Impact Experience

Jenna is the CEO of Impact Experience which is focused on addressing the very critical issues of structural racism and incorporates a variety of powerful tools to tackle prejudice by confronting and engaging with the historical and ongoing realities of inequality and racial bias. With Jenna’s leadership and vision, Impact Experience has spurred numerous positive outcomes for underestimated communities including retraining former coal miners in Appalachia; attracting greater pools of capital to minority and women-run businesses; and addressing health disparities. 

Jenna is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Business School, is a PD Soros Fellow, an Echoing Green Fellow, Forbes 30 under 30, Summit fellow and a Stanford Social Innovation Fellow. She has worked at the Word Bank, at the Calvert Funds and helped to build a coalition of foundations divesting from fossil fuels and investing in new economy solutions. She is an active member of the Bahá'í Faith.

It is an urgent and momentous time to explore the linkages between wealth creation and social justice. The combined trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic fallout has disproportionately impacted people of color in many countries around the world, and most sharply, in the United States.  

Through an ongoing initiative with community leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, researchers, investors, and asset owners, we are working to explore how the history of racial terror in the United States has affected the financial industry and corporations globally, and how we can use this context to reduce bias and stop the underestimation of women and people of color. 

This project builds on the existing body of evidence about the multitude of economic and social barriers faced by entrepreneurs of color, and aims to provide a practical and catalyzing platform for taking tangible next steps for co-investing, deal structuring, and impact tracking.

The US Government Accountability Office reported recently that less than 1.3% of the more than $70 trillion assets under management globally, are managed by women and people of color. The Economic Policy Institute reported that by 2032 people of color will represent about half of the population, and more than half of the working-age population.This data demonstrates the persistent prevalence of bias in asset allocation and the imperative to overcome persistent economic injustices happening in the United States and beyond. 

In order to create seismic and systemic shifts in how funding is allocated, Impact Experience builds human relationships that span across diverse sectors to bridge gaps and lessen disparities. We believe that sector-specific silos prevent the cross-fertilization of ideas and stifle opportunities for innovative strategies. 

In order to lead change and drive participatory action, we apply insights from and combine elements of the disciplines of systems transformation and organizational development, design thinking, and somatic psychology and experiential learning curricula that builds bridges not only between organizations but between people. In doing so, we increase awareness about the persistent nature of structural racism, associated biases, and the imperative to innovate practices in community development and asset allocation.

Drawing from my expertise in impact investing, philanthropy, and community engagement, my team and I have developed a convening model and tailored curriculum that connects investors, academics, artists, philanthropists, business and community leaders to racial justice issues through a meaningful and impactful process. This project will engage private companies, universities, and various foundations in order to connect core institutions across the public and private spaces to the process and methodology of Impact Experience in order to actively reshape the impact investing field by applying a racial equity lens to endowment portfolios, talent development, education, philanthropy, and private enterprise. This project builds off of our partnership with Illumen Capital, an impact investing fund of funds which focuses on providing its fund managers with bias-reducing strategies with the goal of channeling investments to support individuals and businesses run by women and people of color. As a result of this partnership, asset owners and managers representing over a trillion dollars in assets under management have made a long-term commitment to reduce bias in their decision-making processes in the investment cycle by examining the role of unconscious bias in the context of the individual and in societal and economic structures.

Outcomes from my work with Impact Experience includes behavior change towards increasing racial and gender equity and reducing bias, job retraining, infrastructure investments, access to education, mentorship opportunities, direct access to funding or other positive community impact. To date, over 10,000 people have been impacted by our work, 1,500 commitments have been made, 100+ strategic partnerships have been formed, and $40 million in capital investment has been sparked. 

For example, in Williamson, West Virginia, we have activated over $15 million in new investment that was used to build the new Williamson Health and Wellness Center which in turn has created over 60 new jobs for community members, while expanding access and improving the quality of healthcare. 

Our partnership in Arizona led to the formation of  an Opportunity Zone Impact Working Group led to the development of potential low-income housing investment deals co-designed with local latino and indigenous communities.

In rural Georgia, we partnered with the Sapelo Foundation to give voice to community leaders and collaboratively develop solutions and catalyze systemic change and created a framework for a future scholarship program, launched a national resource map of rurally focused entrepreneurial opportunities, and a new build-a-thon project with Code for Savannah.

I have led expansive efforts to stop structural racism across philanthropy, economic and community development, as well as in asset allocation and asset management. My work in elevating understanding of and between people from different perspectives and backgrounds includes the following components:

• Draws from UN Sustainable Development Goals;

• Engages key funders and decision-makers in alignment with their areas of interest;

• Builds partnerships with local leaders and stakeholders in order to understand their needs rather than assume what needs to be fixed;

• Applies a lens of climate justice to address urgent threat of climate change on marginalized communities.

The Impact Experience Co-founder Daryn Dodson and I, met while consulting with Calvert Investments, a $13 billion mutual fund and pioneer of the Socially Responsible Investment field. We found that, despite investors’ good intentions, they were often disconnected from the priorities of the communities in which they were seeking to invest in and, as a result, lacked an in-depth understanding of the issues from the communities’ perspective. Oftentimes, this would result in private capital being channeled into coastal cities, which resulted in rural areas failing to receive resources needed to mobilize growth. Daryn and I created Impact Experience to address systemic inequality and persistent biases in the investment industry by building bridges and deep relationships between impact investors, foundations, entrepreneurs, artists and local leaders, to co-create solutions with marginalized communities.

Since we launched Impact Experience in 2015, we have been invited into more than 30 communities across the United States. Our network spans from impact investors, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, educators, artists, to social activists. A key component of our model is focused on providing investors and companies with the opportunity to become more proximate to the communities in which they are seeking to invest in.

I am a member of the Baha’i Faith which is a primary source of my inspiration and passion for bridging social justice with economic progress. The essence of my faith is a celebration of unity in diversity. My ancestors were persecuted in Iran because of their faith. I was raised in London by a single mother and attended an international school providing exposure to many different cultures and backgrounds.

This complicated era of social unrest and pandemic that we are living through calls for more businesses like the one that I have built which incorporate climate resilience and racial equity into their core operations and product design. I have witnessed firsthand from collaborating with many individual leaders, firms, organizations, and communities that human wellbeing is directly tied to economic wellbeing—therefore, the status quo of disparity and environmental degradation has become a massive risk to business and finance. 

As the CEO of Impact Experience, I am humbled and proud to stand behind the outcomes that we have catalyzed. Our collaboration with MIT Elevate would be a moonshot for our critical work in racial equity and bias reduction and in removing the multitude of barriers faced by entrepreneurs of color. 

My co-founder Daryn Dodson and I have a long history of working in the impact investing field and draw upon both our professional experience and personal networks in order to build the foundation for successful Impact Experiences. Our team also is experienced in facilitation,  broadly experienced in environmental innovation, and is focused on values of diversity and inclusivity. Our team provides intentional space and time to build trust and co-create solutions that allow individual participants, organizations, and community partners to remain in the drivers' seat. 

Over the last five years, we have refined a model for co-creating entrepreneurial solutions and innovation with and within marginalized communities. Our process is offered as virtual curricula designed around four distinct phases: 

(1) Participatory Design: trust-building and context-setting meetings, site visits, in-person and virtual convenings to diagnose needs of all stakeholders;

(2) Ideation: We partner with thought leaders to surface ideas that expand possibilities and we design and prototype solutions;

(3) Implementation: We partner with individuals, foundations, non-profits, companies, and communities to test and refine these prototypes; 

(4) Investment: Through our broad and uniquely engaged network of artists, entrepreneurs, action researchers, impact investors, foundations, and fund managers, we generate real-time investment and partnership interest from funders and companies in the prototype solutions we create.

When I first began working with the group in West Virginia, I shared with them the coalition building work I had been engaged in with over 170 foundations representing over $10 billion in assets under management to divest from fossil fuels and invest in new economy solutions. Former coal miners in the group provided me with the feedback that hearing me talk about the work of divesting from fossil fuels felt like a lack of respect for them, their history and their narrative. This taught me the power of framing in all engagements and also the power of listening more than talking. This has helped me in future engagements to start with the lens of the community and the leaders within it rather than my own preconceived notions. I, now, spend much more time with local leaders before any engagement to truly understand their perspective and context.

Five years ago, I helped to build a coalition of >170 foundations representing >$10 billion in assets under management to divest from fossil fuels and invest in new economy solutions like clean energy. Much of this work involved engaging with foundations to explore ways of achieving more alignment between their investments and their grantmaking. I did a Ted X talk on this work -  

This coalition of foundations is part of a broader movement of universities, insurance companies, pension funds, individuals representing over $7 trillion in assets under management. 

This was a positive outcome, but I realized that much of this new investment was bypassing marginalized communities and would continue to exacerbate wealth and opportunity gaps without intervention. I wanted to find a way to direct resources to marginalized communities suffering from environmental degradation and economic decline, and started a pilot project in Williamson WV, which is now a five year engagement with the community.

Activities and inputs include: 

-A team consisting of world-class facilitators with expertise in psychology, somatic healing, implicit bias, creating empathy, and connections across disparate groups. 

-Tracking breakthroughs in group sessions and insights and relating them to measurable outputs and outcomes, including investment or grant dollars mobilized, impact in communities created. Implementing research to understand the voices of marginalized people, the primary beneficiary, through interviews, focus groups, community meetings, etc. 

-Convening groups of investors, entrepreneurs, change leaders with a world class facilitator, to build breakdown barriers to funders understanding of communities and communities understanding of funders. Convenings taking place in a setting that is comfortable to marginalized communities. Facilitators focus on helping the group to confront the stereotypes and misconceptions that each group might have regarding the other on an interpersonal, socio economic level.

-Connecting investors face-to-face with  community members who can vocalize their needs and desires.

-Producing virtual convenings alongside in-person project-based initiatives. 

-Lead participants (funders and marginalized communities both represented) through a process of reaching a deeper understanding about each other through a series of exercises from professional facilitators.

-Survey participants before and after the convening on their perceptions of each other.

Outcomes include: 

-Grants and investments are directed towards the actual needs of marginalized communities because each party is better informed by our unique methodology and process of convening and action research. 

-At the Individual Level: deep connection to values and how that manifests in one's work and existence for both funders and marginalized community members;

-At the Community Level: relationships, trust, and collective wisdom are cultivated; Funders are connected to the community ultimately impacted by investments not just in a meeting, but in a carefully curated conversation focused on establishing empathy and deep connection

-At the Organizational Level: Organizations and funders, as well as marginalized communities continue to adopt our methodology to engage in the future globally  ultimately creating more efficient, effective and longer funding engagements.

Our network is currently over 900 individuals and 20+ communities. Over the next five years, we intend to accelerate our impact to serve 100 or more communities.