each can reinforce the others. This allows us to draw on different forms of support according to what is needed – from grants that help where market economics do not work, to catalytic capital and impact investment that can support growth and sustainability through entrepreneurship.
The same thinking shapes how we work with partners. Depending on what will add most value, our contribution may include expertise, networks, strategic advice and coaching, communications or connections to others who can help.
Total Impact is not a fixed formula. It is our way of ensuring that all the resources available to us contribute as effectively and consistently as possible to the future we seek.
Doing good. While doing well.
Our journey
How a long-standing conviction shapes the way we put all our resources to work for impact.
Your journey
Every organization starts from a different place. Explore how foundations and others can take practical steps towards aligning more of what they have with the impact they seek.
If it remains a story about pioneers, we will have failed. The more important question is how this becomes normal practice for endowed foundations, family offices, pension funds and other long-term asset owners.
— Stefan Germann