Anna Ivanova (MPPA ’13) would like global investors to put their money where the mouths of America’s undernourished are.
Later this month Ivanova and two students from the Isenberg School of Management will pitch their Food Forward Impact Fund during the final round in this year’s International Impact Investing Challenge. For this competition, hosted by the Kellogg School of Management and supported by the Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations, graduate students from around the world design potential “impact investment” vehicles that would have a positive and sustainable effect on the environment and/or on society.
On April 26, the 12 finalist teams will present their plans and defend them before a panel of judges at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Ivanova’s teammates are Spirit Joseph (MBA ’13) and Maria Fernandez (MBA ’14). Together, the UMass team has conceived of the Food Forward Impact Fund, which would finance programs to promote healthy eating choices and improve access to affordable and nutritious food in low-income communities throughout the United States.
“Food access is a very big problem right now and it was interesting to see how impact investing can be applied toward solving it,” Ivanova said. She became fascinated with the concept of impact investing after attending a social enterprise conference at Harvard last year through the UMass chapter of Net Impact.
Ivanova, a Fulbright fellow from Siberia, has a keen interest in innovation and market-based solutions to social problems. She put that interest to work last summer during an internship at the World Bank’s Information and Communication Technology Sector Unit. This semester Ivanova is deepening her knowledge of impact investing as she completes her capstone on social impact bonds, which are relatively new ways of financing social programs “in which government agencies pay only for real, measurable social outcomes — after those results have been achieved,” according to the Center for American Progress.
And though such public-private collaboration is not a mandatory criteria in the funds created for the International Impact Investing Challenge, Ivanova’s real-world experience can only help her team meet two of the competition’s main requirements: Each project must be both innovative and feasible. In addition, each team must use thorough financial research to show how its proposed investment vehicle would make a significant positive impact on the planet.
Ivanova and her teammates will spend the next few weeks fine-tuning their research and their case for the Food Forward Impact Fund.