In this paper you will find an explanation of the barriers to mission investing, also known as Program Related Investment and Mission Related Investment, and a concluding hypothesis about what it will take to help remove the barriers.

Educating foundation leadership, building foundation staff expertise, improving data quality and lowering the cost of making a mission investment are all issues to understand and address. If our hypothesis is correct, the time is now to build the necessary data, education and support capabilities to help private foundations better access private sector investment tools to advance their mission.

Globally, one of the most powerful ways to create social impact is to improve the lives of women and girls. But what does it mean to ‘improve the lives of women and girls’ and how can you know whether you’re really making a difference? To answer these questions, the Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP), with the generous support of the Tara Health Foundation, identified The XX Factor, the five dimensions of women’s lives.

The XX Factor identified five dimensions foundational for the lives of women and girls: health, education, economic empowerment, personal safety, and legal rights. For the Women’s Index, CHIP in collaboration with Women of the World Endowment conducted research and analysis of social impact indicators available to inform investment with a gender focus within the sovereign debt space.

In this guidance, you’ll find the best ideas from the 1,904 proposed solutions submitted to 100&Change. MacArthur assembled a list of its Top 200 and from there chose eight semifinalists. But rather than leave the remaining 192 on the cutting room floor, MacArthur turned to CHIP.

For this work, we initially analyzed each of the 192 applications to understand the social impact goal – i.e., what is the meaningful, positive change the applicant seeks to create? We considered the problem the organization was trying to solve, who would be impacted by the solution, and how their lives would improve.