The Purpose of Capital: Elements of Impact, Financial Flows, and Natural Being

A unique exploration of how investors may act with deeper consideration of the meaning of money, The Purpose of Capital: Elements of Impact, Financial Flows and Personal Being, explores the historic roots of our understanding of capital, investing and wealth management, connecting how we think about finance with how we think about our lives, World and personal purpose.

Many books tell investors how to invest for maximum financial returns; others seek to tell investors how to invest for financial return with the generation of positive social and environmental impact. The Purpose of Capital takes the reader behind the "how" to explore the "Why" of investing.

The Purpose of Capital explores:

- Our focus on investing as finance alone has taken us down the wrong path--and how those investors seeking to "do well and do good" have fallen prey to the notion financial return is the main driver for creating impact in the world.

- By focusing primarily upon returns for investors we fall short of our potential to invest capital for the benefit of a broader set of stakeholders--including not only the environment but our own potential to use our capital to realize greater personal development for our selves.

- The roots of our current inability to invest for total returns is an historic struggle, connecting us with centuries of reflection in a variety of cultures and traditions--the lessons from which may benefit investors today.

- The Purpose of Capital details how the true purpose of capital is not simply to make more capital, but rather to function as a fuel for individual freedom in the context of community and Earth.

Having produced seven books on the "how" of social entrepreneurship and impact investing, Emerson now turns his attention to placing investing within an historic and philosophical context, grounding investing within a more complete consideration of why we should invest in system change which, in the end, offers the potential for transforming ourselves as investors and as people.

Jed Emerson is strategic advisor to family offices and wealth management firms executing diverse approaches to investing for financial returns with social and environmental impact. Co-author of the first book on impact investing, as well as six other books on impact investing and social entrepreneurship, he has been active in both fields for nearly thirty years. He has served as founding director and board member of diverse social enterprises and impact investment groups. Emerson is a Senior Research Fellow at University of Heidelberg's Center on Social Investing and has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford business schools. He has taught social entrepreneurship at Kellogg Business School and NYU-Abu Dhabi in the U.A.E. In the late 90s, Emerson coined the concept of Blended Value to describe the reality that the value we create in our lives and through our investing is a blend of social, environmental and economic elements. While the value we create is whole, we are asked to choose between doing well or doing good, making money or engaging in philanthropy and working in nonprofit or for-profit organizations. This dualism prevents us from capturing the full value and returns of not only our investments, but our lives and personal purpose. The Purpose of Capital: Elements of Impact, Financial Flows, and Natural Being explores how we may bridge the divide between how we think about doing well and doing good in order to optimize the overall impact of our lives and wealth. In recent years, Emerson's work has expanded to include consideration of not simply how to invest for more than money, but also how we might think about the deeper purpose of our wealth and lives-the Why. His latest offering, the eighth book he has produced, is The Purpose of Capital: Elements of Impact, Financial Flows and Personal Being and explores the broad and historic links and connections between how we think about money and investing and how we understand the total, integrated value of our lives and World. Before becoming an internationally recognized leader in impact investing and social entrepreneurship, Emerson spent the first part of his career in social work, focusing on youth and community development. He was founding director of Larkin Street Services, a San Francisco-based nonprofit serving homeless and runaway youth. While he is proud to have served in that role and helped launch a program that over the years has engaged with thousands of homeless youth, he became frustrated with traditional approaches to philanthropy and nonprofit management. In 1989 he left Larkin Street to become founding director of the Homeless Economic Development Fund which later became the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund, or REDF, the second venture philanthropy fund in the United States and the first to fully document and disseminate its lessons through a wide variety of publications.