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Innovative Financing for Social Impact Course

This course is designed to help you understand the entire spectrum of innovative financing options for purpose-driven companies and impact-focused founders. You will learn to assess funding options, build a network of like-minded founders and funders and gain access to resources you need to design your own innovative finance toolkit.

Content for the course is based on Aunnie Patton Power's book Adventure Finance as well as new research.

What will you learn?

This course is designed for both founders and funders, as well as funding intermediaries. For all participants, by the end of the course, you can expect to:

  • Understand the entire spectrum of innovative financing options for purpose driven companies and impact focused funders
  • Be able to assess funding options and their appropriateness for different stages of a company's growth and their funding needs
  • Build a network of like-minded founders and funders
  • Be equipped with a plethora of resources and materials to use as reference guides in the future

Want to Join The Next Online Cohort?

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Course Overview

This course consists of two elements:
 
Online Self-Paced Modules
These six modules can be completed at your own pace.
The modules represent approximately 3 - 5 hours of content including videos, text, and quizzes.

Live Workshop
The live content includes exercises and cases, as well as Q&A, discussions and networking.  The live sessions are designed to further your knowledge of the online material, give you bespoke feedback on your own approach and help you engage with likeminded founders and funders.

Are you a funder wanting to broaden your funding options?

As a funder, by the end of this course, you can expect to:
  • Understand your own resources 
  • Assess your funding options for organizations in your pipeline and portfolio based on their company characteristics, their mission alignment and their funding needs

Are you a founder wanting to understand your financing options?

As a founder, by the end of this course, you can expect to be able to:
  • Evaluate who you are as a company, how mission driven you are and what your funding needs are
  • Assess your funding options based on your self-evaluation
  • Articulate the pros and cons of different financing options for your company
  • Map out the characteristics of potential funders

Are you a Social Entrepreneur thinking of applying for one of the courses?

Apply for a scholarship and get 30% off.
Apply Here

Would you like a workshop in your City?

Let us know if you would to have an innovative financing workshop in your city by filling out this short survey.
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See What Past Attendees Have Said About Our Workshops

Rares Pamfil, Vice President, Impact Investing, Barclays

“It was an incredible tour of what the cutting edge of impact finance looks like around the world. Unlike 90% of impact investing presentations, the workshop talked about real deal structures with details from actual term sheets - there's no better way to learn.”  

Tamara Giltsoff, Former Head of Innovation, DFID

"Massive learning curve into the depth and breadth of Innovative Financing tools and I thought I knew a bit. Every investor/fund manager, regardless of explicit impact intent or not, should be well versed in these pioneering investment instruments and how they prove out.” 

Shideh Haradian, Director of Sales and Business Development, Fluor Corporation

“Thank you for all your fabulous work in bringing the latest innovative finance tools in one place and your generosity to make them so accessible. A must workshop for every Impact investor and entrepreneur.”

Orianna Fielding, Social Entrepreneur

“Thank you for an information packed accessible and inspirational day. Definitely suffering from information overload in the best possible way! You provided a knowledge base in one day that would have taken months, if not years, to acquire. What I learned from you is invaluable for me as a social entrepreneur - thank you!”

Introducing Adventure Finance

The venture capital model doesn’t work―at least not for 99% of startups and small businesses. In this 99% are a lot of companies with incredible potential: businesses headed by female founders and those from diverse racial backgrounds, organizations headquartered outside of venture capital hubs, and purpose-driven enterprises that are creating social and environmental impact alongside financial success.

Counter to what the press-savvy venture capital world would have you believe, there are a lot of funding options out there for startups and small businesses. Adventure Finance is designed to help you understand some of these options, and walk you through real examples of how other founders and funders have put them to use. 

In simple, approachable language, the book breaks down the different types of funding options available from revenue-based financing to recoverable grants to redeemable equity to distributed ownership and more. Through a mix of storytelling and research-based frameworks, based on a decade of research and experience in investing in early-stage companies, this book will give you the ability to determine how each of these structures can contribute to your own funding journey.

The goal for this book is to shift the conversation about startup funding and help founders and funders widen the spectrum of “mainstream” investment options in order to make the venture financing world more inclusive and purpose-driven.

More about Adventure Finance

Meet Your Instructor

Aunnie Patton Power

Aunnie Patton Power is an Academic, Advisor, Author and Angel Investor with a focus on directing innovative financing to organizations that create positive social and environmental impact. At the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, she holds the title Associate Fellow as well as Entrepreneur in Residence at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She is adjunct faculty at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship and Academic Director for the BEAM Network. Aunnie works with funders globally to design innovative financing instruments and deploy capital, including sitting on the board of JUMO and the investment committees of Sanlam Investments and Nyala Venture. She founded Impact Finance Pro, a careers platform and is a founding member of the Dazzle Angels, a female angel investing group. Her first book, Adventure Finance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021 and she is working on her second book (working title Carried Impact).


A reformed M&A investment banker, Aunnie began her impact investing career in 2010 with Unitus Capital in Bangalore and has since worked with start-ups, intermediaries, funds, family offices, foundations, corporates and governments across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Aunnie's work has been published throughout the world, including by the Oxford University Press, the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), the World Economic Forum, Impact Investing Policy Collaboration and as a Massive Open Online Course on Coursera. 

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