A New Approach: Full Stack Philanthropy Aligned at Every Level

At The Impact Seat Foundation, our mission is to create a world in which women, and particularly women of color, can succeed as business leaders. To build an ecosystem that promotes women leaders, we need to make sure they receive the support and financing they need at every step of the way.

What does impact investing + grantmaking + advocacy equal? That’s Full Stack Philanthropy.

The Impact Seat Foundation uses this approach to combine impact investing in diverse, women-led companies, grantmaking, and advocacy for a new economy that’s fully inclusive.

We utilize these three pillars of Full Stack Philanthropy like other foundations do, except that we added a twist. We wanted to amplify the effect of my philanthropy by making sure that every facet of our Foundation’s existence serves to further fulfill our mission.

You can watch me speak about this in particular here:

Tying into this mission, as a foundation we have decided to invest only in women-led companies. This means the money that will go into our grantmaking program then turns around and helps to build other organizations that specifically propel women entrepreneurs in their leadership teams.

From our perspective, the funding base should be completely in line with the foundation’s mission. After all, why invest in fossil fuels, then turn around and donate the profits toward climate change?

We believe that your investments and philanthropy should advance the social causes you champion. So if you care about solving a particular issue, ideally your investment portfolio and your grantmaking are both optimized to advance that issue.

Our Full Stack Philanthropy approach makes sense financially. In our case specifically, we invest only in diverse, women-led teams — because the data tells us that they win. When your investments are profitable, you have more funding available for grants and advocacy, and thus a bigger impact.

What’s your perspective on this topic? Share in the comments!