Financing impact

Abrar is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow at Saïd Business School researching on topics of global environmental change, climate finance and corporate purpose. He is affiliated with Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and is a Fellow of Green Templeton College. Abrar is currently on a prestigious three-year British Academy Fellowship at Oxford, investigating the ways in which dedicated climate funding, such as the Green Climate Fund, and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and distributed ledgers, shape implementation and diffusion of climate action in Pakistan and emerging economies. He was on the core research team for a pioneering Oxford collaboration with EY Global, to understand how and why C-Suite and Boards from large global MNCs are again focused on corporate ‘purpose’ in a turbulent global economy. The findings contribute to a global research initiative on corporate transformation to meet the challenges of the early 21st century.

Alex Nicholls is the first tenured professor in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford. He is also a Tutorial Fellow and Member of the Governing Body at Harris Manchester College. In 2004, he was the co-founder of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship - for which he helped raise the core funding - as well as the co-founder of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, which he founded in 2010. Alex is the co-author of a major research book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, Sage, 2005) and the editor of the first scholarly collection of papers on social entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2006, 2008). In 2015, he published a further co-edited volume on social finance and a new book on social innovation with NESTA. 

In 2019, Alex published a book examining the economic underpinnings of social innovation in the European Union, based upon CRESSI.

Bridget is an economic anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Saïd, where she is Director of the global research Initiative, Ownership Project 2.0: Private Capital Owners & Impact. Bridget received her PhD in Economic Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Fellow of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. With a focus on economic topics in South Asia, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh, Fellow of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and Language Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies to support Bengali language proficiency via full-time language study in Kolkata, India. Bridget was previously a fellow in residence at the WZB (Centre for Social Science Research) in Berlin and has served on the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council for Development Finance.

Gayle is co-founder and CEO of pfc social impact advisors, an international consultancy offering strategic guidance in leadership development, programme strategy, and impact measures to leading foundations, corporations, impact investors, governments, and intermediaries. She also directs the Oxford Impact Investing Programme and the Social Finance Programme at Saïd Business School. Gayle has two decades of experience as a strategist, philanthropist, and trusted advisor to social investors worldwide. She has managed and assessed more than US$15 billion in philanthropic and social investments to alleviate poverty, mitigate climate change, promote gender and financial inclusion, and build the capacity of new leaders in the field of social finance. She has also advised social investors in more than 45 countries and has taught social investing classes worldwide. 

Jonathan's business, public policy, teaching, research, writing and not-for-profit work largely focuses on creating more environmentally, socially and economically resilient cities. Based in New York, Jonathan is the President of Jonathan Rose Companies, LLC and leads the firm’s vision, program and growth by developing award winning new projects, investment funds and city plans to model solutions which integrate the issues of affordable housing, community development, culture and the environment. Jonathan is also the Vice Chair of the Board of Enterprise Community Partners. Moreover, he and his wife Diana Rose are the co-founders of the Garrison Institute and he serves as Chair on its Board and leads its Pathways to Planetary Health Program.  

Karim is a practitioner, educator, and researcher in impact measurement and impact investing. Karim has worked with prominent private, public, and social sector organisations on evaluating the impacts of grant-making and impact investment strategies of individual programmes, complex portfolios and ecosystem-level initiatives in developed and emerging markets. He was the Co-Chair of the Impact Measurement Task Force convened by the Government of Ontario, and a member of the Impact Measurement Working Group of the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force. Karim was previously Advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation on social impact measurement, and he co-founded the Topical Interest Group on Social Impact Measurement at the American Evaluation Association. Karim was previously co-founder of Purpose Capital (now Rally Assets), where he established and led its Impact Advisory practice. Karim is a senior fellow with the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, leading capacity development programming for non-profits and charities on impact measurement.

From 2002 to 2024, Melissa was the founding President and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc., an innovative non-profit whose mission is to accelerate philanthropy in pursuit of a just world. Melissa built RPA into one of the world’s leading philanthropic advisory, grant making, research and project management services, facilitating more than US$500 million per year across dozens of countries in all major issue areas. 

Under her leadership, RPA developed the “Philanthropy Roadmap” donor guides with support from the Gates Foundation. She created “The Theory of the Foundation” research program and wrote multiple reports in that initiative. An adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Business School, Melissa has also been appointed to the 2024-25 Visiting Faculty of Tsinghua University’s Schwarzman College and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. She is a board member of Candid, Equality Now, and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. In 2023, she was a Bellagio Center fellow. Melissa holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University

Nick Andreou is founder of Impact Edge Consulting, an advisory firm that helps early-stage investors and startups leverage impact as a source of competitive edge. He was previously an investment manager at Big Society Capital, Head of Insight and Impact at Balloon Ventures, and a researcher at the University of Nottingham. He holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and an MBA from Oxford’s Said Business School. He is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and a guest speaker at London Business School. Nick is also a founding member of ImpactVC, an initiative dedicated to helping VCs unlock their impact potential. 

Dr. Pu Yang is a researcher for the Climate Compatible Growth project at Energy and Power Group. Her research intersects climate economics and sustainable finance, exploring how social impact can be monetized to motivate more ambitious climate actions. Her current focus is to measure the social economic benefits of energy transition to promote climate-compatible growth in Kenya, Zambia, and Vietnam, aiming to harmonize economic development with environmental sustainability.

From 2015 - 2022 Sean was the CEO of the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) and Director of the Economic Justice Program at the Open Society Foundations. Prior to this, he was a strategic investment advisor focusing on China, Mongolia, and Africa and the social and economic impact of large-scale extractive investments working for Goldman Sachs (Asia) and the Rio Tinto group. He began his career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and worked for many years in film, television and newspapers. He is an Executive-in-Residence at University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School where he teaches the Impact Investment course. He is a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute, and serves on the boards of: NatureFinance, and the Baha’i Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland.

Dr Sugandha Srivastav is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in Environmental Economics at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Sugandha's work lies at the nexus of the economics of innovation and environmental economics. Her research explores how to bring early-stage technologies to market and the role of R&D support, advanced market commitments and other de-risking instruments. She explores how society can most efficiently incentivise investment in technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver broad societal goals. 

Tara helps build entrepreneurial ecosystems all over the world. From delivering fund-raising strategies to agricultural cooperatives in Angola to helping Arabian Gulf governments launch startup investment funds, she has dedicated most of her adult life to catalysing entrepreneurship, especially to growing enterprises in emerging markets and under-served communities in the U.S. Tara started her own company which trained over 2000 entrepreneurs across Africa and Latin America. Tara shifted her focus to impact investment and is now Director of Chemonics International, doing both strategy consulting and impact investing in Africa and the Middle East.