Impact Investing
for the
Next Generation
Plan your moves.
Impact starts with you!
The seven-month program, run annually since 2015, builds and fosters strong cohorts of wealth holders committed to impact investing within their context. The curriculum is purposefully curated and led by a group of global experts and program alumni.
The program is globally unique and rooted in both research and practice. Founded at the Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI) at the Harvard Kennedy School, run by the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) at the University of Zurich, and now held at the University of Zurich and MIT Sloan School of Management, the training is facilitated in a trusted environment of wealth holders, which enables open sharing of experiences. The university platform ensures that the program content is free from conflicts of interest, with knowledge dissemination and capacity building being its two key objectives.
The Program
Participants during the 2021 - 2022 training
Dates for the 10th Cohort
Module 1: October 15th-18th, 2024 in Zurich
Center for Sustainable Finance & Private Wealth (CSP)
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Module 2: April 29th- May 1st, 2025 in Boston
MIT Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Alumni Weekend: May 2nd-4th in Boston (optional)
Private investors gain three things from the program. First, technical knowledge and how to differentiate and assess impact investments. Second, they learn how to engage different stakeholders and how to talk with them about impact investing. Third, participants meet program alumni and like-minded peers, hear their strategies, and are able to share deeply and openly in a trusted environment.
Dr. Falko Paetzold
Program Co-Founder & Managing Director of CSP at the University of Zurich
There’s a big distance between theory and practice in impact investment every year. People have talked a lot about the amount of talk versus action. The way we think about this program is that it gives people a framework for ongoing action.
Dr. David Wood
Program Co-Founder & Senior Research Associate at the Social Innovation and Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School
There’s a huge transition of wealth between generations right now, and many of those young people want to leverage their wealth to not only secure their financial futures but the environmental and social future of the planet. This program brings together the wealth holders of the next generation so they can network, look for investment opportunities, and really develop their strategies to deploy capital for good.
Dr. James Gifford
Program Co-Founder & Founder of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment
One of the practical skills we try to teach through the due diligence exercise component of the program is to have the students learn to ask challenging questions of funds they want to invest in, and particularly to be better educated and confident clients for their financial advisors and for their teams.
Temple Fennell
Program Co-Founder & Family Member of Keller Enterprises - Single Family Office
MIT is proud to co-host this program because it's simply unique - there is no other mechanism for building a trusted learning community among prospective impact investors with this level of instruction, accumulated wisdom, and robust alumni community.
Dr. Jason Jay
Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan
Alumni Reflections
Participants during the 2021 - 2022 training
alumni network members
of the alumni from the first and second cohorts have reached an advanced stage of impact investing
of cohorts 1-7 reported an increase in their confidence following the program
The program provided me with the initial vocabulary to be able to structure conversations about impact investing and with the network and support system to ensure that these conversations actually help me achieve my impact investing goals.
Lara Lemann
Brazil/Switzerland ’16-’17 Cohort
I think that being on location in these amazing places tends to put the cohort members in a position of really feeling how important history is and that they have the ability to write it with the right guidance, which I think the program provides.
Arieh Mimran
Senegal/Switzerland ’16-’17 Cohort
The program led me to a much deeper understanding that helped me advance my journey to concrete investments. For example, I have invested into a fund that provides debt financing to media organizations in countries where press freedom is under pressure. I also provided a loan to a business that produces clean cook stoves in Lesotho, and I am looking at several direct impact investment funds.
Antonis Schwarz
Greece/Germany ’15-’16 Cohort
The concept of impact investing has sparked an interest in my family and is motivating people who were not part of the investment decision process to join the conversation. The practical applications of the program enabled me to start a conflict-free discussion about the family fund, and to start a process to review the impact of our assets and steer them towards investments that are more aligned with our values.
Fernando Scodro
Brazil/Singapore ’15-’16 Cohort
