I'm Julia Patrick. It's another episode of the non-profit show. And today we're really, really excited to have our guest, Anthony Wall Jr. As he told me in the green room chatter, only his mom calls him Anthony when he's in trouble. So really, Tony to you and I, Tony, welcome. We're really excited to have you on today. Thank you. I am delighted to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. Well, it's going to be a lot of fun. But before we get started, I want to remind everybody that I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jira Ransom, the non-profit nerd, and my trusty sidekick is off today, but she'll be rejoining us tomorrow. Again, we have amazing sponsorship that we want to make sure everybody knows about. That comes from from Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd, and non-profit tech talk. I want to make sure that I call out Bloomerang because they were so generous to have us at the AFP conference in their booth broadcasting live from New Orleans last week. It was really exciting. And it's a big deal that they opened up their convention center home, if you will, for us to broadcast from. So thank you again to them. Hey, if you want to consume more of our content, I want to make sure that you know that we have this super cool new app. You can download it. Just take a quick photo of this right now. If you're watching us through one of the streaming platforms, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we'll connect with you about each one of our shows every day. So you'll never miss anything. And you can also queue us up on any podcast where you'd like to stream your content, as well as broadcast streaming. One of my kookiest favorite things to do is to take my smart TV remote and speak into it and say the non-profit show and we come up. It's kind of crazy, but it's really fun. So find us wherever you get your content and we will be there along for the ride. More importantly, we're going to be on a ride today with Tony Wall Jr. founder and author of Noesis. Thank you, Tony, for joining us. I am really delighted to be here. It's a terrific opportunity. Hey, well, it's really fun to be exploring this project with you and understanding more of what you do as an author and a speaker and a thought leader. Let's get into it because there's so much to explore. And I've got to first start off with your name and the concept and this amazing word. Well, as you, I understand, as you see here, we put an E at bar over the E to assist people to get that long E, Noesis. The word Noesis is a Greek word and the simplest way to put it is this. If we have all the data that we could possibly get and we reached the highest level of understanding that we can with that data, we've reached a state of Noesis. It's a Greek word. So it asks the human race to step it up, if you will, in its ability to think. Is this similar to enlightenment or is that we're working at our best function or like our highest level of highest functioning? It's a good question. It's a fusion of intelligence and philosophy. This is not Mr. Spock. This is Mr. Spock with a sense of humor. What a concept! Yeah. So that's what Noesis is. We can reach the top level of our ability to do so and that's what we're here for. Awesome. Really interesting. I love that piece of it. It almost seems like we're asking everybody to get outside of themselves and their emotions and to look at things in a more intellectual way. That's what we're going to ask. We're not only going to ask that. We're going to help you very much to do it. It's why I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm an observer and a conversationalist which I think you'll appreciate. So this is not a dark undertaking. I want to explain that right out of the gate. This is hopeful and remedial at its core. So proceed. I love it. You know, one of the things that you talked about on your website and we talked about this a little bit in the green room and that's human nature and perpetual conflict and it's a very interesting concept because, dare I say, the majority of non-profits, the 1.8 million alone just in our country, they're dealing with conflict, human cost conflict and it could be many forms, many, many forms and so what do you make of that that we're in this washing machine of, you know, movement and conflict? What I make of it will perhaps surprise. We have no choice and what do I mean by that? Let me say, explain first, conflict among humans is unnatural. As I speak, there is no human being on earth that has a natural enemy. So right away we are acting unnaturally relative to our deepest longings. So what could go wrong when we're acting unnatural in a relative fashion other than everything? So, you know, we, what do I think about a conflict? I think that perpetual conflict will in fact destroy us and it always and to say that brings no value whatsoever. We are not sensationalists. The fact is that since we became stationary beings, we've had 45 empires. All of them were disassembled and destroyed by perpetual conflict. It's the only demonstrable killer of human interaction. So what do I think about perpetual conflict? I don't think I know for a living that perpetual conflict, we won't survive it. We have to understand its mechanisms. Right.  And I'm fascinated by this issue of understanding conflict because we have so much going on in the nonprofit sector and we talk a lot about this, Tony. We talk a lot about this. Sometimes it's so hard to look to the future and to be strategic because we're just trying to, you know, deal with the fire that's present, right? And how do we step outside of that and really think strategically, dare I say about the root causes of our problems, how to navigate them versus being compassionate and empathetic and dealing with what's right in front of us? Well, we are loving creatures at our core. We are a masterpiece of collaboration and affiliation that was thrown off, if you will, derailed by a very viewable event in our evolutionary timeline. And that is when we organize ourselves into larger and larger populations aided by an agricultural awakening. And we defaulted to behaviors of acquisition. So this masterpiece of a being that navigated the entire world over 275,000 years was suddenly asked to become self-interested. It was a test that we never studied for, if you will, in our DNA.  No, no, we're gravely injured having been knocked off our deepest longings. So we are in existential crisis. That is a very, very reasonable way to put it. That's where we come from. We're not sensationalists of any kind. You know, so interesting that you would use the word self-interest because that's one of the things that we do talk about with the nonprofit sector and nonprofit sector leadership. You know, Tony, I'm seeing at this point in time in history in our country, a lot of people that lived a certain way, especially people of a certain generation, moved through the pandemic, suffered tremendously in many different ways. And then I've had kind of like a reawakening to say, I'm not going to be doing the corporate thing. I'm going to go into service or I'm going to, you know, change my life in a certain way. And I'm wondering if that's part of this discussion. These things that upset us or jolt us a little bit that then caused us to reevaluate. Yeah, I want to say also, we came into existence before the pandemic. That's important because this is not a cottage industry here. Human beings are unsustainable. And we're socio-mathematicians here actually, at our core socio-mathematics. Why? Because we, by way of observation, long ago occurred to me that all all stationary empires to ever exist are not only gone, but they were disassembled and destroyed in precise fashion. When we're in the midst of any precision, anything mechanical, we are in the midst of a mathematical consideration. It occurred to me that what we call flawed is injured. We're breaking down just as an organ would break down if it were to get sick. We break down the same way every time. So that alerted me to something socio-mathematical is going on rather than a fault. We're scourged now. We're deeply injured beings. We're frightened beings. The things we see, the craziness, is the manifestation of fear. We're fearful. So that's a lot different in a scourge, isn't it? If we were to find a child that was crying saying that they were lost, who among us would not drop what we're doing to make sure that child got back to safety? Well, when we begin to look at ourselves as lost and frightened beings, maybe we'll like ourselves enough to preserve ourselves. But right now we're self-loathing. We don't deserve it. It's such an interesting thing because we hear that a lot, Tony, about nonprofit management, and you'll hear that. Are you fundraising like in a fear-based way? Are you navigating your leadership and changing your community in a fear-based manner? So it's fascinating to me that you would actually bring that up and point that out. Well, I know that this is called the nonprofit show. So let me talk about what I can help people with. If they're up and coming, I think with their most important points, they've already found out or they will find out the following, the work ethic. Your ideas already have merit. Now, are you ready to put in the work? And the work ethic is, whatever you think you'll need, multiply it by five. You're about to go into go to work. So only the most dedicated of founders should proceed. And also, you need compliance. Oh my goodness, compliance. If you are not locked down solid in compliance, everything will go bad from there, even starting a bank account. I mean, so your compliance is, you know, so have very good legal advice because, you know, and also here's this standard of quality. Start with the standard of quality. Do not ever compromise it. Do not ever go below it because people are really smart. And that is that, you know, we maintain intelligence and empathy here where you won't stay. It's that simple. And if our front door begins to look chipped and warped, that means what's behind that door is also the same. Yeah. So I wanted to impart that general information to your audience. Yeah, I like that. I appreciate that because I think that's one of the things that that we talk a lot about across the industry. And I'm sure you've heard this conversation before. And that is, you know, as a nonprofit, we're still a business. If we're not providing quality services to our communities, then we're not going to retain donors. We're not going to retain confidence in the funding sector. And it all goes away. So you're right. I mean, I do believe that we must be looking about all of these inputs to how we're managed, how we're looking at our behaviors and how we're looking for solutions and not just putting out that immediate fire. And so it's a really interesting thing. Talk to me a little bit about understanding human nature. I've got to ask you this, how often do people reach out and just say, I want to learn more about this entire ecosystem of being human so that I can be a better individual? I mean, it's a pretty heady conversation that I think sometimes people aren't willing to have. Yeah, they're not willing to have, but Clarity is our friend. Clarity is now our friend. Listen, we do videos on all. We're professional explainers.  Who accepts our blame? And nobody I know. So humans don't respond to that. So we will respond to an explanation. We're professional explainers here. Every single thing that we will do today, all eight billion of us, will spring from a past reality. And that past reality, our evolutionary timeline on this earth, once a poorly lit alley is now as vibrant as the Las Vegas strip, we know so much about how we got here and we're not in control. Again, a very, very fair way to put it. The minute we start sensationalizing, we're gone. So, you know, we are not acting. We are in crisis. We're in existential crisis. All eight billion of us, we think we don't have anything in common. Oh my, we are. We have so much in common. Like for instance, the present moment, all eight billion of us share the present moment. It's all beyond. So that's a far cry from we're so different. How different are we? We come from the same place. We're flying on the same spaceship or any other cliche you want to throw at it. I love that you said that. Yeah, we all the commonality is this moment in time. That's a cool thing to think about. Yes, but what got in the way of that? What got in the way of that? Well, here's what happened. We could not deduce our origin until 200 years ago when Charles Darwin, who the best friend we'd never met, put out a book called On the Origin of Species. It means that no human culture prior to that ever had a point of reference to define itself. So that meant that when that a default to paranoia was all we had available to us, who knew we came from the same place, which now is not in Genjaker. And by the way, some people may not be comfortable with evolution. So then I say, it's all good. It's all good. I mean, hold fast to your beliefs. But our central assumptions here for problem solving are that we all come from the same place and that that is not in Genjaker. And that our linear progression on this planet is so knowable. And that means we can determine who we are for the first time. It's a really interesting way to look at how we are, especially if leading a life of service. Because I think a lot of times, Tony, and and I don't know if you see this, but especially in the nonprofit sector in human services right now, there's a lot of blame and shame and, you know, really a negative we versus they kind of approach as opposed to saying we're all the same, you know, humanity. Well done. And here's why. Again, when you have an unnatural behavior, it's going to have a breakdown that is precise. Us versus them has never been more pronounced. Most people look out and see the sea of a mess. I don't. I look out and I see the only available rival place of increasing fear. Fear chooses safety in numbers. That explains suddenly the us versus them. It's a tribal 101. So now I'm explaining a mechanism as opposed to we're calling these choices. They're not. I mean, show me the cruelest of human hearts. I'll show you an injured heart. When we were born, we have 100,000 prior generations already packed into our DNA. These are compulsions and impulses that react that literally come to life 20 times faster than thought. So who do we think we are now that we're seeking sustainability, trying to push aside what is essentially Mount Everest in the way of compulsions and impulses that we think we sent to the basement. But I'm going to explain that I think that they think that they didn't go anywhere and that they're making the rules for modern humanity. We would need to understand that first and get a consensus on that so we can see ourselves differently and then wish to preserve ourselves right now. We're a self loading species. We don't like ourselves.  Well, we have it. We were knocked off of our deepest longings. Whose fault is that? Interesting. It's a really interesting way to start looking at human behavior and especially in this time. And I'm sure you hear this as well as I do. So much of what we talk about in order to influence or to build that new tribe or get support, whatever words you want to use, we do try and go back and think about the human experience and what we're at at our core. But this is a very difficult conversation to have. It depends. I'm getting better and better at explaining like our need to run away is noted. However, it is also unnatural. Here's why our ancestors, our evolving ancestors, sought the bad news every day. The bearer of good news had less value to our survival than the bearer of bad news. And so we could plan survival strategies, couldn't we? If we were quantify the bad news. And this happens today too. You, me, we all get up in the morning and our executive functions take over. They allow us to determine the obstacles for that day. And we get busy clearing those obstacles. I'm going to ask the entire human species to view itself safely, to escape what we see is natural, but there's nothing to fear. There are no mysteries. There are only things that need to be revealed. And that's why we're here. Clarity will educate you, not frighten you. So escapism is understood. However, it is the bad news that will keep us alive. So let's test that theory. You know, it's really interesting that you would say this because one of the things that I've noticed in the nonprofit sector is used to be for fundraising. Everybody would do like the sob story. And I hate to say this because it's so negative, but have that pity party to try and tug at the hard strings and get people to give their money. But now I'm seeing more of an intellectual path that says, this is the scientific information we have. This is the data. This is where we can go. This is how we can move the needle. You know, you might use the word impact or whatever, but the change is less benevolent and more intellectual. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that, you know, as you're having your discussions with noesis. Well, it made me put noesis together five years ago by a notion of observation. You know, we could determine the evolutionary triggers for all modern behavior. It's all notable now. And we could deduce the uselessness of these behaviors in the modern day. It will take decades. It will take decades. And my life would be long over if our state of mission is achieved. It took us 10,000 years to get into this mess. It's going to take a long time to get out of it. And by the way, I'm speaking to big business here. We're not coming for anybody. We're not asking anybody to give anything back. This is the awareness period of the mission. We are acting unnaturally. Unnatural behavior cannot persist in nature. When I go like that, one species just went extinct. Earth loses 150 a day. Let's get busy preserving ourselves in order to expand on our individual beliefs. So hold fast to your beliefs. But let's keep ourselves alive so we can expand on our many beliefs because they assist us in reaching the finish line of our lives. Interesting. Well, you know, it's hard to believe our time has gone so quickly. And this has been a fascinating thing to have you on the nonprofit show and to hear your perspective.  That is a big, you know, clarion call to most of these 1.8 million nonprofits in the country. And that is how do we navigate change and how do we look forward and understanding history? What are your comments about that? Thank you. We are here to unite all human beings on earth under the banner of species self preservation. We cannot unite politically, religiously, culturally. No, no, no, we're not ready. We can unite under a fourth banner that's now coming at us out of the mist and rather quickly. And that is that the mortality of the most remarkable species, perhaps in a galaxy, is visible on the horizon. And when that's true and when everyone sees it, we're in free fall. Again, a very reasonable way to put it. We must unite under the banner of self preservation while asking no one to give up anything in the near term. We'll disappear quickly if we do that. And we have got to, we've got to survive ourselves. We've got to allow all our present models to reorganize themselves painlessly. We have to do this. We won't survive perpetual conflict. We will not survive unnatural behavior. Well, it's been fascinating to have you on, Tony, and I want to make sure that we give everybody an opportunity to reconnect. Anthony Awal Jr. Tony, as we like to call him, founder and author of Noesis, the Noesis Project.com. Is that correct? Is it .com or .org? It's .com. I mean, it's about .org. .org was sold and now they're a profit making such wide intrusive. Okay. All right. I just, I saw that for a minute and then I was like, wait a minute, I better, I better verify that with you. Yeah, that's good. It's a good question. Tony has a book, The Human Injury, A Species in Crisis. Again, you can find that through the Noesis Project.com. Really been interesting to have you on today and to learn more about, you know, your thought process and the work that you're doing with this higher level of thinking. It really does have a lot of overlapping into our sector. I can see that and it's been really interesting to have you on. Hey again, everybody, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, the non-profit nerd herself will be back tomorrow. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors. They include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Your Part Time Controller, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join with us day in and day out to have these amazing conversations like we've had with Tony Wall today. Tony, thank you so much. Again, thank you for the great opportunity. I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Hey everybody, we'd like to end every episode of The Nonprofit Show with, I guess, Tony, we would call it our mantra and that is to stay well so you can do well. Thanks everybody. Tony, thank you.


Welcome to this, I believe, first ever session at SoCAP on Childlands Investing. It is a conversation and a presentation on our newly published Childlands Investing framework. Please check it out if you haven't. As Chris said, my name is Alexander Rostami. I lead the Innovative Financing Hub in Helsinki. It was a long trip to get here and it's also a good moment to enjoy the sun because in Helsinki we're going to wait until April until we see the sun again almost. With me I have our fantastic youth ambassador, Kripa Kanan, and we're going to talk about Childlands Investing and we also have our esteemed panel which is, they're going to come up on the stage a little bit later. But before we proceed, I want everyone to take a deep breath and imagine, picture a world in peace, a world with no poverty, with zero hunger, a world without pollution and climate change. Picture that. I think it's not a difficult task for you to do that because you're here. All of us want that. That's why we're here. But if you had one choice, one option to realize that, to make it happen, one little tweak you can do so that in one or two generations we have a world like that, what would that choice be? What would that little tweak be? For me the answer is clear. That's why I joined UNICEF. I believe that in a world where children from the day they are born, if they receive and they are raised with love and care, they have all their basic needs met, they have all the opportunity to reach their highest potential. In a world like that, there will be humans which respect each other and they respect the environment they live in. I think that's the only way we can realize that dream which we all share. Children are our most precious resources or assets. Children from the plenary yesterday was a lot of good discussion and a lot of good presentation but children were not mentioned at all. Still children are our most important assets but we don't talk about them and we don't think about them as precious assets which we need to invest in and care about. But when we think about children it's quite limited. We think education, yeah we can invest in education and that's it. But children are more than just few sectors or industries. Children are part of an ecosystem. It takes a whole community to raise a child and investing in that same child of lips the community itself. So children are part of everything. So child lens investing is not only about education but it's about all the ecosystem where children are part of. And it's also interoperable with all other impact themes. So child lens investing if you do climate, if you do health, if you do education the child lens investing framework can be added to that and it's complementary to it. Uplifting children is not only the smart thing to do it's the ultimate way of impact investing. We truly believe that and we want you to join us and we need to do it because we are failing children everywhere. One out of six live in extreme poverty, one out of six children and one billion children on this planet lack access to life's necessities. That's a huge number and we need to join forces. So when it comes to children and what they need, over to you Kripa. Hi, thank you Alexander. My name is Kripa. I'm a UNICEF USA National Youth Council member and advocate for climate change and I just want to thank you all so much for coming to this session today and taking time out of your day to come listen to what we have to say. Today October 24th 2023 is a day filled with great concern. I'm concerned about the future. With our polluted atmosphere dependence on fossil fuels and lack of equitable solutions the climate crisis is only worsening. When I visited India I saw the large proportion of the population that was affected by climate change from displaced housing and forced migration to immediate health effects like lung cancer, heat related illnesses, respiratory problems and waterborne diseases. And who is most affected by all of this? Children. Seeing first hand the effect of environmental pollutants on well-being I became a passionate climate justice advocate but climate is only one piece of the puzzle. There are many other humanitarian issues that go hand in hand like health, education, the effective armed conflict on climate change and water sanitation hygiene. I have organized city wide trash pickups and community wide volunteering and awareness events making blankets out of plastic bags to donate to homeless shelters for example. I've been a club leader for numerous environmentally focused organizations, spoke at conferences like these and done things just as small as planting trees and taking care of gardens at school events. However, while these events are impactful it's not enough. It's simply not big enough to make the change that we are looking for. We need to be big and we need to be bold and that starts today. Now I have a question for you all. All of you are currently driving investments and are actively contributing at the decision making table. Do you know how many children you reach with your work? Do you know how these specific issues I mentioned before affect children directly? Do you have a well established child or youth committee? Young people have the most at stake and their voices need to be heard. Despite being the most affected demographic our voices and interests are underrepresented in decision making especially in the investment world. But imagine what we could accomplish if we tapped into the 12 trillion dollar private capital market. This could encourage green investments, establish public-private partnerships that support infrastructure development, promote research and development of green technologies and create climate finance literacy. It is critical to prioritize children and our needs ensuring a better future for us all. Why is it that large companies are often a cause for climate change? Let's change that narrative. Instead of utilizing fossil fuels and transportation emissions expanding production that directly causes deforestation, partaking in plastic pollution and adopting high energy technology, let's make the private sector a partner in this fight for climate justice. Philanthropy alone isn't enough to ensure that every child is healthy, educated, protected and respected. Investors have the unique power to shift capital and support the issues that matter to them and their actions whether it directly or indirectly affects the lives of children. I hope you'll listen deeply in today's conversation. We must consider the next generation in investing. It's our only hope for a better future. Today, October 24th, 2023 is now a day filled with change and hope because of you all. We need your help. Thank you. Thank you, Kripa. Children are not consumers, they are not voters, they are not a workforce. And that's why. They're not part of the equation. But we want to change that. We want all of you to embrace our call to action. Come and do research with us, advocacy, come and test and come with us to build the field of childless investing. Because that is the next big thing which is going to happen within this space. Thank you. That, the panel, please. Welcome, everybody. You all in the back. That means you, Joy. Come on up. Dimitri, you too. Come on. It's going to be more cozy if you move forward. I'm David Bank. I'm the editor and CEO of Impact Alpha. We cover everything around the impact investing field. How many of you are readers of Impact Alpha? Nice. How many of you are subscribers to Impact Alpha? Thank you. So let's just hold off on the introductions of the panel. Just a little bit of the room here. Oh, no, let's do the panel first. Because then they'll know who they're talking to. So Christina Shapiro from UNICEF USA. Just tell us briefly who you are. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm Christina Shapiro. UNICEF USA. I'm the president of the Impact Fund for Children, the Impact Investing Affiliate of UNICEF USA and a core partner in launching Child Lens Investing. Thank you. And Prith Godar from Save the Children Global Ventures. Yup. Save the Children Global Ventures is a new organization within Save the Children. You all might know that Save the Children is a humanitarian and international development organization. The Global Ventures was set up to mobilize capital for children through impact investing and innovative finance. And we are looking to be kind of very intensive doctors of Child Lens Investing. Terrific. And Caitlin Rosser from Calvert Impact. Yeah. Hi, everyone. It's great to be here today. Caitlin Rosser, a lead impact measurement and management at Calvert Impact. Calvert Impact is a non-profit impact investing firm based here in the US. We raise capital from individual and institutional investors, pull it into a loan fund through the community investment note, and then lend it out to funds and financial intermediaries operating all around the world across nine different sectors and 100 different countries. So really excited for the conversation here today. Great. And now, who are you all? First of all, how many of you once were children? How many of you have children in your life in some way, your own, your friends, family, your community? And how many of you actively consider children in your investment or other decisions? How many of you would like to learn how to actively consider women in your investment decision? Right? Children in your investment decisions. All right. So that's the setup here. And Caitlin, you have spearheaded an effort to sort of formalize and provide a framework for thinking about this. And just tell us how you've come to think about child lens investing. Sure. So thanks. Can everyone hear us? It's a little bit cavernous in here. So if you can't just let us know and we'll speak louder. So we all, I think a lot of you, because a lot of you raised your hands, know that childhood is a uniquely formative age. And any investment in children, particularly in early childhood, have a disproportionate impact in the life of that child for the rest of their lives. So what we have been doing over the past year with our partners at the Office of Innovation at UNICEF, with Tideline, who's in the audience and Criterion, who's also been a partner in this work, is to bring to life what it means to incorporate children into investment decisions. And that is simply because investors don't consider children as stakeholders. Children are ubiquitous, but they're invisible from investment decisions. And what the child lens does is it invites investors to put really their glasses on and look through the lens of a child, incorporate child-related factors into their investment strategies and processes. And with the goal of avoiding harm, but that's really a low bar. It's more than avoiding harm. It's driving improved well-being for children and improved childhood outcomes. And the approach that we took was to really pursue a principled approach to the development of a lens. And so that means bringing in key principles to this investing strategy. And so one of those core principles, which I think will resonate with a lot of you, is the principle of the whole child. And the reason that's really important is because children are not economic agents, they're often not considered as part of an investment strategy. But if you're an investor, you could be impacting a child by investing directly in the education, health, or nutrition of that child. If you're an investor that is investing in the families, it could be through small business lending for heads of households or loans and mortgages, you are impacting that child. If you're investing at the society level on the systems that children need to succeed, the education, the health care systems, you are impacting children. So by taking a whole child view, we invite investors to understand that they are having impacts on children. Every investor action, I think Kripa said it, impacts children directly or indirectly, intentionally or intentionally. So that is one of the core elements. We're inviting investors to be intentional.  There has to be intentionality, including specific elements of how you're pursuing better business practices or specific investments for outcomes in children as part of your ESG or your impact strategy. There has to be intentionality of incorporating children in your investment process and also in outlining what contribution you're having as an investor. And in doing so, what we've done is we've really created a broad tent. We learned from the gender lens investment movement, which is we wanted to create a broad tent and allow many different kinds of investors with different strategies to see themselves reflected. So this particular lens invites investors in the public equity space to be child screening investors, which means they're screening in particular opportunities or actively managing investments to ensure that the companies that they're investing in have business practices that elevate child wellbeing and avoid harm. If you're an investor in the private capital impact space, but again, you're investing in affordable housing, children are not necessarily the direct beneficiary, but you are impacting children. So you can be a child inclusive investor by pursuing those same strategies, thematic or lens-wide, but certainly understanding how you're impacting children, assessing that impact. Or you might be a child inclusive investor that has children as one of many discrete impact objectives. And of course, there's entities like Save the Children, whose North Star is impact for children. So the lens is meant to be very broad. And maybe just to end where Krippa left off is, you know, why is this important? And if you think about climate, I heard Doreen from Impact Investors Exchange talk about how women disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change. But children do, more so than anyone else in the world. 80% of children are impacted in some way or form by climate change. I heard the statistic that 20,000 children have been displaced by climate-related activities every day over the last six years. Children are also disproportionately bearing the burden of energy insecurity. So imagine a world where a climate investor who's focused on renewable energy is not only focused on renewable energy, but is focused on that renewable energy in a way that impacts households, clinics, and schools, not only driving lower carbon emissions, but better health and education outcomes. That's the vision we want everyone in this room to walk away with. Terrific. And so, Prith, let's dig in a little bit because you'd imagine that Save the Children would have already had a child lens investment, a child lens in some fashion. So what actually is new or helpful or useful about this framework? It's exactly what Christina said. It is introducing a new level of intentionality to what we do. It is very easy to be Save the Children and deploy capital and just claim impact for children, but we are looking to build the field a little bit and show that it's much more, impacting children is much more than just about saying you're doing it. It's about kind of intentionally demonstrating it and having a thought process around it. We have a variety of investment tools that we're deploying in the marketplace. We have an early stage venture fund. We have a philanthropic fund. We have another, a larger wholesale debt fund that we're trying to launch. And so we have a number of investment strategies and we have actually a number of themes across which we can deploy capital for children. So education, health, agribusiness, just a number of different ways to touch children. And the problem with our space has been that children can be touched in so many ways. That's generally a good thing. Children's impact can come through many different channels, but at the same time, because so many dots connect to children and they connect in so many different ways, there's so much kind of breadth, so much different varieties of impact for children. It's almost as if children have been overlooked as an impact theme. And that is sad because children kind of have no voice to kind of tackle that problem. If you look at gender lens investing and what's happened there, you have a lot of women champions in financial services. So kind of from the inside out, they were able to champion more capital for women, but that does not exist for children. And so taking a more intentional approach to demonstrating that intentional approach, having other people demonstrate that intentionality almost gives that voice that's missing back to children. And so we're trying to almost emulate what gender lens investing did for moving money into women. People here know about the 2x challenge. I used to work for an advisory firm before this and we used to help impact investors raise capital. And we would always tell them sign up for 2x because a lot of investors like to see a gender focus. And so we would actually see impact investors who wouldn't otherwise do it, start thinking about deploying capital for women. And so these sort of demonstrations of intentionality, these kind of field building efforts, they do actually move money. And through Save the Children's work, I think we're trying to demonstrate that this is a new thing kind of in conjunction with UNICEF, in conjunction with people like Calvert. And to make sure children kind of get that voice that they deserve in the impact investing world and beyond. Let's just stay with it for a second because actually in my trick question at the outset, I was gonna say, how many children are here? And if you notice, there's actually not very many if any. So to your point that unlike gender lens or some other lenses, you're sort of acting a little bit as a proxy for something that's not here. And so that's an interesting aspect. So just dig in a little bit on maybe on your own portfolio of how you think about this in a way that goes deeper than just the obvious, as you said, about investments that might affect children. Yeah, so we've been working with UNICEF over the past UNICEF and Tideline. Our colleagues are here over the past few months on what exactly it means to take kind of a child, like an intensive child lens investing approach to making investments. Our version of that is to start with, do no harm. It's to say, make sure that if we're making an agri-business investment, there's no children in the child labor in the supply chain. That would be kind of a, we have kind of a baseline look at do no harm. But then we quickly start looking at things like scale and things like depth as well. So in terms of scale, we look at kind of, in absolute numbers or proportional numbers, how many children are impacted. But then we also look at our vulnerable children being kind of touched, either especially low income, children with disabilities, marginalized races, refugees, et cetera, et cetera. Is there any systemic impact in something? Is the urgency of the impact very important? Is the duration of the impact going to be large? So we look at a lot of those things and then we look at that in conjunction with scale. If scale is not huge, but depth is great, we like that, or vice versa. But then we quickly move to actual intentionality. When it comes to intentionality, there's quite a bit we can process there, but we're actually, we're looking at companies that very specifically think about children as a customer segment, and that would be kind of a baseline version of intentionality. But then we're also hoping every now and then we come across companies that actually collect data from children, that actually process that in the design of their products and services and that take intentionality to the next level. And so that's broadly how we think about every single investment we make across education, healthcare, agribusiness, and even out climate as well. The last thing we look at is whether save the children can kind of amplify some of that impact through the resources we have around the world, but that kind of layout is broadly how we think about kind of translating the intentionality that Cristina was talking about into our investment processes. Terrific. And Caitlin, you're kind of at the other end of the spectrum, and I think if I understand from our earlier conversations, did not have a specifically child lens on Calvert's investments, I think you probably do have a gender lens and other things, so then take the same question. How does having a child lens affect your actual work? Yeah, David, it's a great question. It's a question that I have gotten all day yesterday. Whenever I mentioned this panel, right after, what does a child lens mean? What does that mean? I get, okay, so how is that relevant to Calvert impact for folks who know our work and our portfolio? And it was not at all obvious when we were first approached to consider the child lens framework. We lend through funds and intermediaries. The largest portions of our portfolio go to affordable housing, microfinance, SME lending, renewable energy and sustainable ag. The more obvious sectors like health and education are very, very small in our portfolio. For example, as of the last quarter, education, pure play education, was 0.2% of our portfolio. So when we considered something like looking at the child lens, it was not at all obvious at first. The connection came when our CEO, Jen Price, learned about the framework, because she's on the UNICEF USA Impact Fund for Children Board and investing in children and for children is really close to her heart. She brought the framework to our impact team and in a very non-pushy, respectful way, said, could we consider something like this? And because of the analogies, and Pranpreetha, the analogy to gender lens investing is really, really apt here. A lens and joy, you were really wonderful. At a webinar, we held with Tide Line and everyone a few weeks ago, defined lenses as centering a voice that has not been considered in the past. And that was what was so important to us when we became champions of gender lens investing at this point in 10, 11 years ago. And that's what really resonated when we really started to dig into the child lens framework, centering voices that we had never considered before. Children, we never really considered what is the impact on children. And we started to look at the impact on children in our portfolio is everywhere. Children really are ubiquitous. They are the beneficiaries of affordable housing when families are the beneficiaries of affordable housing. If you bring residential stability, you get educational and health outcomes. If you're thinking about microfinance and small business, entrepreneurs are often entrepreneurs to support their families. If you think about renewable energy, why are we investing in renewable energy? Well, for cleaner air and a more healthy environment, all for our future generations to continue to exist on this planet. So for us, it was a really, really eye-opening exercise to understand that impact on children is everywhere in our portfolio. We just needed to start being more intentional about asking about it. Let's just stick with it, Caitlin. So at some level, and Christina said this, it risks being everything and therefore not focused. So just take it either in the nine different issue areas or focus areas that Calvert has or even just in the investment process itself from sourcing and due diligence through reporting and management and whatnot. How does, what changes by looking at it this way? Yeah, absolutely. I think we're still figuring out exactly if you think about the investment management process, we're still figuring out how the child lens is going to be implemented across each of those stages. But because I'm the director of impact measurement and management, we started with impact measurement and impact reporting. So earlier this summer, we alongside Prith participated in a cohort of investors piloting this framework led by Tideline and UNICEF-USA and the other UNICEF teams. And we started, it coincidentally, was right at the time we were preparing for our annual impact data collection process. So we collect impact data on an annual basis from our 100 portfolio partners, so 100 funds in the portfolio. We usually kick off in June. It's what we say, remember, it's impact reporting season and we could go into, afterwards, I can walk through that whole process with folks, but it was a really appropriate time for us to say, okay, well, we think that this could be relevant. We've got a touch point with all of our portfolio partners coming up in a month. Let's just ask them, what are they already doing? And the results were so surprising. There were some sectors where the impact should have been more obvious to us before we asked and kind of in hindsight, it is really obvious, affordable housing. So for example, we had a portfolio partner respond back to us, self-help enterprises, they are an affordable housing developer based in the San Joaquin Valley, actually of California, and they came back to us and said, wow, we have so many additional programs that we do for children, for the families, when we're developing affordable housing, we are thinking about eco-friendly playgrounds, play spaces, appliances, we're thinking about the materials that we're using in the building development, making sure that they are non-toxic, that they're not harmful for children. They're so intentional about their housing design. As another example, a microfinance network group, Vision Fund International responded to us and said something similar. Children are centered in our work, and in fact, they actually do a survey of all of their, or of a sample of their clients across all of their networks, trying to understand a set of what they call child wellbeing outcomes and how that changes over time. The longer a clients are, clients of Vision Fund, of the particular country group. So that was surprising, but it shouldn't have been. And I think that there's a couple of sectors that we're now going forward continuing to test the relevance of this. Both in, I think, product design as well as in outcomes measurements, you know, on an annual basis, and that's renewable energy. I mean, we often say like solar home systems allow students, allow children to study, like longer they get to study after school, they get to do their homework, there's health outcomes there, there's educational outcomes there, and yet we don't actually ask about those to many of our portfolio partners. So that's an area we have to start exploring more. And so, you know, really the sky is the limit in terms of how well we can understand our impact on children across all of our different sectors. It's just gonna be about where do we start to focus going forward. Right.  So give us just a couple examples and sort of pin down on how you sort of centered children in the investments. Yeah, I'll provide a quick set of three or four different examples to just give you kind of, you know, a variation of the different, the wide variety of flavors of impact for children. And again, kind of why, you know, child lens is actually very useful. You know, we're doing something as explicit as trying to finance early childhood development centers, you know, in kind of career terms preschools in Rwanda and South Africa, for example. We know that equipping preschools better will, first of all, will increase access to preschools, but it'll also kind of, you know, retain children in preschools more, which leads to just kind of better learning outcomes. And we know that, you know, learning outcome changes in early childhood have kind of longer trajectories on things. And we had to think about that. We had to apply a child lens piece of thinking to make sure that we are making the connections in a way that are meaningful. But that's very, I mean, that's kind of a very obvious example. You know, we've also done a lot of work in health investing. And for example, we made an investment in a diagnostics company, a machine learning-based diagnostics company. They're actually here. They're called ThinkMD. And we, you know, we had to be thoughtful about what the connection was between a general healthcare company, a healthcare kind of tech company, and children. And we saw that this company had the ability to work throughout save the children's programs around the world and equip healthcare workers to be more accurate in their diagnoses of illnesses for children.  We had to kind of define kind of what the connections were to children and how strong they were and what the intentionality of this company was. In this particular case, it was strong because they had a very explicit kind of pediatric component to it. And so the connections were clear. But now, you know, we're also doing other things. We're talking to a corporate partner about trying to do outcomes-based financing for their supply chains, kind of providing more affordable financing for supply chains that don't use child labor. So now you're getting into a different flavor of thinking about children.  And that's still a question that we're trying to process through. And so again, I think we saw the use of why a structured approach to child-lens investing is important because we're also trying to prevent a little bit of children's impact washing. You know, the fact that we're maybe saying that hopefully, you know, means that child-lens investing is on the map. But yes, I mean, it just shows the needs for the tool. And then, you know, finally, we're thinking about climate investments. And this is where I think we have to be the most thoughtful because it's very easy to say that any investment we make in climate benefits children. And so therefore, you know, it's a child-lens investment. But we're trying to, again, be a little bit more thoughtful about whether there is intentionality. Instead of just saying, you know, future generations are going to inherit the future climate, we're trying to put a little bit more kind of focused specificity and intentionality behind that. But as you can see, kind of across, it's, you know, we have to apply this across venture-style investments, across philanthropic investments, across wholesale debt financing. We have thought about doing things like ETFs in public markets with a child-lens. And so all, you know, all that just shows how kind of badly something like this is needed. And, you know, just the fact that it doesn't exist at all now and it's important to build. Great, great. Christina, just take it up a level then. Like you think of UNICEF actually saved the children as well, more in services, advocacy. You don't necessarily think of UNICEF as an impact investor. I know you have a fund and Prith has a fund, but why, but take it to the level of what can investors, how can investors actually have an impact on children? So I mean, I think you've heard a lot of examples, but just why UNICEF, I mean, UNICEF operates in 190 countries, it has 16,000 staff. It's already making sure that every child is healthy, educated, protected, and respected. To add to that, UNICEF has a long trajectory of working with corporations to improve business practices through the child rights and business teams. So to us, it was a very natural extension as we're thinking about how do we address the significant gap in funding and financing available to achieve the SDGs, to really fulfill our mission. I mean, to do what Crip is asking us to do, what our other youth ambassadors and youth council members are asking us to do, we can't just think about philanthropy and government. We need to think about the full capital spectrum in the financial markets. And so our job right now is not so much as an investor. Doesn't mean that we can't in some point think about partnerships, but it's really to challenge the field to bring the youth voice, the youth lens, thank you, Caitlin, for that very effective definition of a lens. And to really ensure that investors are incorporating children. So that's the why UNICEF. As we thought about it, we wanted to make sure that whatever we were creating was highly interoperable. So we know everybody is, if you're focused on a thematic or you're already focused on a lens, the question we're getting is, are you asking us to do one other thing? And the answer is yes, but it works with what you're doing, where we built the intentionality that Tideline approached this was to make sure that this particular framework is elevating the best practices that already exist within the ESG and the impact space, operating principles of impact management, the principles of responsible investment, the SDG impact standards. It is really built on top of those. We even, part of the toolkit that was designed to accompany the framework is leveraging tools that are probably being used by a lot of investors already in this room. The difference is we're asking you to consider the impact on children, but the tools are similar.  So we looked at Iris Plus and what metrics are there that reflect impact on children that you could start to report on. So I think that's the UNICEF role. But to priest point into yours, I mean, it's not about blue washing, it's really about the intentionality. And for us, it's about investors beginning to make those connections and reflections on how are we impacting children directly or indirectly to try and understand and measure it because in order to better manage it and to be intentional, you have to be able to measure it. And you might be doing harm and not know it, but you might also be accomplishing significant impact that you're not elevating. And as I met with a lot of fund managers recently, I got asked, which is a fair point, like is this gonna help me raise money? You know, my concern is I need to raise money. I already have an impact objective. The answer is yes, I think over time, absolutely, but you need to elevate the data. If you're able to show that in addition to achieving a certain climate or energy objective, you're improving the outcome for children and families. I think that is incredibly appealing not only to investors that are focused on children, but investors that are focused on impact. So let me pause there and see if you have another question. The follow on that is yes, you can elevate the impact and the question that some folks will ask and they'll make it pushback about that is there. Are you also elevating return? So the business case question, which I know raises hackles sometimes, but it can be additive to the argument and maybe there's some indication, at least conceptually if not in the data, that there's a business advantage here. So I will say there's in the public equity space, there is emerging information. So I don't know if he's here, but Matt Goodwin from the Global Child Forum, which is a nonprofit funded by the Swedish royal family. They've created a benchmark. They've been tracking publicly traded companies and they have been showing a correlation between performance on the index as it relates to a company's performance on child rights and financial performance. So it is initial data that exists. I would say, you have evidence every day, a healthier child is a better student, is a better worker, is a better leader. So there are evidence that if you're investing in children, it results in better economic growth over time. I mean, again, that is a macroeconomic argument. So maybe not what you're looking for, but part of the challenge is because children are not economic agents, that data's not being reported, David. So that is part of when you think, what is UNICEF looking to do? Is we need to field build and all of you in the room need to help us do that. So that is elevating cases where you're seeing financial results improved because of a focus on children. I would argue that, and again, I don't have the data yet to prove it, but maybe some affordable housing investor does, is that if you are an affordable housing investor that is considering children and you're focused on better proximity to childcare, green foods, educational facilities, that you're gonna have less turnover amongst your tenant base, which improves the financial performance of the project, while also achieving better outcomes for children. Great. You seem like you were wanting to weigh in on this. I mean, I can just quickly say a couple of things. There are three levels of the case. One is, as Christina was describing, kind of reflecting almost the fact that, I think there is data around the fact that ESG investments do outperform non-ESG investments over time. And when you take a child lens to things like no kind of child labor in supply chains, I think that very much is kind of reflected. Those are practices that I think are known to generally bolster financial performance. There is also the economic case, like you said, and I think the economic cases tends to be quite clear in that there are things like data saying that if children are stunted and wasted in certain economies, there's a trend to see, that shows those economies just generally tend to have lower economic output. So that exists. And then there's the more direct case for some of the markets we operate in. Education financing is actually, there's a huge demand for it. There is a business case to go and do more lending as to schools and early childhood development centers and small businesses. So the cases exist on various different levels. I think Christina's right, like more data needs to come through to show that, but there's a lot of data that kind of already does exist as well. So maybe just to jump into your point. I mean, by not considering children, you're ignoring market segments that are growing. I'm not gonna speak to the profitability of those, but if you look at maternal child health market growing, renewable energy growing, ed tech growing, all child relevant. So I think the investors would be ignoring opportunities. I would imagine that on the other side too, that investments that hurt children could become increasingly less even available. So for example, the court case that was recently decided in Montana, where some youths assumed that the approval process for oil and gas and other energy projects and the development projects in general had to take into account children's right to a healthy environment. I think there's a federal court case moving through on the same track. There might be drivers like that or even regulatory drivers that said you must take into account children and if you couldn't, then you'd be disadvantaged. We'd love to see even more of that. We were very encouraged by that case. I know that there's other states that are going the other direction, but we're not gonna focus on those. But I definitely think that case in particular elevated the fact that a child's rights to clean air supersedes somebody's rights to pollute. And I think that was very affirmative for our vision and the mission that we're pursuing. I think we're gonna take questions from the audience. I don't know how are we doing that? Are we taking, people have notepads to write down or are we gonna just take them live? I guess people wanna do it live. And we're at, Chris, how do you wanna do it? You wanna collect them? All right. Oh, with a microphone. There you go. All right, so Chris will run around. Put your hands up again. You can choose, Chris. Thank you. Why do you think of the childcare cliff in the US? I don't understand how that happened. The childcare cliff where 3.2 million children are losing access to daycare because federal funding is expiring. It'll make a lot of working women have to quit their jobs in the US. The childcare industry also disproportionately employs working women, sorry, disproportionately employs women. So both in terms of the job loss from the women will be impacted by the childcare, daycare centers being losing funding, losing federal funding. So the childcare cliff deadline was September 30th. I've been following the mom's first and the Marshall plan, the mom's first posts, and I'd love to know your thoughts on the childcare cliff and what you guys are, like what your organizations are planning on doing to support children and mothers who will probably have to step back from the workforce to be able to take care of their children, but will lose their jobs. I can take, it doesn't answer your question directly. We're not directly working in the US at this moment, but the strategy that we talked about, we're actually trying to scale up in a bigger way in different countries. So I mentioned kind of this one transaction around financing early childhood development centers in South Africa and Rwanda. We're actually now trying to commercialize that and make a large fund, a sizable fund, something in the range of $50 to $100 million to do that around the world, starting primarily in Africa, but in other places as well. And the importance of this actually relates to something else that we didn't cover before, which is the cross section of child lens investing with other types of lenses. With this particular example that you're talking about, I think child lens investing is super interesting because making a child lens investment also contributes to gender lens investing because it actually supports the care economy as well. I mean, it allows women to participate in the workforce. Of course, it affects girls in schools and kind of girls' education as well, while generally being very intentional about investing in children. So we think, and with all of this, going back to the last question David asked, we think there's actually a strong business case to do this.  So the business case exists, and not only do you kind of get a good child lens investment, but you actually are touching other lenses as well. So we think this exact space is ripe for greater investment.  Keep it coming. Hello, and thank you for giving me the opportunity. I am Shan, I'm from Trinidad and Tobago, so I'm in the Caribbean region, and also a SOCAP entrepreneur whose business model actively incorporates children, specifically in the wash space. So I work in waste management and getting the children to, one, understand the importance of managing their work and how it affects them and how they live, and also doing that through really creative storytelling. I'm also a children's book author and created stories for them to understand the importance. So my question is, the Caribbean region has often been ignored for a long time as it pertains to investing. However, because we're all island communities and significantly impacted by the events of climate change, one of our islands was completely wiped out, which hasn't happened in over 150 years. It is important that we show that investment can come to the Caribbean region. So my question for you is, one, have you ever considered the Caribbean region as a possible area of choice for child lens investing? And two, how can entrepreneurs like myself, social entrepreneurs like myself, be able to access the funds that you have to increase or reach an impact with our work with children? Thank you. So there's a sort of interesting question embedded in that, which is people who have child lens, entrepreneurs who have child lens ventures, how can they get into kind of a pipeline for investors who are looking for child lens investing? And then the specific question about the Caribbean. Yeah, happy to take, touch on this a little bit. You know, as a, essentially we're a debt fund to fund, so we're not lending directly to operating companies or anything like that, although I really appreciate the analogy because we had a recycling company in our portfolio that we recently released a case study on and we did not at all focus on their impact on children in that success story. And I wish we could kind of go back in and re-interview the bar where I'm looking at my colleague, Catherine who heads our portfolio. And we've worked on that case study for quite a long time. And I know that Eureka recycling is the company based in the Twin Cities here in the States. I know that they incorporate children into their thesis as well. So our, I can't speak to necessarily how you can get capital from impact investors who are investing in the Caribbean, but I can certainly speak to the investments that we're making that do touch the Caribbean. And so, we have some investments through mostly kind of geographically diverse funds. So we're not kind of investing in one particular country or one particular country fund. However, there are a couple, at least one fund that's coming to mind and I'm not entirely sure if this would kind of, if you would fit in their investment strategy or anything like that. But we have a loan to Crescent. They are an SME financier in, based in Puerto Rico, but they are now part of a group called Cygnus Capital.  They're based out of Jamaica, but they do investments all across the Caribbean. And this was just a really helpful push for me to start asking a little bit more about how their investments impact children. So I just, a little bit of gratitude from me. And you can just come and talk to us and talk about your business and let's hear it. We do have one pool of money that can potentially look at this. As further advice, there's a group called Incofin. They launched a wash fund, a global wash fund. I think the Caribbean might be part of that.  What is that? We'd like to learn more. This is the president of Incofin, kind of a relatively large fund manager in impact investing. So he's interested in this. If you have something for him, I can help connect you. We can talk afterwards. Yeah. Hands in front here. Well, first, thank you for making space for this conversation and for your inspiration and the two of you too. My name is Ana Maria Ristis-Aval. I'm launching the first ed tech fund in Latam. So I'm already early adopter and I hope we can keep the conversation going. But one of the things I am doing a lot is with entrepreneurs like you. So I'm actually educating them on framework, something that they need to be following and I suggest that they do. So one is for them, like what are tools are available for them to embrace some of the frameworks that you are promoting. And the second is I'm connecting with a lot of LPs, like family offices and like endowments and others who are like learning about some of these practices. So like, maybe what's the strategy for you all to communications and advocacy and how we can all who are in this room and care about the support, the effort. So maybe the question is how LPs can help drive the conversation forward? So I'm gonna broaden a little bit and then dive back in. So I think part of our vision right now to ensure that there's awareness is doing things like this. I mean, we were at the gym, we're at SoCAP, we're just recently publishing this framework and we're trying to get it out. Tomorrow there's a delegate let's session. I see Joy here that all of us are participating and we invite you to come there because part of what we're trying to do is understand what people are doing in the child lens investing space already where there's a gap in knowledge and what we need to address. So I would say that right now we're trying to get the word out. We're inviting people to do one-on-one meetings with us and to give us feedback to understand where are the gaps. So if you're interested in adopting this framework but there are certain things that are getting in your way what are those things? What do you need from us or from other people in the field to be able to pursue this? So I would just say we're in the reflection mode and we invite everyone in this room to think about their impact and reach out but we're gonna continue to do this work and to case make, to elevate the case studies of the fund managers that participated in the cohort with Tideline to elevate how a variety of different fund managers are already thinking about child lens in different ways even when they're not exclusively focused on children. So that's something that we're committing to do in this space. I think as LPs again you can bring in the perspective of is this something I care about? This is something I wanna begin to track. You can begin to share that awareness with other LPs but I do understand if you're the sole LP in a fund sometimes it can be hard to gain traction. So it's really about also educating the GPs too as a way to drive the change in the creation of new funds or the incorporation of child lens into existing funds. Caitlin, you're essentially a fund of funds so you're an LP to those funds and so what's your experience sort of introducing this to the funds in Calvert's portfolio? Yeah, absolutely.  But still, I mean the analogy is still there and I would just say just start asking questions like we did. Really understand that you are not the expert, you are not the ones deploying capital on the ground, you're not working with the entrepreneurs but you are the ones who are going to these sorts of events and you're hearing, oh wow, this is something that investors are really starting to care about and oftentimes we might be the first person to ask a GP or a fund manager or a borrower the question but we are never the only one. We might be a little bit early but then we prepare some of our GPs, some of our fund managers, some of our borrowers to get those questions kind of on the longer term and frankly I mean I was very surprised at the positive responses that we got from let's say 20 funds when we asked our entire 100 fund portfolio over the summer who was already considering children. If we had never thought to ask the question we'd be missing out on a huge piece of the impact that our capital is helping to effect. So just come to it with humility and just start asking questions. Can I add, I'll say one more thing. We have been trying to promote Child Lens Investing by just through our fundraising work. So now when we are going to LPs and pitching we're saying yay in addition to this great investment strategy and this track record and all of those sort of things we have this thing called Child Lens Investing and everyone, well not everyone but a large majority of people are very very curious about what this is. We've gone to DFIs, they really like it, they're like tell us more, sometimes they ignore a lot of the other stuff that we have in the deck and they're like tell us more about this Child Lens Investing thing. Foundations really like it and even some family offices where kind of children's impact very much resonates with them, they like it a lot. So use it as a marketing tool. It is not high cost to do this. It is not extremely expensive. It's not difficult in any way. As long, I mean you're working an ed tech fund. It should actually be quite straight forward and easy for you and I think you will get a very good response in the market. Like I was saying earlier when I was working to advise funds on fundraising we told them always sign up for 2X. I think hopefully one day Child Lens Investing will start reaching that kind of place where you need 2X and you need Child Lens Investing to really kind of attract investors. So let's see if we get, how fast we get there. That's a good jumping off point because I was gonna do a cold call and this is why people don't sit in the front row Joy but the analogy of Gender Lens Investing has come up several times. Joy was one of the pioneers of that lens and I wonder whether you have some thoughts on just how lenses develop and what the stages of sort of market formation are as people start thinking in a new way. Chris, you got a mic here? Okay, I'm here. Okay, let's, okay, Joy you got a minute to think about it? Yes, I can think. Think, okay, back here. All right, so thank you so much for creating this space for us to discuss Child Lens Investing. My name is Claire Ugoike and I work with the American Heart Association and part of what we do is we have a social impact funds as in addition to the public health programs that we actually implement. For the social impact funds, we work with over a hundred community-based organizations where we invest in them to address social determinants of health. And so part of their solutions are basically focusing on children. We do like education, solutions around education, assess how the food, health and all that. So I'm wondering what kind of metrics would you suggest like when you're looking at Child Lens Investing, how do you measure that? How do you, what are frameworks for measuring such kind of investment? Measurement, sounds like a Caitlin question. Yeah, happy to take that one. I mean, I hate that like all of my responses not in this panel but in life are generally, it depends and it depends on the sector. And health is not a huge portion of our portfolio so I can't kind of think through some of the health specific metrics that you might think of but like Christina said, you know, they're building this impact metrics bank of existing impact metrics. So kind of sourcing from the existing metrics that are out there. And I mean really like if you think about the five dimensions of impact, what, who, how much, impact risk and contribution, this is just another who that we haven't thought of. We're not coming up with brand new metrics. These are just the same metrics that we're collecting if you're measuring health outcomes. This is just measuring the same health outcomes for children. I mean there might, there's probably certain sectors particularly education where the metrics do change so kind of take what I'm saying with a grain of salt but it's really, it's less about completely changing our measurement approach and more about centering a stakeholder that has not been a consideration in the past. So hopefully that helps a little bit. Do you have anything to add to that? I mean, we'll publish the framework is out. The toolkit will be published on our website. Hopefully by the end of this week and with it will be a link to the metrics bank so we encourage you to look at that. And I love what Caitlin said, it's about the who. Now because we are asking investors to also consider the impact on indirect beneficiaries, investors might be already tracking impacts or sorry outputs and outcomes for their primary target. So again, if it's about affordable housing, it's a number of housing units on the market that are now affordable, number of housing units that have more than two or three rooms which are typically for families. But we are asking investors to track additional metrics that are available, again, they're not new metrics but if possible, how many newly housed children as a result of those housing entities. So this is an example of an extension of existing metrics but moving beyond just the direct beneficiaries to indirect beneficiaries which we know are children but are not getting counted or measured. Great. Joy, you got a few minutes of prep time now. I'm not sure it is. When he does it, it works. So Joy Anderson, Criterion Institute and we've been alongside UNICEF and others in thinking through what would a child lens investment look like and I had actually a question back to you because one is I think what you've reinforced so well and what we learned in gender lens investing is it's important to continue to say we're not creating a new reality.  They are already affected by our portfolios. It's not like a new thing that we're making up. It's already there. The question is whether or not you have a clear lens to see it and I think that's where people get confused. Oh my gosh, there's gonna be more than one lens. We have to think about race and gender and children and well yes, you really should be thinking about all of those things at the same time without your head exploding but I think that's there. So I had actually raised my hand to ask a question, David, before you called me out but because one of the things we learned in gender lens investing where I think we went wrong early on is all of our early convenience around gender lens investing didn't actually include very many gender experts, honestly. It was created by people who were responding to investor needs that were talking about investment opportunities, looking at the data case and it was all really good work. And building the traction and all of that but so maybe one of my questions is many of you named the sort of expertise about how to look and UNICEF has this in spades, right? Sort of how do you look at in having a lens, how do we make sure it's a smart lens that actually is drawing from child rights organizations, the people who have been saved the children, people who have been looking at children's issues for a long time, how do we make sure that that depth doesn't get lost in this new movement? Because I think it's one of, we were underwhelming in gender lens investing. We sort of got focused on women on boards and didn't have a deeper, more robust story and so it's, I think this is going in a different direction but I'm curious about that and I'll also just reinforce Christina's point. We are doing tomorrow a session in the morning that really is just what we used to do for the gender lens investing breakfast here that are like, everybody come together and talk about what you're doing to build the field of child lens investing so that will be tomorrow and not a panel just a whole bunch of people talking but that's my question to you. All right so if you can craft your answer to sort of how to be smarter and what's next and make it a closing statement then you get extra points. Oh I always wanted the extra points so I'm gonna do my best here. Sorry, it's the nerd in me. It's a really good question Joy and I think that is why we wanted, we felt very strongly that UNICEF had to be at the table as a convener but obviously not the only voice in the room and that's because we do have deep programmatic expertise, not the only one clearly on what has worked for children across different thematic areas of investment and different geographies and so certainly in development of this framework we socialize this extensively within UNICEF, within our different divisions, our social policy team, our different program divisions, et cetera, our child rights and business teams to get their input and so that framework is reflective of that expertise. In terms of what's next, I mentioned that we're asking people to very much reflect. We think that one of the things that we've heard is an opportunity, not just to need an opportunity to take this incredible framework that is at a high level and deepen it, go one layer deeper into thematic areas where truly that expertise that UNICEF has will come to life. So, and I often hear my colleague Erin saying this, well what's the difference between a WASH fund and a WASH child lens investing fund? We need to bring that to life. What are the particular outputs and outcomes that we know are hugely important in the WASH space? And by the way, they may vary by geographies, but my guess is they may not.  We're not gonna be certifying funds, but we can certainly bring that knowledge through a deeper development of thematic guide. So that is definitely something that we're already in conversations on and thinking about. And then my closing statement. I leave you with this vision, right? Today, we always hear this rally call for net zero. And some of you said it before, but what if the rally call is no poverty, half of child poverty? That needs to be the rally cry by all private sector investors, not just philanthropists and governments. Yeah, my answer will be less sophisticated to, I mean, Joy's question, just copy as much as possible, don't try to reinvent. I mean, UNICEF has done all sorts of great work. We have our own kind of version that builds off that, tries to take it a little bit further.  They're just not talking about it. So I think for those people who wanna join in, just kind of use what's out there and then start talking about it more. The community of impact investors in this room, I mean, if they just simply decided to adopt child lens investing, we already have a force, a force that can go to kind of broader markets and take this to a new level. And so some of this is just about coming together as a community and saying, let's give voice to children because in this community, children don't really have a voice. So all we have to do is take a few easy steps to adopt this and we're already kind of like halfway through this battle. So talk to every impact investment fund manager on this campus about child lens investing. And Roberta, you have to get in on the game too as well. Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. I mean, obviously plus one to what Christina and Preet said, I will, you know, I think there's two kind of angles that I'd like to take here in terms of like who's an expert as well. So obviously looking at the research and relying on like the programmatic experts like UNICEF and Save the Children, it's one of the reasons we were so comfortable but also excited to engage with this framework. But in our portfolio, the experts are the fund managers. That's who we ask. Of course, the research is important. The academics are important and it's important to test our assumptions against what the research says is likely to happen. But we put a lot of faith, a lot of weight into our fund managers' experience on the ground and then the entrepreneurs' experience on the ground as well. And so how can we, and I'd love to like leave folks with this, you know, how can we elevate the community voice and children's voices here? You know, whether it's through surveys, whether it's through asking their parents, and I know there's all sorts of complications we can get into after the panel about what parents might say versus what children might say. But how can we go direct and really understand what children think about the impact that we're creating for them? How do we elevate community voice? And then I guess, you know, one just kind of parting thought. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Just start asking questions. If you are a fund manager, start asking your portfolio companies. If you are an LP, start asking your GPs. Just start asking questions about how this might be relevant to the fund, to the portfolio company, to the entrepreneur, to the small business, to their family. And I think folks will be just really, really surprised at the positive response that they'll get. Terrific. So ask questions, socialize in the impact world and poverty and child poverty.


Now we're going to go through the market, man, because you know, yes, St. Patrick's Day came early, but guess what? It was a hellish market out here today. You had the S&P futures go down to 4212, and right now we are 188 points above that. How's that? That may be first. Very close. Bottom line, what am I expecting? You can expect this S&P now 4572, where it's 45, so that's now 175 points. I expect you'll go up on a bounce. What you'll probably see is that you're going to go up with light volume, and all that sets up, folks, is the next leg down. But I expect a very large bounce now coming out of this market. NDX100 did a 1 to 1.618 ABC down. Now that number, folks, was 13,775. We got to 13,706. You rejected it, 1210 this afternoon is when the markets decided to turn, 12 o'clock, oil turned, bottom line, NDX100. You can expect the NDX100 to go up to ice, and ice on the NDX100, folks, is 15,547. So you're talking about 1,500 points from where we are, and if we get to that area, and as we get up into that area, if you see the volume contracting, the bottom line is that that very well could be a B to a C of a much larger ABC structure on the way down. This is an intense market. There's no two ways about that. The market's job is to take the most amount of money away from the most amount of people in the least amount of time. And what you're going to see here on a bounce like this is, you know, that's what we may have happened. So my take is that when we get the bounce going, bottom line protect yourself if that bounce is on life volume. Gold, I expect gold is going to bust, you get the Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday started today, no, so that's tomorrow, goes into Wednesday, bottom line, they get their hands tied. The markets tied them up big time and this gold contract wants to run to 1881, wants to run to 1925, you're going to see some real juice underneath these resource stocks, under the metals, under the agricultures. Have a great night, folks. Have a safe night. Come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, kicks us off 9 o'clock. Great program. Great information. Great way to start the day. We'll get them, folks.


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Right now in December 2023, why are GIP and GLP1 agonists in the news? Again, it's because a brand new study just came out. The weight loss drug worked for the majority of patients, but if you stop taking it, you regain some of the weight that you lost while taking the drug. Hey guys, my name is Boris. I'm a physician assistant. I'm currently working in urgent care medicine, but for my first year of clinical practice, I actually worked at a medical weight loss facility where I prescribed weight loss medications like fentramine, wagovi, and also diabetes medications that are used off-label to aid in weight loss, such as tralicity and manjaro. And the reason I'm making this video is because I saw a Zep bound, which is made by Eli Lilly, in the news and how people are concerned about it. And I thought that I would just share some of my thoughts and my experience and my opinions about the situation as a professional medical provider who used to prescribe medications just like Zep bound regularly and saw the pros and cons and saw the practical aspects of prescribing these things and using them for medical weight loss. First things first, what is Zep bound? Terzepotide. Zep bound is the brand name. Terzepotide is the name of the compounds. So if there ever is a generic version, which will hopefully be way cheaper because it's expensive, it will be called Terzepotide and it'll be made by multiple different drug makers as opposed to Zep bound, which is only made by Eli Lilly and is branded and is thereby very expensive at the moment. So what is Zep bound? So Zep bound is a combined GIP and GLP-1 agonist. And I'm not going to give you like a detailed pharmacology lecture about how exactly this thing works, but very briefly, the medication is an agonist. An agonist means that the medication mimics or acts exactly like a substance that our bodies already make naturally and in order to have a desired certain effect on the body. In this case, to lower blood sugar, curb the appetite and also help with losing body fat, which eventually the downstream effects of which are lowering risks of heart attack and stroke and also high blood pressure, obesity, etc. All right. So the TLDR, the too long didn't read version of all of this, how these medications work is they act like two hormones that the body already produces naturally, which eventually decreases appetite, decreases blood sugar, and hopefully causes weight loss, which is the desired effect. Now all of that sounds pretty great. However, what are some of the downsides? Well, like any other medication, there are side effects, most commonly nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea. In my experience prescribing these drugs, however, if you start at the lowest possible dose and very slowly and gradually titrate upwards, increasing the dose until you have the desired effect, or there are some mild side effects. So generally patients don't really have intolerable side effects. And the mild side effects that they may have will go away in a few weeks once their body adjusts to the drug. And also those mild side effects can usually be controlled with things like Zofran for nausea and other certain medications for the side effects. If you also use this is my clinical experience. If you also use different versions of these medications, such as the oral version, Rebelsis versus the injectable versions, which are multiple different injectable versions, some patients are able to tolerate some better than others. So some patients tolerate the injectables better than the oral version and vice versa. Also Rebelsis, the oral version, and I think there might even be other ones at this point, they allow you a lot more control as opposed to the injectable ones, which usually last all week. So it's a pretty good dose that kind of goes out throughout the whole week, as opposed to the oral ones, which you have to take every single day. The ones that you have to take every day is more annoying. However, you have much more control, much more ability to micro adjust so that you can kind of take a little bit less at certain times and a little bit more at others, you know, based on my clinical experience. And that also helps to mitigate some of the side effects. However, nothing I'm saying here is medical advice. Talk to your medical provider if you're interested in these medications. This is not medical advice for you personally. This is just what I did my sharing my personal experience as a prescriber of these medications. And it actually did work out very well for the majority of my patients that I use them on. Unfortunately, another side effect of these medications is missing a mortgage payment because would go be runs about $1,300 a month. Manjaro runs about $1,000 a month. Trilicity about $800 a month. And it's pretty difficult, unfortunately, to get them covered by insurance for the purposes of weight loss, especially if you don't have diabetes. Even for diabetes, it's kind of tough to get them covered by insurance, especially completely. But for weight loss, it's even harder. So the cost is definitely because these medications are so new, most of the patents are still in effect. So it's very, very difficult to afford these medications and to get insurance to cover them. But anyway, all of that is also actually old news, the cost, the side effects, the effectiveness, all of that is old news. They've been around for over a year at this point and people know what they are. So right now in December 2023, why are GIP and GLP1 agonists in the news again? Well, it's because a brand new study just came out, a randomized clinical trial, clinical trial, just came out, which concluded that, and I'm reading a quote here from the conclusions, in participants with obesity or overweight with drawings or terzepotide, the drug I mentioned earlier, withdrawing this medication led to substantial regain of lost weight, whereas continued treatment maintained and augmented initial weight reduction. So basically what that is all saying in science speak is the weight loss drug worked for the majority of patients, but if you stop taking it, you regain some of the weight that you lost while taking the drug, no way. Wait, so the drug works and if you take it, it'll work and you'll lose weight, but then if you stop taking it, you'll stop losing weight and you'll even regain some of the weight back. Okay, I don't understand why that's surprising. Why is that surprising?  So why is this surprising? What did people expect? That taking the medication for a few weeks would simply fix obesity and overweight forever? That it's impossible for you to now regain weight because you took Wagovie or terzepotide for a certain number of time? That's literally impossible. It's literally impossible. There's no treatment in the world that can do that, not even a gastric bypass. You know, the surgery where they staple part of your stomach or, you know, in layman's terms, they basically make your stomach smaller and also reducing the area that it has to absorb things so you're not absorbing as many calories or just kind of pooping them out causes tremendous, tremendous side effects, so many problems after these gastric bypass surgeries. And unfortunately, a lot of people even regain the weight, some or all of it. So I know that sounds crazy. You take your stomach and you make it a lot smaller. How could you possibly regain weight? People find a way. The body always finds a way. So not always a lot of people do lose a lot of weight and they keep the weight off, but I can't tell you in my clinical practice as a weight loss professional, a medical weight loss professional, how many people came to our medical weight loss practice because they already had a gastric bypass and they regained all or some of the weight and now they want help losing it because obviously you can't get another gastric bypass. It's, you can only get one, you know, per lifetime.  So yeah, even a gastric bypass is not permanently going to fix your weight problem for all patients. For a lot of patients, people gain, you know, most or all of it back. So there is simply no way around bad behavior. Take this as an example. Okay, let's say you wake up at 730 every morning. Let's say maybe you wake up at 8am every morning, more realistic, right?  Okay, if you do that every morning, probably right away, but eventually your foot's going to hurt. It's the same exact concept with waking up every day and having a muffin or a bagel or a donut or breakfast and then going to work and snacking throughout the day and maybe even going to HR and, you know, just taking a piece of candy from the candy dish once or twice a day and saying just a little piece of candy, you know, one's not going to hurt and then rarely or never doing anything physically active. Literally, it's the exact same concept. You do bad behavior, you get bad results. It's the way of the world. I'm sorry. I didn't make the world. That was God. That's not me. I'm just reporting the facts that if you do something, it's going to have an effect. If you have a poor diet, if you eat processed foods, if you don't exercise, you're going to be obese and simply taking a medication, especially for a limited amount of time, is not going to permanently fix that. The fact of the matter is it's a daily thing. Daily habits do add up. Daily habits matter. That's what causes either weight loss, weight gain, health or poor health. All right. So I'm not really sure what people expected and why this is so surprising to people that you stop taking the weight loss medication, you gain weight back up, but apparently it's surprising to people. But anyway, so these weight loss medications, like most medications are a crutch. Now, don't get me wrong. My job as a medical provider, as a licensed physician assistant, is literally to practice medicine, which means I occasionally do prescribed medications. I'm not opposed to medications. I think they're magic. I legitimately think medicine is magic. That's why I love it. And that's why I practice it. That's why I committed so many years of my life to it is because medicine is magic. I still am baffled every single day. It never ceases to amaze me that a tiny little pill can eliminate or at least drastically reduce terrible suffering that without that pill would have been impossible or at least difficult to tolerate. Medicine really is magic. And surgery, also part of medicine, also just fixes things that people would have just had to live with or die from. So medicine is magic. However, even though it's magic, it cannot simply solve every one of your problems. In the case of weight loss, medication can help. It's been proven. And sometimes it can even help quite a bit. But as this study shows, it's not a silver bullet. It won't permanently fix your problem. Okay, guys, hope you enjoyed that. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'll see you in the next video.