Toussaint Bailey, Uplifting Capital: Bringing ‘the quietly bothered’ into impact investing (podcast)
From Impact Alpha, By David Bank:
Toussaint Bailey: Bringing ‘the quietly bothered’ into impact investing. Between the true believers in investing for impact and those that have dug in their heels against it, there are the “quietly bothered.” “It is incumbent upon us people who are changemakers for a living to create solutions for these quietly bothered folks that meet them where they are in their lives,” Uplifting Capital’s Toussaint Bailey says in the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast. “We want to turn these desires for big, sweeping changes into micro acts of courage that people can access in a day.” Bailey himself is more than quietly bothered. In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, he took a sabbatical as CEO of Petaluma, Calif.-based Enso Wealth Management, which he had built into a $1.8 billion registered investment advisor. He convened a series of conversations around race and racism in wealth management. “And at that point I knew I needed to do something more than just help people create wealth,” he said. “I needed to help people who seemed to be genuinely bothered by what they were seeing, who seemed to genuinely want to make change.”
Bailey arranged the sale of Enso and launched Uplifting Capital. The firm is part of the second cohort of VC Include, the accelerator for diverse impact managers founded by Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson (see, and listen in to, “VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson on three drivers of inclusion alpha”). Uplifting Capital aims to broaden access to impact investing to high-net worth individuals and small foundations that are moving capital from public equities to private markets but may not have an impact lens. Bailey knows that such investors need products with relatively low fees that are easy to integrate into standard portfolios in terms of cash flow, liquidity and returns. The fund’s first deployments were to Collide Capital and Kapor Capital. “If we’re not creating solutions for the people who want to see change, then we’re missing the opportunity,” Bailey says. “If we’re missing potential allies, then shame on us.”
- Keep reading and listen to, “Toussaint Bailey, Uplifting Capital: Bringing ‘the quietly bothered’ into impact investing,” by David Bank on ImpactAlpha. Catch up on all of our Agents of Impact podcasts and our Weekly Briefing onImpactAlpha.com, Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.
