After a weekend of pageantry, puffery and protest, it’s time to deliver. Holding the Trump administration and Congress to account means more than chasing every tweet, more even than setting straight every falsehood. It means keeping track of real results and using data to correct course.
Fortunately, President Trump provided his own scorecard in his inaugural address. End disease. Harness the energy of tomorrow. Create great schools, safe neighborhoods and millions of good jobs. Rebuild our infrastructure, revive our manufacturing base and restore middle-class wealth. On Twitter, he promised health coverage “for everybody.”
Stripped of the president’s pessimism and posturing, those goals could be shared by any number of impact investors, entrepreneurs and the growing global movement of people working to build an inclusive, sustainable future.
And that means the impact community will play a key role in holding the new governing coalition to account. The impact investing community’s deep thinking and long experience in valuing social and environmental benefits is a skillset the country and the world need now more than ever. Rigorous impact accountability is the antidote to “alternative facts” on things that matter.
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“We don’t chase his ghosts and his tweets,” Dave Chen, CEO of Equilibrium Capital in Portland, wrote on Facebook over the weekend. “We win by defining and getting to our goal: what we are for.” Chen’s list includes climate action, diversity and respect, opportunity and education, health care for all and global leadership. “We use our energy and innovation in context of the goals,” Chen says.
To help the impact community rise to the new challenges, ImpactAlpha is launching The Brief, a daily newsletter delivered to your inbox. We’re ramping up and accelerating some of our most popular features. Every weekday, we’ll follow the money in #Dealflow, and give you #Signals to help you stay ahead of the curve.
And because this too shall pass, we’re going long-term to keep us all on track toward #2030. That year is the deadline for global goals still shared by nearly every country in the world. You can sign up for The Brief here. And please send your own goals, strategies, deals and, yes, performance to [email protected] or @ImpactAlpha.
