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Celebrating 10 years of impact

Published

As we cut the cake on ten years of the Oxford Impact Investing Programme, we reflect on the programme’s journey, its alumni community and the future prospects.

The beginning

For the past ten years, the Oxford Impact Investing Programme (OIIP) has been building a cohort of talented professionals that are playing pioneering and leadership roles in advancing deals and field building efforts to deliver positive financial, social and environmental returns.

In 2013, OIIP was the first global impact investing executive education programme in the world. Around that time, the Global Impact Investing Network estimated $4 billion was invested in the emerging impact investing market - today, the total market size is $1.164 trillion. The faculty at Saïd Business School saw this potential, and in typical Oxford fashion, pushed boundaries to launch a programme in a relatively new area of finance.

That first five-day programme was launched in thanks to the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with Debra Schwartz and the MacArthur Foundation generously providing scholarships to ensure that non-profit organisations could also attend the programme.

The journey

At the helm and directing the programme for the past ten years have been Associate Fellow Gayle Peterson and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship Alex Nicholls, witnessing nearly 1,000 students, from all over the world, take up the impact investing challenges before them and flourish. In Gayle’s words, ’Through our shared alumni stories, we witness today’s heroes - extraordinary and fearless. Their gifts of impact give us all hope that we can successfully address climate change and the world’s greatest problems.’ 

One of the programme’s first alumni was Fumi Sugeno, now head of business development at Japan Social Innovation and Investment Foundation. Reflecting on her experience, Fumi says: ’It has been ten years since Oxford, but I continue to use what I first learned on the programme. It is not necessarily technical knowledge per se, but about having a mindset that helps you to think about the long term in a broad, deep, and meaningful way.

‘Oxford Saïd gave me the springboard to follow my passion and professional path in this sector. It is a testament to the programme that I still communicate regularly with some of the faculty and fellow participants. There is a sense of belonging to a global community of leaders who are building this exciting financial sector.’ 

In addition to promising the academic rigour of Oxford Saïd, the OIIP faculty made a commitment to bringing experienced impact professionals into the classroom who have launched and led impact investing initiatives globally.

We invite them to class because of the willingness to discuss their failures as well as successes. This openness is a hallmark of a confident learning community.

Gayle Peterson

Associate Fellow

One member of the OIIP faculty that bridges these two worlds is Karim Harji, who directs the Oxford Impact Measurement Programme (OIMP). Karim initially presented to the 2015 OIIP cohort on his work in impact investing and impact measurement and reflected on this experience: ’OIIP inspired me to deepen my teaching and research efforts in impact measurement, building on Alex Nicholls’ pioneering work, and eventually led to us co-developing a new executive programme and field building contributions in this area. It has been a privilege to see our alumni take on leadership roles in the field, lead initiatives to promote innovative structures and impact integrity, and learn with and from each other.’

The future

OIIP continues to go from strength to strength and has inspired a portfolio of programmes as the needs of students and the industry evolve. Aunnie Patton Power, the programme director for the Oxford Impact Finance Innovations (OIFI) programme, has been involved with the programmes from the beginning, consulting on the design of the first iteration of OIIP and teaching on many of the subsequent programmes, before designing and launching OIFI in 2021 with Alex.

’The portfolio of programmes that Oxford Saïd has developed is unique globally in that it provides opportunities for new entrants to the space to hone their skills and develop their network as well as offering experienced deal makers the opportunity to take their investment structures and impact measurement to the next level,’ she says.

Saïd Business School now offers a portfolio of four related impact programmes:  

Alex has been driving the launch and development of this portfolio of programmes and reflecting on the last ten years said that when they began it was not clear how or, even if, impact investing would become an established part of the finance ecosystem. 

Thanks to ten years of working with our extraordinary students and faculty, it is now clear that we have built a community that, in turn, can help spark a movement for change.

Alex Nicholls

Professor of Social Entrepreneurship

Looking to the future Gayle adds: ‘In the next decade, with cascading global systemic challenges caused by climate change - natural disasters, exponential loss of biodiversity, mass human migration, growing income and technology inequalities - impact investing must step up to addressing these world scale problems.

‘It will require strong leaders who are able to adapt and candidly speak about their challenges and iterate investments to meet changing, often chaotic circumstances. It will require leveraged and collaborative capital to meet multi-layered, multi-sector demands. As impact investing grows and scales, it will require a continued commitment to listening to involving communities most at risk in all stages of impact investing. As a community we must continue to commit ourselves to doing no harm and achieving positive impact.’  

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