Reflections on a Decade of Purpose-Driven Investing

By Santhosh Ramdoss, President and CEO of Gary Community Ventures, and Mark Gustafson, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Caprock

In 2016, Gary Community Ventures made an uncommon bet. We decided that every dollar on our balance sheet, not just the traditional 5% set aside for grantmaking, should work in service of our mission to reshape the arc of opportunity for Colorado kids and families. That meant finding a partner willing to walk an uncharted path with us. We found that partner in Caprock.

What followed was a decade of collaboration that built a deeply mission-aligned investment portfolio and, in the process, helped push the broader field of impact investing to the mainstream.

This spring, Gary and Caprock are graduating from our advisory partnership. Gary is bringing investment management in-house as part of its journey toward a 2035 sunset, the deliberate, founder-directed transfer of all assets to the community. But before we look ahead, we want to look back at what this partnership produced and what it means for the field we both helped shape.

Where We Started

When Caprock came on board in 2016, the landscape for mission-aligned investing looked very different than it does today. Most foundations kept their endowments safely siloed from their programmatic work. The endowment was managed for returns; the program side distributed grants. The two rarely spoke to each other, and there was, in the words of many practitioners, a kind of violent gatekeeping between the two.

Gary’s founders, Sam and Nancy Gary, saw it differently. They believed that capital is never neutral. It either reinforces existing systems or helps transform them. Their vision wasn’t just to “do impact investing.” It was to deploy 100% of Gary’s assets in alignment with its mission, using the portfolio as an active tool for systems change alongside grantmaking, policy advocacy and venture building.

For Caprock, Gary’s vision stood apart. It created a rare opportunity to partner with an organization seeking to fully align its capital with its mission, testing whether a deeply integrated approach, one that pursued both financial performance and measurable impact, could be executed at scale.

What We Built

Over the next decade, the Gary-Caprock partnership explored a territory that few foundations and advisors had walked together:

Mission-aligned portfolio. Together, we built a portfolio where every asset class helped support Gary’s mission. The goal wasn’t to avoid harm; it was to actively advance systems change for Colorado kids and families.

Deep private market partnerships. We identified and invested in private fund managers and direct opportunities aligned with Gary’s core priorities: affordable housing, early childhood, family wealth-building, and community ownership. These weren’t off-the-shelf impact funds. They were carefully selected relationships where Gary’s capital could be catalytic.

Place-based investing experiments. Gary’s commitment to Colorado meant that a significant portion of the portfolio had to find its way home. We explored approaches for deploying capital directly into Colorado communities through community development financial institutions, local housing investments, and collaborative vehicles that pool philanthropic capital for local impact.

The Caprock-Gary partnership demonstrated that a portfolio can be managed with institutional discipline while remaining fully aligned with mission. It moved full portfolio impact investing from concept to a repeatable approach in practice.

Why We’re Graduating

Gary operates under a 2035 sunset mandate.

As we get closer to our goal of leaving behind a Colorado that flourishes well beyond us, the investment work is evolving. The portfolio is shifting toward capital preservation and community transfer structures. But the work ahead isn’t simply about winding down. It’s about catalytic discovery that is deeply mission-oriented: finding the investments that build durable community wealth, integrating the portfolio even more tightly with our programmatic work, and ensuring that every asset we hold can ultimately become a community asset.

This is where the partnership’s legacy becomes most visible. Over the past decade, Gary built something that went beyond traditional advisory: the portfolio became one of four interconnected tools, alongside grantmaking, policy, and venture building, working in concert toward shared outcomes. What some industry leaders have begun calling systemic investing, the strategic orchestration of multiple forms of capital in service of systems transformation, is simply what Gary learned to do. That integration, that muscle, is now part of who we are as an organization.

Internalizing our investment operations is a reflection of the growing internal capacity we’ve built at Gary and the phenomenal team here. It’s the natural next step for an organization that has learned, with Caprock’s input, how to use its full balance sheet as an instrument of change. The questions we’re now asking require investment thinking that is embedded within our programs, our policy work, and our community relationships in ways that only an in-house team can provide.

In many ways, this transition reflects the kind of partnership Caprock has sought to foster from the beginning: helping clients develop the capabilities and confidence to pursue their financial and impact goals. Sometimes that means growing alongside an organization over time; in other cases, it means helping create the conditions for an organization’s next chapter. Both represent successful partnerships. For Gary, this moment marks the latter, with a decade of partnership helping establish the foundation for this work to continue from within. 

What Has Changed And What Endures

The most important product of a decade of partnership isn’t a portfolio. It’s what the portfolio helped prove:

That mission alignment doesn’t require return sacrifice. Gary’s portfolio has delivered competitive returns while being fully aligned with its values, demonstrating that the old binary between “doing good” and “doing well” was always a false choice.

That foundations can be more than grantmakers. When you deploy 100% of assets in service of mission, the distinction between “endowment” and “program” dissolves. The entire organization becomes an instrument of change.

That the best partnerships end well. In a sector where relationships often outlive their usefulness out of inertia or obligation, Gary and Caprock are choosing a different path: honoring what we built by being honest about what comes next. The ending isn’t a loss. It’s evidence that the work succeeded.

That what starts as pioneering can become practice. The approaches we developed together, full portfolio alignment, place-based investing, integrated capital deployment, justice-centered investment criteria, are now part of the standard vocabulary of impact investing. That’s not because the field lowered the bar. It’s because practitioners raised it.

As Gary moves into its final decade and Caprock continues to grow and serve new clients, we carry forward the lessons of this partnership. For Gary, the conviction that every dollar should work toward a more just Colorado. For Caprock, the belief that this approach could extend beyond a single portfolio, shaping how we help clients align capital with impact.

For the field, a proof point: that when a foundation and an advisor share real conviction, the impact extends far beyond the portfolio.

Santhosh Ramdoss is CEO of Gary Community Ventures, a Colorado-based philanthropic organization working to reshape the arc of opportunity for kids and families as it approaches its 2035 sunset.

Mark Gustafson is Co-Founder and Managing Director at Caprock, a multi-family office serving high-net-worth individuals and foundations, where he built the firm’s impact investing platform to help clients align their portfolios with their mission and values.