As many of you know, Adasina Social Capital celebrated our fourth anniversary earlier this year. As we shift into a new phase of firm growth and look to the years ahead of us, we want to begin by saying thank you. It is due, in part, to each and every one of you that we are able to embark on this next chapter.
During our first four years of operation, we have achieved unprecedented outcomes together. In collaboration with our Social Justice Partners and community of aligned investors, collectively we achieved:
- The end of forced arbitration for survivors of sexual assault;
- Over $1 Trillion in investor support for our Ending the Subminimum Wage Campaign;
- Created and published Investor Datasets at no cost, helping public markets investors take action in their own portfolios on racial, gender, economic, and climate justice issues;
- And much more, which you can read about in our inaugural Impact Report.
Importantly, with your participation and support, we have shown that impact investments can indeed spark meaningful, measurable positive change while delivering sustainable, non-extractive, justice-aligned financial returns. More information on our firm’s recent performance can be found in our Q3 Investor Briefing.
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Even as we take a moment to celebrate our shared achievements, global conditions demand we raise our sights still higher: here in the United States, legal challenges to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing are intensifying, though often unsuccessful in court. Recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened legal protections against self-serving corporate actions, shifting the burden to investors to act as a check and balance. Meanwhile, increasingly frequent and severe climate-related disasters worsen racial, gender, and economic injustices globally. And the human, economic, and environmental costs of social injustices continue to go undisclosed and unpriced in publicly listed equities around the world, even as those costs mount ever higher. We see these developments as powerful evidence that our Social Justice Investing approach is needed now more than ever.
Within this context, we see our past achievements as preparation for this moment. We know how to significantly increase the scope of our unique community-centered approach, and we have confidence born of experience that together we can lead the desperately needed systemic transformation of financial markets for social justice. We are making proactive changes to bolster our firm’s capacity to instigate even greater positive impact for our clients and for the safer, healthier, more just and more prosperous future we all want to inhabit.
Scaling Our Operations Through Collaborative Leadership
Just like other businesses, our ability to scale as a firm rests on our team’s capacity and efficacy. Unlike other businesses, our ability to achieve our objectives also depends on applying the same commitment to practicing our social justice principles in our operations as we do in implementing our investment strategy. In the spirit of the widely misattributed quote, we are taking intentional steps to be the change we wish to create.
We are thrilled to share with you that we are accelerating our planned shift to a more collaborative model of leadership. This is in keeping with our value of accountable power, which encourages an equitable distribution of resources and responsibility within our firm, and embodies our commitment to turn away from extractive capitalism and toward living systems. While we are certainly not the first to decentralize power and authority, we nevertheless hope our approach emboldens others to join in transforming financial markets — including their own enterprises — for social justice.
One of the most visible facets of our planned shift is the decision to expand our CEO Office to include Julianne Zimmerman as Co-CEO alongside our Founder & Co-CEO, Rachel J. Robasciotti. By distributing executive responsibilities and reinforcing executive capacity, we foster greater resilience and robustness within our leadership team, and position Adasina for substantial growth. Our Co-CEOs, Rachel J. Robasciotti and Julianne Zimmerman, are both trailblazers of industry transformation within the impact investment community. Julianne’s 30+ years of influential leadership across impact investing and social entrepreneurship complement Rachel’s 20+ years leading Adasina and the social justice investment practices that led to its creation. Julianne brings a profound and abiding commitment to the Adasina community and the necessity of advancing social justice via financial markets. We look forward to the many ways in which her perspective will enable us to deepen and expand Adasina’s beloved community.
We have also welcomed Danielle M. Burns to our leadership team as Managing Director for Growth. As a highly respected figure in the impact investing sphere with 30+ years of leadership across traditional and impact investing, Danielle brings exactly the right combination of industry experience, deep values alignment, and creative insight to the vital work of recalibrating our client-facing functions and enhancing our engagement with our networks of peers and stakeholders.
We are also expanding our Public Equities Portfolio Management Team, with the addition of a Client Portfolio Manager to provide greater analytical capacity and support for our growing relationship management, investor mobilization, and industry transformation initiatives. If you know just the right person for this role, please connect them with us!
Meet Our Expanded Leadership Team
 (she/her) Founder & Co-CEO  (she/her) Co-CEO  (she/her) Co-Founder, Chief Operations Officer & Chief Compliance Officer  (he/him) Managing Director, Investments & Impact  (she/her) Managing Director, Growth |
Embrace a Bold Future With Us
As we strategically expand our leadership team at Adasina Social Capital, we’re laying a vigorous foundation for swift and effective growth, not least by recalibrating roles across the firm so that all of our extraordinary team members are better able to exercise leadership in the industry. This comprehensive approach makes the firm more robust and resilient, amplifies our impact and leadership capacity, and sets the stage for new initiatives to unfold in 2025 and beyond. As just one indication of these enhancements, you may have already noticed that more of our team members are serving as spokespeople, sharing their expertise at conferences, in webinars and our own Investor Briefings, and in third-party publications.
As always, thank you for your collaboration, support, and belief in Adasina. It is because of you, our investors and partners, that we are able to embark on this exciting new chapter of collective systems change. As with our past wins, our future successes will center on our relationships with you, our beloved community.
With that awareness, we warmly invite you to embrace a bold future with us, one in which public markets investors generate long-term collective benefits for people and the planet. To join our transformative journey or to deepen your existing commitment, please connect with us at invest@adasina.com. If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to our mailing list to receive future news and content.
Please stay tuned for further updates, and please let us know how we can work even more closely together to make a positive impact at the scale of the market!