Liesel Pritzker Simmons: All In on Impacting Investing

Liesel Pritzker Simmons, 31
Co-founder and Principal, Blue Haven Initiative
Boston

Liesel Pritzker Simmons doesn’t just talk about impact investing. She backs up her excitement with action.

Raised in a wealthy civic-minded family, Ms. Simmons developed an early sense that social challenges are too big to be solved by only giving. She set up Blue Haven Initiative as a laboratory to answer the question: What happens if a family office — the company a wealthy family sets up to manage its holdings — invests all its assets prudently to optimize their social and environmental impact?

With no skeptical board to persuade, she has the autonomy to experiment and learn by doing, an approach well suited to her action-oriented instincts. And she is working to ensure that these lessons ease the way for others.

This year, she helped launch The ImPact, a nonprofit that aims to speed the spread of impact investment through a peer- learning network. Ms. Simmons brings a winning wonkiness to the work: Ask about her most exciting investment and she’s just as likely to talk about the yields on bonds she bought from a large corporation because of its commitment to transparent reporting as the celebrated solar-power start-up bringing lighting to rural Kenya.

Mr. Bugg-Levine is chief executive of the Nonprofit Finance Fund.