Grant Trahant

Hi, I owe you an apology. Over the past several months, content on Causeartist has slowed down. Fewer interviews, fewer stories, less of what brought many of you here in the first place. That wasn’t by accident. I’ve been heads down building something I believe the impact community has needed for a long time, but that hasn’t existed in a real, cohesive way. Causeartist 3.0. At its core, this next chapter is about combining two things that have always lived separately: Storytelling and infrastructure.

Most impact funds operate at the margins of traditional finance. The Citi Impact Fund operates from inside one of the largest banks in the world. That's a different kind of leverage. Meredith Shields manages a $500 million carve-out from Citi's balance sheet, deployed exclusively into double bottom line companies. In this episode, she covers how the fund defines impact, why it moved to Series B investing, and what she's watching in sectors like care, education, and financial resilience.

Max Friedman didn't set out to build one of the most widely used fundraising platforms in the nonprofit sector. He and his two co-founders, Ari Krasner and Leon Cohen, started with a simpler observation: the tools available for people who wanted to raise money for a cause were either expensive, hard to use, or both. And the fees were rarely transparent. That was 10 years ago.