Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

Cathy Clark first came to my attention as the coauthor of the book The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism. However, as she tells me in this interview, she had an early start to social entrepreneurship. Cathy grew up in inner city Philadelphia. While still a high-school student, she helped her father create a program that prepared students for college. Through this experience, she learned that social outcome is the result of a well-run organization. Through her career she has had stops at the Aspen Institute, Markle Foundation, Flatiron Partners, Columbia University and the Investor’s Circle, to name a few. Today, Cathy is the Director of the CASE Initiative on Impact Investing (or i3) at Duke University. The mission of CASE i3 is to build the field and market of impact investing so that it can support the needs of social entrepreneurs and investors. Key quotes from the interview: “To get to a social outcome…you have to know how to run an organization.” “It wasn’t