{"id":37267,"date":"2023-03-27T19:13:04","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T23:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?p=37267"},"modified":"2023-04-27T21:43:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T01:43:57","slug":"celebrating-women-and-investing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/celebrating-women-and-investing\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Women and Investing"},"content":{"rendered":"
>> Back to April 2023 Issue<\/a><\/div>\n

\"Stella<\/b>In honor of Women\u2019s History Month, Stella Tai, Stewardship Investing Impact and Analysis Manager at Praxis Mutual Funds, interviews Lori Scott to reflect on the contributions and achievements of women in the field of investing.<\/h2>\n

Lori Scott joined Praxis Mutual Funds<\/a> as a Trustee in 2023, and is the Managing Director, Impact Credit at Lafayette Square<\/a>. Lori previously worked at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Anthos Asset Management, Armature Consulting, and Calvert Impact. She brings over 25 years of experience in community development finance and has paved her own way in the impact investment field.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Stella: Tell us about your background and how you got into investment management\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Lori:<\/b> I came to impact investing indirectly. I grew up in a steel mill town in Indiana that became increasingly economically distressed, and going to college was my way out. My first job was at a City of Chicago program that funded artists to bring their work to disinvested neighborhoods. Over and over, I saw the power of arts to engage people, create community, preserve culture and enrich lives, but against the backdrop of deep economic inequalities. This sparked my interest in community development, and I went back to get my MBA with the vague notion that business skills could be used for good purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

After business school, I became a real estate lender at Illinois Facilities Fund, a community development finance institution, making loans to nonprofit social service facilities like child-care centers. For decades now, CDFIs have shown how to build healthy portfolios seeking to generate a consistent yield while making capital available where mainstream financing was not available.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stella: Why was a focus on underserved women, people and places important to you?\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Lori:<\/b> Reimagining how capital can be used to solve problems is what drew me to this work. Impact investing can be used as a tool to realize human potential by re-channeling capital to support quality basic goods and services like quality health care, affordable housing and quality jobs. It is a tool for making systemic changes increasing the support of underserved women, diverse entrepreneurs and fund managers, further shifting capital to underserved people and places and making strides to bridge the wealth gap.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Stella: What are your current views on the state of gender-lens investing?\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Lori:<\/b> When I first joined Calvert Impact, a leading impact investing institution, our investment strategy was centered on community development and affordable housing in the U.S. and microfinance internationally. Microfinance was where I first learned about gender-lens investing, as many of the early microfinance models focused on women, and it became a wide-scale demonstration that very poor women around the world were a good credit risk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is so much inspiring work going on right now in gender-lens investing, with a global blossoming of talent pioneering innovative investment strategies and contributing to thought leadership, research, and data. There has been an uptick in diverse voices in the gender conversation \u2013 an overdue improvement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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