Launching a Corporate Impact Fund with Blair Miller of TELUS

03/23/21 • 24 min

In late 2020, TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunication companies, launched a $100mm corporate impact fund. Named the Pollinator Fund for Good, the fund invests seed and Series A capital in social entrepreneurs working across four impact areas: environment, agriculture, health, and inclusive communities. Joining this episode is Blair Miller, the Managing Partner of the fund to talk about how the TELUS culture of social capitalism led to the fund’s creation and what other corporates interested in impact investing can learn from their experience.

Previous Episode

The Economic Imperative to Support Marginalized Entrepreneurs with Melissa Bradley of 1863 Ventures

Ever since being denied a Small Business Association loan for being a Black woman, Melissa Bradley has dedicated her career to building support ecosystems for historically marginalized entrepreneurs. From her time working in the Treasury Department of the Clinton White House to the recent launch of both Ureeka and the 1863 Fund, Melissa has helped support entrepreneurship and wealth creation from leadership roles across the public, private, and social sectors.

Melissa is the Managing Partner of 1863 Ventures, a nonprofit accelerator of New Majority entrepreneurs - their term for the aggregation of diverse ethnic groups that will represent a majority of the US population by 2044. Here she recently launched the 1863 Fund, which aims to both reduce the cost of capital for New Majority founders and to better align that capital through the use of revenue-based financing. She is also the co-founder of Ureeka, an online platform for entrepreneurs to access the people, programs, and connections they need to grow. She is an Adjunct Professor of impact investing and social entrepreneurship at Georgetown University and served as a political appointee under both Presidents Obama and Clinton, most recently serving as the Director of the Social Innovation Fund for President Obama.

Next Episode

Scaling Responsible Innovation in Lending with Jacob Haar of Community Investment Management

“Lending has the capacity to transform what people can do based on their capabilities and not necessarily based just on the opportunities that they’ve been dealt. If you believe, like I do, that capabilities are equally distributed but opportunities certainly are not, then lending can be a way to try to level the playing field a bit more.”

This episode of Money and Meaning features Jacob Haar, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Community Investment Management (CIM). CIM is an institutional impact investment manager that provides debt capital to lenders who are doing innovative work in underserved communities. The CIM capital both helps these organizations scale up their lending practices to serve more customers and helps to bring responsible and transparent solutions for the underserved into the financial mainstream.