S2: Ginny Fischbach of Impact100 on Impact Investing Inglenook #58

Ginny Fischbach of Impact100 on Impact Investing Inglenook Romy interviews the founder of Impact 100 Oakland County (Michigan), Ginny Fischbach. What happens when 100 women put $1000 each together for a community good?    Full transcription Romy: Welcome to the Impact Investing Inglenook of Bonfires of Social Enterprise. You will meet Ginny Fischbach of a women’s funding group named Impact 100. Now there are Impact 100 groups all over the world. You will learn more about these groups in just one minute. First, I want to give a shout out to our listeners and fans in Australia. I want to thank you for your support of our show. And, I know you guys have an Impact 100 group! Very cool. Okay, let me turn our attention to my interview with Ginny Romy: Welcome, Ginny. Ginny: Well, thank you, glad to be here. Romy: I’m excited to interview you for our Impact Investing segment of Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Let’s jump right to it, what is Impact100? Ginny: Well, Impact100 is you get a group of women, and you try for a hundred or more women, each woman gives a thousand dollars, donates a thousand dollars, and then we turn that into a one hundred thousand dollar grant for some local nonprofit. If we get more members, of course, the grants get bigger. It started in Cincinnati in 2001, the first Impact100. A lady by the name of Wendy Steele, who now lives in Michigan. She started a group of one hundred in Cincinnati. She had heard of giving circles and stuff and thought it was a great idea to pool money but at a larger scale. She got a hundred women and gave out a hundred thousand dollar grant, and it’s been growing ever since then. Cincinnati now has almost five hundred members, so they’re giving close to half a million dollars out a year in grants, which is just awesome. Romy: Oh my gosh, yes. Ginny: They’ve made a huge impact on that city, and they’re really active. It’s grown now to thirty-six chapters around the world, thirty of which are in the US and six in Australia, over four hundred thousand members around the country which are really pretty cool. It’s very, also, a loose organization so we’re not paying dues into a national organization of any kind, it’s just everybody helps each other to do their own thing in their area. You can modify the processes and stuff to fit your local area, to make it work for you, so it’s really pretty exciting. Romy: That’s incredibly exciting. I love anything that has to do with a village coming around an idea, sourcing, lots of resources. You get a lot of people together, and you can really make a huge impact. Is that where the name came from or is there a history of the name? Ginny: Exactly. She named it Impact100 thinking, “If I get a hundred women, I can make a huge impact. If we pool our money we can make a huge impact on a community.” That’s where the name came from, which is pretty exciting. Romy: When did Oakland County’s begin? Ginny: Well, we just started this year. This is our first year, so we’re really excited. We started getting members first of the year, we got our 501(c)(3) from the IRS in November, I think it was, so right after the holidays we started. In about six months we were able to find a hundred women, so we know there’s a lot of women who want to give in the community. We have a lot of areas we haven’t even reached in Oakland County, yet so I think we can get a lot more members real soon. We just started and if we want to talk about why we started? I have a home down in Fairhope, Alabama, and it’s in Baldwin County. There’s an organization down there, an Impact100 organization,...