Investing for Impact & Change

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to the increasingly popular movement around impact investing and how money can be used to create positive change alongside a financial return. Financing the UN Sustainable Development Goals has been estimated as a $12 trillion business opportunity and we will explore how investments can positively impact important areas such as sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, conservation, as well as affordable and accessible basic services such as housing, healthcare, and education. Through exploration of real-life case studies and an interactive approach to learning, you will gain valuable tools that enable you to approach social and environmental challenges in a sustainable way. Guest lectures and site visits let you meet a wide range of inspiring impact investors, social entrepreneurs and political activists who work with making investing work for the greater good. The course includes a study trip to London where some of the leading actors within impact investing are situated. Experiential learning is a key component of the course and students will be actively engaged in learning in the following ways: 1) Developing their own investment deal by identifying a real-life solution that benefit society, measuring its impact and proposing a financial instrument that can enable and scale the solution. 2) role-playing games to understand interests from the various actors in the investment landscape, site visits and guest lectures from professionals within the field 3) learning about the communicative journey to engage more new investors to the market with education-oriented stories how to make an impact with money.