Sallie Krawcheck

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Sallie Krawcheck was one of the most powerful women on Wall Street. CEO of Merrill Lynch. CEO of Smith Barney. CFO of Citigroup. She had reached the top of an industry that was not designed to put her there, and she walked away to build something it told her did not need to exist.

In 2014, she co-founded Ellevest, the first investment platform built specifically around the financial realities of women’s lives: longer lifespans, earlier salary peaks, career interruptions for caregiving, a gender pay gap that compounds over decades. Wall Street had spent years trying to get women to adapt to a male-centric financial system. Sallie turned that problem on its head and built a different system entirely.

The industry doubted her. She received criticism from former colleagues. She kept going. Ellevest launched publicly in 2016, grew to over $1 billion in assets under management, was named to CNBC’s top 50 Disruptors list, and helped hundreds of thousands of women start investing for the first time. Forbes named her one of the seven most powerful women in the world. Fortune called her “the last honest analyst.”

In December 2024, she stepped down as CEO to focus on her health, transitioning to a board role and passing leadership to the next generation of women she had built the firm to serve. Even in that decision, she modeled something important: that how you lead matters as much as what you build.

Her conviction has never wavered: nothing bad happens when women have more money. We are honored to celebrate her here.

Patricia Farrar-Rivas

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Patricia Farrar-Rivas came to impact investing through revolutionary movements in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. What she witnessed there about justice, power, and who controls resources shaped everything that followed.

She co-founded Veris Wealth Partners in 2007, one of the first wealth management firms in the country to commit fully to impact investing across all asset classes, not as a niche offering but as the entire thesis of the firm. She led it as CEO for nearly 14 years, building it into a nationally recognized leader in values-aligned wealth management and helping pioneer the application of a gender lens to investment portfolios before gender-lens investing had a widely recognized name. She invested a significant portion of her own wealth in founding the firm, putting her money precisely where her values were.

Over three decades, she helped build the infrastructure of the impact investing field itself, co-leading the Mission-related Investing introductory program for Confluence Philanthropy, serving on review committees, and consistently working to move the mainstream in the wake of what she was building at the edge. She sought to serve BIPOC and female entrepreneurs, climate justice, and place-based initiatives, not as afterthoughts but as the core of her investment philosophy.

After retiring from Veris in 2022, she did not slow down. She was elected to the Sonoma City Council and now serves as Mayor of Sonoma, applying the same systems-level thinking to local government that she brought to wealth management.

She is an IFB Pathfinder and a woman who has spent her entire career proving that financial services can be a vehicle for justice. We are honored to celebrate her here.

Ruth Shaber

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Ruth Shaber spent 25 years as an OB-GYN at Kaiser Permanente before deciding that the most powerful thing she could do for women’s health was change where the money flows.

In 2014, she founded Tara Health Foundation as a spend-down private foundation committed to 100% mission alignment, meaning every dollar, in grants, direct investments, and public market holdings, works toward the same goal: health and economic justice at the intersection of race and gender. As the foundation’s corpus grew from $10 million to over $100 million deployed, Ruth developed new tools and frameworks for gender-lens investing, funded research in partnership with Wharton and Penn, and expanded into private investments, taking direct stakes in companies advancing women’s health and bringing other funders alongside her to build lasting infrastructure in the field.

She co-founded Rhia Ventures, a collective of foundations and investors bringing new types of capital to reproductive health in the United States, at a moment when that work has never been more urgent. And she co-authored The XX Edge, a rigorously data-driven book that makes the financial case for gender-diverse investment teams, showing that gender inclusivity is not just a moral argument but a performance advantage. The book launched the Diverse Investing Collective, which aims to increase assets managed by gender-diverse and racially diverse teams to 33% by 2033.

Forbes named her to its 2020 Impact 50 list of investors seeking profit and pushing for change. She was honored with the Lucretia Mott Award by Women’s Way in 2025. She is a scientist who decided that capital is one of the most powerful medicines available, and she has spent the last decade proving it. We are honored to celebrate her here.

Amy Domini

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Amy Domini did not just join a movement. She built the one the rest of us are standing in.

In 1990, when most of Wall Street considered the idea of socially responsible investing naive at best and financially reckless at worst, Amy and her partners launched the Domini 400 Social Index, the first stock market index selected based on social and environmental standards. Two years later, the Domini Impact Equity Fund became the first environmentally and socially screened index fund available to everyday investors. She did not just make an argument for values-aligned investing. She built the proof.

What followed was three decades of firsts. Domini Impact Investments was the first U.S. mutual fund to publicly disclose its proxy voting record. The first to publish proxy voting guidelines. A founding signatory to the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment. A consistent voice using shareholder advocacy to push major corporations on human rights, environmental standards, and fair labor practices, helping companies like Gap and Disney expand their human dignity criteria long before ESG was a household term.

Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Barron’s named her one of the 20 most influential people in ESG investing. She has written multiple books on the subject, including Ethical Investing and Socially Responsible Investing: Making a Difference and Making Money, which made the case before most people were ready to hear it.

Her conviction has never wavered: that investors control massive global resources, and that those resources have a role to play in building a planet worth living on. We would not have the language, the frameworks, or the field without her. We are deeply honored to celebrate her here.

Lisa Renstrom

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Lisa Renstrom identified one of the most persistent gaps in the values-aligned investing space and built the solution to close it.

Investors who wanted to align their money with their values had nowhere easy to turn. Financial advisors who specialized in this work were invisible to the people who needed them most. So Lisa co-founded ValuesAdvisor, a nonprofit platform dedicated to making it frictionless for investors to find a values-aligned financial advisor. It is a simple idea with an enormous impact: remove the practical barrier between intention and action, and more money moves toward good.

ValuesAdvisor did not come from nowhere. It came from three decades of work at the intersection of environmental advocacy, philanthropy, and impact investing. As President of the National Sierra Club, President of Rachel’s Network, and co-creator of DivestInvest Individual, Lisa has consistently worked to make values-aligned capital accessible to more people at greater scale. Each chapter of her career has been about closing the gap between what people believe and where their money goes.

She is an IFB Pathfinder and longtime member of our community. Her conviction that this work should be easier for everyone who wants to do it is one we share completely. We are honored to celebrate her here.

Melanie Audette

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Melanie Audette has spent more than a decade building the infrastructure that makes impact investing possible for foundations across the country.

As Senior Vice President at Mission Investors Exchange, the leading network connecting foundations to the tools, knowledge, and community they need to deploy capital for good, Melanie has been instrumental in building an organization that now represents more than 200 members and over $270 billion in total foundation assets. She works with foundations at every stage of their impact investing journey, helping them move from intention to implementation, and from isolated experiments to institutional practice.

Her work is both strategic and deeply practical. She co-led the development of the Community Foundation Field Guide to Impact Investing in partnership with Harvard University’s Initiative for Responsible Investment, a resource that has helped hundreds of foundations understand how to align their capital with their mission. She is a founding member of the Impact Investing Committee for the Council of Michigan Foundations and has previously served in the U.S. Foreign Service, bringing a global perspective to her work in philanthropy and impact.

Before her work at Mission Investors Exchange, Melanie held leadership roles in four membership associations and nine nonprofit organizations, giving her an unusually broad understanding of how institutions change and how communities of practice actually build momentum over time.

Melanie is a founding member of Invest for Better’s Impact Investing Committee, one of the early voices who helped shape how we think about this work and who we are building it with. We are honored to celebrate her here.

 

 

Jessica Droste Yagan

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Jessica Droste Yagan has spent her career building the case that financial returns and positive social impact are not just compatible but inseparable.

As CEO and Managing Partner of Impact Engine, one of the most respected impact investing firms in the country, she leads venture capital and private equity strategies that invest in for-profit businesses and funds delivering measurable social and environmental returns. Founded in Chicago when impact investing was still considered a niche idea, Impact Engine has grown into a nationally recognized firm proving that the market for doing good is real, scalable, and financially sound.

Before Impact Engine, Jessica led the creation of McDonald’s Corporation’s global and U.S. sustainable sourcing strategies, integrating ethical, environmental, and economic sustainability across one of the largest food supply chains in the world. She also worked in urban economic development at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, bringing the same rigor to community economic health that she would later apply to impact capital markets.

She holds a BA from Haverford College, an MBA from Stanford, and an MPA from Harvard. She serves on the board of the Global Impact Investing Network, The ImPact, and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at Chicago Booth. Crain’s Chicago Business named her to its 40 Under 40 list in 2013.

Jessica was involved in Invest for Better in our earliest days, helping shape the ecosystem that made this work possible. We are proud to celebrate her here.

 

 

Rehana Nathoo

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Rehana Nathoo found impact investing the way she describes it: through sheer dumb luck and really great timing. She started her career with the United Nations Capital Development Fund in East Africa, working on the ground in Uganda and Tanzania to help prime local financial markets and build better relationships between communities and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. That early, practical experience shaped everything that followed.

From there, she went on to help lead the impact investing grantmaking program at the Rockefeller Foundation, design the Social Finance program and pilot impact investment fund at Bank of New York Mellon, and lead the impact investing portfolio at the Case Foundation. She saw early and clearly what many in the field were still figuring out: that impact without transparency and data was too easy to fake, and that widening the tent required translating the language of impact into something the whole financial world could act on.

She founded Spectrum Impact to do exactly that. A strategy consulting firm that helps organizations expand their impact investing footprint, Spectrum works across the full spectrum of capital, from foundations and family offices to institutional investors and corporations, building the strategies and products that move intention into practice. She also teaches impact investing and global development as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, ensuring the next generation of practitioners is trained with the same rigor and clarity she has brought to the field for over a decade.

Rehana has been a consistent supporter of Invest for Better, providing one of our early grants and helping shape how we think about impact investing strategy in our earliest years. We are honored to celebrate her here.

 

 

Jacki Zehner

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At 32, Jacki became the youngest woman and first female trader to make partner at Goldman Sachs. She could have stayed. Instead, she walked away from Wall Street in 2002 to spend the next two decades asking a more important question: what happens when women direct capital with intention?

Born and raised in Kelowna, British Columbia, Jacki graduated at the top of her class at the University of British Columbia before being recruited by Goldman Sachs in New York. On the trading floor, she experienced firsthand what it meant to be one of very few women in a hyper-majority culture, and she never forgot it. That experience helped her understand something she would spend her career proving: women plus money plus community equals power.

After leaving Goldman, she co-founded Women Moving Millions, the world’s largest philanthropic network for women funding women, through which members have collectively given over one billion dollars with a gender lens. She served as its founding president, building it from a campaign into a permanent global institution. She has written over 600 essays on women, power, philanthropy, and money, and is now the founder of SheMoney, a platform dedicated to advancing women’s financial agency and wealth through content, community, and consulting.

Jacki is also an active early-stage investor, backing women and BIPOC founders through direct investments and funds, with a portfolio of over 20 companies. She has served on the boards of numerous women-focused nonprofits and has been a consistent voice for gender-lens investing long before it became a recognized field.

Invest for Better was one of the early organizations Jacki said yes to, providing one of our first grants and becoming a Pathfinder in our community. That early belief in what we were building helped make everything that followed possible. We are deeply honored to celebrate her here.

 

 

Suzanne Biegel

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Before anyone had language for it, Suzanne Biegel was living it.

A globally recognized pioneer in gender-smart investing, Suzanne dedicated her life to a single conviction: that capital directed toward women is capital directed toward a better world. As co-founder of GenderSmart, now 2X Global, she helped connect gender-smart investors across the capital spectrum into a cohesive field, influencing hundreds of funds and billions of dollars of capital along the way. She co-created Project Sage, one of the earliest benchmarks for gender-lens investing in private markets, and played a key role in the 2X Challenge, which has mobilized over $33.6 billion in gender lens investments as of 2024.

In the final chapter of her life, after a stage four metastatic lung cancer diagnosis, her energy shined brighter rather than dimmer. She founded Heading for Change, a fund investing at the intersection of gender and climate, built on the belief that women are not just disproportionately impacted by climate disasters but are entrepreneurs, leaders, and creators of vital climate solutions.

Invest for Better would not be here in its current form without Suzanne. Fresh on the heels of closing the Women Effect pilot, she flew from London to Boston to join the summit that produced IFB. She served on the IFB Steering Committee in those formative years, always providing the sharpest insights, and did what Suzanne did so skillfully: she connected Ellen and Janine to one another. She remained a resource, a donor, and a presence in our community until her passing in September 2023.

She did not just believe this movement was possible. She helped build the ground it stands on, and introduced the people who would build IFB on top of it. We are honored to carry her legacy forward.