Nov 7, 2024
Why We Invested in Catalyze GP Runway Fund
By Catherine Toner and Emily Williams
Why We Invested is a series created by the Gary Community Ventures Impact Investing team that highlights recent investments and our overall investment philosophy. The goal of this series is to share our due diligence in service of empowering other impact investors and foundations to continue to leverage their full corpus for mission aligned investments. If you have any additional wonderings or recommended opportunities based on the content you see here, please reach out!
INVESTING IN LEADERSHIP
At Gary Community Ventures, we believe that investing in people means investing in the future. By supporting the growth and development of transformational leaders today, we are not just investing in individuals in the near term, we are investing in the future of Colorado communities. As a sunsetting foundation that will cease to exist in 2035, we are increasingly focused on investments that will have a lasting, scaled impact beyond our organization’s lifespan. Whether in business, nonprofits or government, equitable and inclusive leadership is essential to ensuring Colorado children and families have access to crucial economic and educational resources that enable choice-filled lives. Creating new organizations or businesses, implementing innovative programs, or advocating for policies that improve the lives of Coloradans requires convicted, connected, and resourced change-makers.
To date, Gary’s leadership strategy has focused on launching and supporting The Piton Fellowship – a leadership development program for diverse Coloradans, primarily leaders of color, seeking to drive positive change for themselves and their communities. The rapid growth of The Piton Fellowship, with 209 current fellows, demonstrates a significant need and a strong desire among diverse Coloradans for leadership development opportunities.
As is true across all of Gary’s focus areas (School Readiness, Youth Success and Family Economic Mobility), we know that true systemic change requires a multifaceted approach. Recognizing this, our commitment to supporting transformational leadership has led us to explore new levers for empowering more leaders in Denver and across Colorado.
our investment in catalyze gp runway fund
One such lever is supporting investment leaders and fostering a more inclusive investment ecosystem. We believe that increasing the number of underrepresented and innovative fund managers is crucial for ensuring that capital is allocated in ways that support underserved communities and address critical social and economic challenges. That’s why we are excited to invest in Catalyze GP Runway Fund, a platform providing working capital loans to emerging fund managers, or “Capital Entrepreneurs”, to help them build enduring investment firms.
Alongside Spring Point Partners and Blue Haven Initiative, Gary is anchoring the fund, which aims to address the operational cash needs that often exclude Capital Entrepreneurs from entering the investment ecosystem and becoming capital allocators and decision-makers. It was both the opportunity to establish pathways for more underrepresented and innovative managers to build wealth and to have a direct influence on how capital is allocated in markets that made this such an energizing opportunity for the Gary investment team. We look for opportunities to invest early, establishing strong relationships with values-aligned managers and entrepreneurs who share our goal to create more opportunity for those who live, work and raise their families in Colorado.
In the same way that we believe that Piton Fellows will create rippled impact within their communities, we believe that investing in leaders and diversifying who has control over where capital is allocated will have a cascading effect and result in more resilient economies.
Learn more about Catalyze here.
Learn more about The Piton Fellowship here.
MANAGING DIRECTOR, IMPACT INVESTING AT GARY COMMUNITY VENTURES
CATHERINE TONER
Catherine is Director of Impact Investing at Gary Community Ventures, where she leads investing and product structuring for the organization’s family economic mobility outcome area. She has a particular focus on housing finance, community and employee ownership, and the future of work. She has a passion for creating innovative investment structures that produce sustainable and scalable impact.
At Gary, that work has included structuring of The Dearfield Fund for Black Wealth, a fund launched by Gary to close the racial wealth gap by increasing Black families’ access to homeownership in Denver, and conceptualizing the tenant equity structure and helping to design the financing strategy for Proposition 123, the first successful ballot measure in the U.S. to create a statewide solution to the affordable housing crisis.
DIRECTOR, STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
EMILY WILLIAMS
Emily has spent her career connecting people, ideas, and capital in service of sparking meaningful partnerships and advancing audacious goals. As the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Gary Community Ventures, she designs and leverages engagement opportunities with aligned funders to create collaborative, breakthrough solutions.