This groundbreaking book charts the path of a new industry, explaining how impact investing is and can be a positive disruptive force. Impact Investing affirms that it is possible and desirable to address social and environmental problems with investments that generate financial profits.

Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson reveal how impact investing is a transformational vehicle for delivering blended value through investment. The authors—two leaders in the burgeoning field of impact investing—give a name to a set of activities previously siloed in enclaves and reveal how these activities are linked within what is becoming a new and dynamic field.

The authors don’t take a normative approach to argue how investors should behave but instead show how entrepreneurial people and institutions are already offering an integrated alternative. Impact Investing defines this emerging industry for all the institutions and people it is affecting (investors, funders, social entrepreneurs, educators, policy makers, and marginalized communities) and showcases illustrative examples of challenges and successes. The book also explores the potential that impact investing holds to tackle the most critical social and environmental issues of our day on a scale never seen before.

Ultimately, Impact Investing offers a fundamentally optimistic vision. This unifying vision illuminates what can be achieved when we capture total blended value, when all our assets work in unison with our values and beliefs.