IMM for the SFF: Reflections on Cohort 1

March 2025

Editor’s Note: In September, we launched IMM for the SFF, a capacity-building cohort program in impact measurement and management (IMM) for Social Finance Intermediaries (SFIs) who have received investment from any wholesaler in the Social Finance Fund (SFF). This program is led by our partners at Impact Frontiers and is facilitated twice a year in September and March. With the first cohort done, and the second about to begin, we wanted to share some early reflections on the program.

Beginning with an Intention

One of our key intentions in all of our market-building programming is to ensure that content is responsive and relevant to the realities of our participants. These contexts are incredibly diverse. SFF investments will span asset classes, fund and IMM stages of maturity, cultures, communities and regions. Being responsive and relevant is our most significant and exciting challenge. It will require deep listening, learning and iteration over time.

When planning the first cohort, we chose to prioritize considering what it could mean to be more responsive to Indigenous ways of knowing in an IMM program, and to be more inclusive of Indigenous IMM methodologies – while still being a program that covers all the fundamentals of IMM and their applications for SFIs in the SFF. We started here because we know that mainstream and Eurocentric IMM practices are common in impact investment and can be, have been and continue to be harmful to many Indigenous people, and that many IMM methods (largely positivist in nature) are fundamentally different and often in contradiction to Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

Our partners at Common Approach to Impact Measurement have been learning deeply on this topic, and through them we partnered with Elder Wendy Phillips, Elder Mark Phillips and Marissa Hill to support our learning journey as we planned our first cohort. [See a story that Common Approach has brought to life alongside a group of Indigenous impact measurement experts from around the world, which shares global perspectives on this issue within impact investment, and invitations for investors and standard setters in transforming IMM practice.]

What happened next was a deeply meaningful learning journey for our team and our partners at Impact Frontiers. We engaged in teachings and ceremony led by Elder Wendy Phillips and Elder Mark Phillips as we developed our curriculum. It’s impossible to express the depth of our gratitude for the experience of being welcomed into community, friendship and trust by these remarkable leaders who are teaching us so much.

In December 2024 we wrapped up our first cohort of IMM for the SFF. Our Manager of Impact Management, Kate Gatto, sat down with co-facilitators Mike McCreless, Executive Director at Impact Frontiers, and Marissa Hill, Founder of Impact Narratives, to reflect on the journey we took together.

KATE: Marissa, Mike, we did it! I will always remember Cohort 1 of IMM for the SFF and the journey leading up to it, and I’m so proud of the program we put out into the world together.

MIKE: I am too! And so grateful to Marissa, Elder Wendy and Elder Mark, the RCP team, Common Approach and the SFIs in the cohort for being up for the journey. One of the nice things about teaching is how much you learn every time, and that was never more true than in this cohort.

MARISSA: It’s been a journey with beautiful humans I’ve grown to love. We laughed, we cried and we celebrated, and it’s a gift to witness standard setters, SFIs and wholesalers make space for new Worldviews and Values that challenge a lot of (and sometimes all of) their status quo. We created impact together every time a participant said this curriculum was helping expand their mindsets and practice, and every time Indigenous IMM practices were recognized as valid and legitimate in their own right.

KATE: Mike, at Impact Frontiers you’ve done other work incorporating social equity lenses and specific geographic contexts into your material in cohort programming. What was unique about this experience, and what did it mean to you?

MIKE: Impact Frontiers has done several intensive projects incorporating racial and gender equity, including year-long investor cohorts for which social equity was a theme, and also a major effort last year to audit our own content (that is, the 5 dimensions of impact, investor contribution strategies, etc.) from racial, gender and data equity perspectives.

Across those projects, my experience has been that doing IMM with an explicit – even if not exclusive – social equity focus is slower, more difficult, and more costly than doing it without. Subjectively, during those projects more than any others, I tend to feel like I am not doing a good job. Paradoxically, when I look back, the projects that incorporated an explicit social equity focus have been some of the only ones in my career in which I felt like we were really doing IMM the way it ought to be done.

What these experiences have in common is that they preclude, or at least make it much more difficult, to fall into thinking of ourselves as ‘invisible observers,’ and from there to fall into the further trap of assumption that our perspective is the ‘default’ or ‘neutral’ one. Which of course is not true, is intellectually and morally lazy and is poor IMM to boot.

MARISSA: Something Mike is reflecting on here is core to the work I’m grateful to be doing alongside Elders Wendy and Mark Phillips, a group of global Indigenous impact measurement experts we call Our Circle, and Common Approach. It’s no secret that mainstream IMM practices (within and outside of impact investment) regularly negatively impact Indigenous People: we are simultaneously balancing inappropriate funder expectations for how our impact should be defined, measured and shared alongside our Relational Accountability which is to the people and places we come from and serve. It exponentially increases the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical labour we invest in IMM when the funds are dependent on our ability to honour our commitments and accountabilities to funders while prioritizing measuring impact in a way that tells the truth of how our communities are creating impact.

From my own experiences and the stories I have been gifted from others , impact investment is deeply rooted in a positivist paradigm. Within a positivist paradigm, a core belief is that Knowledge is what comes from empirical processes that are linear, reductionist, quantitative, and objective and that assume truth is universal and shared – which is critical to why Eurocentric IMM practices are prescribed onto Indigenous SPOs by SFIs. This is not a “sometimes” experience, it is a regular experience, and for investors or standard setters to assume that impact or impact measurement mean the same thing to people who carry fundamentally different Worldviews (or to not realize there are fundamentally different Worldviews at the table) is a significant assumption that comes with significant risk of harm. This is why a core message from the shared story of Our Circle is that impact investment (including standard setting) needs to be transformed so we, as Indigenous People, “…are free from colonial systems that assume linearity, individualism, superiority, universality, and a singular truth and that, too often, weaponize our Worldviews and Knowledge Systems against us.” One of the most powerful messages I have heard as it relates to this is from Our Circle, and this shared story we are co-creating together:

“It is a form of abuse to continually be asked to explain and prove ourselves over and over again in the language of our oppressor, using the tools of our oppressor. To waste our time is an act of violence, by taking away from our life and our mission and to tax our body, mind, and spirit with what you require to perpetuate the systems that serve you and cause us to suffer.”

Love, Respect, Commitment

KATE: Marissa, this work can be challenging and uncomfortable, and we are so grateful for your approach that centres love and relationality; and strikes a balance between the urgency of community needs and the time it takes to do this work in a good way through protocol. Could you share more about what informs this approach and tell us about some of the challenges and learnings we went through together where this approach kept us on track?

MARISSA: You’re bringing up the most critical aspect of the work we’ve done to bring this version of IMM for the SFF together in the way it exists right now. I think back to when we were all together in person – Elders, community members and co-conspirators. Our Spirits were full because we had been in Pipe Ceremony together. Our bellies were full because we had feasted. Our hearts were full because we were in good relations with each other. Our minds were free because we shared laughs and love and human connection and spent more time building relationships than we did writing the curriculum – and that’s by design. In an Indigenous context, our existence as humans is about relationships: our relationship to self, to other humans, to the Lands and Skies and Waters, to the Spirit World and Sky World, to the non-human beings and medicines that exist within and across these people and spaces, and to the endless web of interconnections within and across All of Creation. Nothing is separate from anything else, and nothing happens in isolation from anything else (which is opposite to the positivist view that we can create Knowledge by separating reality and our human experience of this reality into discrete variables that can be understood and valued outside their relationship from each other).

When we do this kind of work, it is not a matter of just sitting down from the start and co-creating a discrete product that is separate from our humanness or our realities. We need to move through a journey rooted in Indigenous Values, meaningful relationship that goes beyond the work itself, ancestral Protocol and Ceremony, and a depth of intention required to respectfully honour the commitment we make in Ceremony as we bring All of Creation in as witness to that commitment. When we hit barriers or find ourselves lost and unsure, we go back to those Values and to that Ceremonial space. We go back to our relationships and shared commitment to each other and to doing the right thing, no matter how hard. We go back to Elders and ancestral practice. We go back to centre, which is our Relational Accountability to community. When you work through that process, you do good work in a good way that is rooted in something so much bigger than any one of us – and that is the process investors and standard setters need to be aware of and ready for when they are invited to do work with community, or their invitation to community is accepted. This is the process we intentionally built into this work, and to which we all committed to honouring.

There were times this journey was really hard, and I think it’s important to talk about that here….to normalize these experiences, because we’re groomed as humans to run away from complexity and discomfort or to pretend it doesn’t happen, even though that’s where we learn and transform people and systems. So, I really appreciate you asking the question. I remember sitting on the floor, we were surrounded by paper and dreams for what we wanted to share through the curriculum. We were talking through the core issues of impact investment and IMM practice, and we were having a hard time finding our way toward what felt right. I was feeling stuck in the depths of this IMM system, with tears in my eyes trying to honour my Ceremonial commitments and Relational Accountabilities. It wasn’t any one thing that got me through that. It was a web of interconnected and inseparable relationships and love. It was you coming to sit beside me, as a source of strength and validation. It was Ryan, sinking deeper into that complexity when he could have run away – I remember the look on his face when he made that choice. I remember the moment Peter made space for silence and just existing as humans. I remember the moment Mike recalculated a path forward in his mind. We were all tired – this work of transforming systems is emotionally and spiritually exhausting – but it was all of you leaning further into the discomfort, further into relationship, further into what brought us to that place, and further into the Relational Accountability that allowed us to see that discomfort and complexity through to the other side.

MIKE: What I remember most is the pure shock of being expected to talk about love. As an “IMM person” I was all ready to talk about things like implicit bias and structural violence not just in society, but in investing and even in the field of IMM. Not that it’s easy to talk about those things but that’s why we’re here and we signed up for it.

What I was not prepared for was to be talking about love. I know this sounds incongruous but talking about the genocide of Indigenous people, and talking about love, were both very uncomfortable for me in our time working together.

I did some reading on my own and came across the Seven Grandfather Teachings, one of which is love, which the site describes as “unconditional love between one another including all of Creation, humans and non-humans.” I reflected that deep down and at its best, IMM done in a good way is animated by that kind of love, though we would surely never talk about it that way.

But it makes sense that love came to the fore in discussions of how to practice IMM in contexts like Canada and the United States, that have perpetrated genocide and slavery. If we’re going to be real about it, if we’re going to confront that, then rote recitations of high-minded principles combined with technocratic fixes is not going to be enough. It makes sense that love is the only human impulse that could possibly overcome a shared experience of genocide and slavery.

So I got . . . not comfortable . . . but at least less uncomfortable talking about love. It even became a joke between Marissa and me, with her trying to find ways to work love into the session design, and me hemming and hawing, blushing and stalling. I do believe she won that one in the end!

An Invitation to Co-Facilitate

KATE: Marissa, we got Mike to talk about love without even asking him to! ❤️ For those who are totally baffled about why we’re talking about love in a blog about an IMM program or are interested in exploring this more, I recommend Shiree Teng’s and Sammi Nuñez’s Measuring Love in the Journey for Justice.

Mike, back to you, it wasn’t our plan from the start to have two facilitators. Can you share about the decision you made to invite Marissa to co-facilitate Cohort 1?

MIKE: Realize Capital Partners (RCP) had mandated us to ensure that the cohort curriculum engaged with, and at a minimum did not contradict or harm, Indigenous ways of knowing and being. That’s part of what attracted me to the project, since I came in knowing next to nothing. RCP also provided the means to make that aspiration a reality, by funding a series of intensive working sessions with Marissa that began with a review of the historic and ongoing experiences of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people within settler colonial Canada, and then alongside Elder Wendy and Elder Mark who shared Indigenous views on various topics and practices in IMM. Marissa, Elder Mark, and Elder Wendy have been amazing partners throughout these sessions, and I learned a tremendous amount from them all. They have also inspired me to do a lot of reading on my own time.

They also made recommendations for radical changes (read: possibility for a complete overhaul!) in the content and delivery of the curriculum that would have resulted in a course that I would love to take, but that I don’t have the experience and expertise to teach. It was also very different than what RCP had commissioned from Impact Frontiers. This put us at an impasse. We didn’t feel we could chuck our own work out the window and replace it with what was recommended. At the same time, to discard the recommendations would be unconscionable. You can’t engage Indigenous Elders and IMM practitioners to review and provide feedback on your plans, and then when they do, tell them “thanks but no thanks, that seems hard, never mind!”

The only possible path forward was to work through the content together and then deliver it together. Which I am very grateful to Marissa and Elder Wendy for being game to do! It was Marissa’s ability and determination to bring the concept of love into our work, and into IMM, that gave me confidence, even if I didn’t know what the result would be. I think it’s fair to say that what we ended up presenting together is very different than what either of us would have presented on our own. Early on, we decided we were not going to try to synthesize Indigenous and Western perspectives into some “integrated” or “consensus” approach, because it was immediately clear that those perspectives, in important ways, are not compatible. I got comfortable with the framing of, “here are two perspectives, they are often mutually incompatible but both have truth and value.” And I think that’s true.

MARISSA: What we shared forward as recommendations, and everything that brought us to that point, created a relational opportunity to navigate complexity in systems that do not shift often or easily, and that need to be transformed the most. What we shared sits within our lived and living experiences and our Relational Accountability to our communities, who have their own very real stories of violence and harm within IMM practices. These recommendations simultaneously felt like a radical shift from the perspective of a system not used to change and like a first step from the perspective of people who are harmed by those systems. The significance of this gap reinforced the fundamental differences between Eurocentric and Indigenous understandings of IMM in terms of Values it is rooted in and who it is accountable to, and is inspiring new conversations and mindset shifts in an industry that rarely finds itself with Indigenous perspectives as the lens through which to look. Within community, we often talk about doing this work in a way that will make our ancestors proud and that future generations will thank us for, and I hope that is true for this work we are doing together here.

Sitting next to Mike during Cohort 1 was a gift, and I remember that time with a smile (which is why I am joining him again as co-pilot for cohort two). Making space to evolve the curriculum with community is one thing, and to collaboratively bring that into action is another. There were so many learnings for both of us throughout cohort one that inevitably have and will continue to make us better people and that will bring that betterness into the systems we exist within. I think back to the times we spent (hours…), me, Mike, and Peter, riffing off each other as we moved through complexity, endless ideas, and hardcore IMM nerdiness until we would find ourselves in the place we needed to be – and those moments were beautiful. Who knew we would co-create new ways of thinking about investor and enterprise contribution using trees as a metaphor, or impact valuation using concepts of power and control.

I have never known a time that needs love more than right now, and I am grateful to RCP, Impact Frontiers, and Common Approach for walking bravely into this unknown, and to Elder Mark and Wendy and the countless community members who showed up for us in Ceremony and at the drawing boards again and again – I love you all more than you could ever know.

Kate: Thank you both so much for sharing these reflections. I continue to learn so much from both of you and I’m really grateful. Mike, the care, openness, self-awareness, and humility that genuinely emanated from you and Peter throughout this journey was remarkable. Thank you for your trust, and for showing up in this way so consistently.

This journey was guided by an intention to be responsive to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and what I learned from you Marissa, and from Elder Wendy, Elder Mark and others who supported us in this journey, is that Indigenous ways of knowing and being can be understood as various forms of deep, sacred, Ceremonial IMM practices in themselves. My experience breathed life and nuance into the wisdom shared through Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Sean Wilson, who speaks about research (and the same applies to IMM) as relational at its core. I will hold the teachings shared with me in Ceremony about the Education Wheel, the Two Row Wampum, and our conversations about impact in the context of our ancestors and future generations close to me always. I understand this to be my accountability. Thank you.

We are committed to carrying forward this spirit of relationship with and accountability to Indigenous peoples in our IMM programming and all the our work we do as a firm. We will continue to invest in these relationships and the ongoing learning journey.