Dear Members and Readers,​

As 2022 draws to a close, we can look back at the previous twelve months with a great deal of satisfaction at the continued progress we have made in our work. When I established Impact Entrepreneur — the term and business — in 2011, a primary goal was to inject into the discussion around mission-driven business and finance a notion of “systems-mindedness”. It is not enough, I argued then and to this day, to build individual businesses that “do good and do well” in the world. Unless we — entrepreneurs, investors, scholars, policy experts, and others — also work together to build a new business paradigm and ecosystem that is fully anchored to sustainability values, goals, and thinking, impactful businesses will undoubtedly founder in a single bottom line status quo that is largely antithetical to the emerging stakeholder-centric models of the “impact economy”.

A further, ambitious goal at the business’s creation was to establish a new archetype of professional. Never had a business sought to create, and succeeded in creating, a global movement in its name.

In this endeavor we have succeeded. Searching the web for “impact entrepreneur” will reveal thousands of individuals around the world who have embraced the term as a vocational identifier, and innumerable media sources that have used the term in their articles. The power and potential of this unique type of brand ubiquity and the global movement of impact entrepreneurs that it has inspired, cannot be understated.

Let’s review some highlights and data points from our work over the past year:

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  Impact Entrepreneur’s Founder, Laurie Lane-Zucker, attending Earthshot Prize 2022 Awards in Boston.

  2022 marked Impact Entrepreneur’s 11th year in existence, and first full year of publishing Impact Entrepreneur Magazine — the first publication anchored to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 other, related issues areas (“Impact Economy”), and covering business and finance innovations that are advancing these subjects in every region of the world.

• Network membership grew 12% in 2022 to exceed 34,700 members in over 180 countries.
• In 2022, Impact Entrepreneur Magazine published over 160 feature articles and news updates. The magazine currently has 18 correspondents and 55 content partners.
• IE Magazine received funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Agency to produce a series of articles on blue economy and resilience economic development in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean.
• Impact Entrepreneur hosted 23 live programs — webinars and deep dives, featuring many of the leading lights of the impact space.
• Impact Entrepreneur TV, IE’s YouTube channel, posted 112 original videos.
• Impact Entrepreneur, with Mission Investors Exchange, organized the inaugural Impact Journalism Summit at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Summit’s participants included impact media publishers, editors, and journalists, as well as philanthropists and impact investors.
• Impact Entrepreneur was honored to be an Official Nominator for The Earthshot Prize, the largest environmental innovation competition in the world, and was pleased to attend The Earthshot Prize Awards ceremony in Boston earlier this month.

Looking ahead to 2023, our team is working with our advisory board and anchor funders to expand our operational capacity so that we can continue to build on the significant momentum and be better situated to contribute in meaningful ways to the enormous social and environmental challenges humanity and the more-than-human world face in this decade. We will be announcing important new developments in the weeks ahead as they are put in place.

Impact Journalism Summit Attendees

In the meantime, if you wish to support Impact Entrepreneur’s work, here is how you can:

• Become a Premium Member and benefit from, among other perks, access to the full magazine article archive and webinar/deep dive archives, priority admission to all live programs, and use of the filterable member directory.
• Make a philanthropic contribution to Impact Entrepreneur. IE has two nonprofit fiscal agents, ImpactAssets and Realize Impact. Tax-deductible contributions as well as grants made from donor advised funds and foundations, can be provided through either fiscal agent. Here is a link to give through Realize Impact.

Thank you in advance for your support of Impact Entrepreneur and our efforts to build the Impact Economy!

Best regards,

Laurie Lane-Zucker, Founder & CEO