Community health workers offer a practical starting point
150
0
How donor-advised funds are becoming catalytic capital platforms
190
0
Why circular migration may offer a better path than mass repatriation
213
0
Lessons from Atlanta’s BeltLine and Pittsburgh Yards
384
0
Jeremy Nicholls on building an accounting system fit for the impact economy
440
0
How portfolio theory could make cultural infrastructure more investable
464
0
Founded in 2011, Impact Entrepreneur is a global platform dedicated to advancing the impact economy.
We exist to explore, interrogate, and amplify how entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and institutions are reshaping markets to address the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges — and where those efforts fall short.
At its core, Impact Entrepreneur is about systems change. We focus on how capital, enterprise, governance, culture, and power interact, and how those systems must evolve if we are to move beyond incremental improvement toward durable, equitable, and regenerative outcomes.
Impact Entrepreneur’s mission is to help build an economy that works for people and planet — not by promoting isolated solutions, but by advancing field-level understanding of how economic systems actually change.
We do this by creating space for rigorous inquiry, honest dialogue, and practitioner-informed insight. Our work is grounded in the belief that meaningful progress requires confronting complexity, surfacing tradeoffs, and learning from real-world experience — not just aspirational narratives or surface-level metrics.
Impact Entrepreneur operates as an integrated ecosystem of journalism, research, convening, and community:
IE Magazine
Our digital magazine features original journalism, analysis, and practitioner perspectives examining the impact economy across regions, sectors, and disciplines. We prioritize depth over hype, evidence over assertion, and clarity over simplification.
Research
Impact Entrepreneur Research produces field-building insights, frameworks, and analysis focused on how impact is designed, financed, governed, and measured. Our research is applied, collaborative, and oriented toward informing decision-making in complex systems.
Webinars and convenings
Through programs such as Luminarias, Building an Impact Economy, and Deep Dives, we convene leading thinkers and practitioners for conversations that go beyond presentation. These sessions explore lived experience, challenge assumptions, and surface insights that emerge only through dialogue.
Community
Impact Entrepreneur is also a global community of entrepreneurs, investors, scholars, policymakers, and field-builders. We serve as a connective tissue across disciplines and geographies — fostering learning, exchange, and collaboration among those actively engaged in shaping the impact economy.
Impact Entrepreneur does not treat “impact” as a branding exercise or a peripheral adjustment to business as usual. We are explicit about the limits of incrementalism and the risks of impact-washing.
Our work is distinguished by:
We aim to be constructive without being promotional, critical without being cynical, and rigorous without being inaccessible.
Impact Entrepreneur serves:
Our audience is united not by ideology, but by a shared recognition that today’s economic systems are misaligned with long-term human and ecological well-being — and that new approaches are urgently needed.
The challenges we face — climate instability, inequality, democratic erosion, resource degradation — are systemic. Addressing them requires more than innovation at the margins. It requires rethinking how value is defined, how capital is deployed, how institutions are governed, and how accountability is enforced.
Impact Entrepreneur exists to support that rethinking — and to help translate it into practice.
Frogs are universal symbols of transformation, fertility, creativity, and wisdom — alive in the mythologies of disparate cultures around the world throughout human history. Frogs are a sign of healthy ecosystems (“indicator species”), and come in many colors that blend them into their local environment.
For us, the aspirational frog in our logo is a totemic mandala. It is a representation of all those who aspire for a better world through “the business of change.” Our frog was also designed to recall the "boiling frog" story that emerged from studies conducted in the late 1800s at Johns Hopkins University. A frog that falls into boiling water will jump out due to the heat, while a frog placed in slowly heating water will simply sit there until it, uh, croaks…, making it a potent metaphor for human action (or inaction) in the face of significant social and environmental challenges.
Our frog, of course, knows better and jumps before it cooks — like the systems-minded impact entrepreneur!
Join our global community of systems-minded changemakers.
Subscribe to the Impact Entrepreneur newsletter for the latest insights, magazine features, and invitations to exclusive webinars, Deep Dives, and events.