Insights
From Permission to Practice: What Institutional Investors Need to Move Impact Investing Forward
By Samantha McDonald, Realize Capital Partners
September 2026
Last week’s Responsible Investment Summit (RIA) 2026 held its first ever impact day, a notable signal that interest in impact investing is meaningfully making its way into conversations at the institutional level.
This shift connects closely to the work we began earlier this year, in partnership with Millani Inc., bringing together a cohort of institutional investors to explore what it takes to move impact investing from intention to action.
The initiative is part of a portfolio of products under our market-building mandate as a wholesaler of Canada’s Social Finance Fund. Over three sessions, participants worked through some of the practical questions institutions face as they consider impact investing, from fiduciary duty and internal barriers to due diligence, governance and making the investment case.
Below are some key lessons from this pilot learning series. A more comprehensive account of the experience can be found in our report, From permission to practice: insights from the Impact Investing Convening Series.
The Sessions
Across three virtual sessions held in April and May 2026, approximately 18 participants from about a dozen institutions across Canada took part in the Impact Investing Convening Series.
The cohort consisted primarily of mid-sized asset owners, including defined-benefit and dual-mandate pension plans, life insurers, university endowments, and private and community foundations.
Participants came from different starting points. Some had already made impact investments or established impact as part of their portfolio strategy, while others were still exploring the concept internally. What united them was the practical reality faced by many mid-sized institutions: interest in impact investing without having a dedicated impact team or extensive internal research capacity.
The sessions were designed with that reality in mind. Participants learned from legal experts, impact investing practitioners at other asset owners and experienced investment committee members. They also worked through a fictitious investment case and applied scenarios intended to move the conversation from theory to practice.
The Incremental Learning Journey
The series followed a deliberate progression, beginning with a foundational question: is impact investing compatible with our fiduciary duties and mandate?
For most participants, the legal pathway was clearer than commonly assumed. The more difficult questions centred on implementation: what would impact investing look like within their institution, and what would need to change to make it possible?
From there, participants examined the barriers standing between interest and action. Some were common across institutions, including limited track records, inconsistent definitions and gaps in education. Others were institution-specific, such as mandate, governance, capacity, liquidity requirements or relationships with external advisors. An important part of this exercise was distinguishing genuine constraints from untested assumptions.
The discussions then turned to due diligence. Participants explored how to apply the same financial rigour expected of other products while also establishing clear impact criteria. The conversation also highlighted the importance of governance, decision rights and internal ownership; work that ideally happens before a live opportunity reaches the investment committee.
The final sessions put these ideas into practice through a two-part simulation. First, participants assessed a fictitious fund from initial due diligence to a mock investment committee pitch. At the diligence stage, none of the groups were ready to commit, hesitating on, and raising questions about, the emerging manager’s track record and capacity, the fund’s structure and returns, and execution and reputational risks. When the case, now modified, returned as an investment recommendation and assumed to have passed due diligence, groups pitched the opportunity to guest investment committee members. Here, the discussion and feedback focused less on the transaction itself than on the groundwork required for approval. This including leading with the investment case, connecting it to an established portfolio strategy, assessing the manager as a long-term partner, and building internal alignment before the formal decision.
The simulation underscored a central lesson from the series: finding a promising product is only part of the work. Institutions also need the internal readiness to assess it and act.
An Actionable Roadmap
The report distils these discussions into a four-step roadmap:
- Establish permission: Confirm how impact investing fits within the institution’s mandate, investment policy and legal framework.
- Work through barriers: Identify which constraints are structural, which are market-wide and which may be inherited assumptions.
- Build readiness: Put impact criteria, governance processes and an appropriate due diligence model in place.
- Make the investment case: Lead with the investment thesis, connect the opportunity to an established strategy and build internal support before seeking formal approval.
The roadmap does not prescribe a particular allocation, asset class or pace of implementation. Instead, we hope it helps institutions identify where they are getting stuck and what they may need to move forward.
Continuing the conversation
Because the series involved a small pilot cohort, its findings should not be read as representative of every institutional investor. However, subsequent industry conversations, like those at the RIA Conference, suggest that many of the challenges surfaced in our convening series are widely shared. This reinforces both the timeliness of this market-building work and the value of creating spaces for institutional investors to learn from one another.
Millani’s recent Canadian institutional investor sentiment study, drawing on extensive interviews with investors across the country, provides another point of connection. Its findings suggest that impact investing continues to grow and evolve, although important questions about its definition, implementation and potential for scale remain open.
We hope the momentum generated by the series continues beyond this initial cohort. The series tested one practical model for helping institutions move forward, combining expert input, peer dialogue and applied learning over time. This approach can be adapted and built upon through future industry initiatives, creating more opportunities for institutional investors to test assumptions, learn from experience and identify a pathway appropriate to their own organizations.