The latest co-learning experience for our 2026 Community Investor Accelerator Cohort, a program designed to help community foundations deploy impact investment strategies, took us to the Total Impact Summit hosted by ImpactPHL.
The Kansas delegation, again identified by our “ruby red” shoes, included our staff as well as representatives from the Kansas Department of Commerce and the five community foundations participating in the CoBank grant-funded Accelerator.
The theme of this year’s Summit offered insight into what it would look like for Kansas to have what ImpactPHL calls an orchestrated impact investment ecosystem. The term “orchestrated” is important. Every musician in an orchestra plays their own instrument. Alone, those instruments can make beautiful sounds. Together, they become a symphony making world-class music.
Similarly, each community foundation, financial institution, private family foundation and the Kansas Health Foundation itself has an instrument to play in the impact investment orchestra. As an orchestrated ecosystem, we can invest together to make an even greater impact.
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That’s why we’re building this ecosystem alongside partner organizations and combining our unique strengths on the same stage.
Composing the Next Practices
Before we could begin building this ecosystem, we first had to find the musicians who would play in the orchestra. That work started decades ago.
In the late 90s, we recognized that our assets were necessary but insufficient to create a healthier Kansas, so we spent the next several decades helping Kansas communities stand up their own community foundations.
Travis Green, Project Director at the Community Investment Project and our consultant for the Accelerator, described Kansas as unique since we have dozens of community foundations serving places large and small with sizable endowments that many other states don’t have.
This isn’t a strategy that we adopted and implemented in Kansas. We helped write this playbook. Now, the program is drawing interest from out-of-state community foundations, showcasing how we work to become THE model for philanthropic impact by creating the next practices.
A New Stage for Impact Investing
This October, community foundations across Kansas will have a new way to join the symphony. Ahead of the Kansas Association of Community Foundations’ annual conference, the Kansas Health Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are co-sponsoring a one-day, pre-conference event focused on impact investing. The Community Impact Investor Convening is for community foundations who are current or prospective impact investors.
We know that community foundations, large and small, are complex, multi-stakeholder institutions that juggle donor-advised funds, endowments and hundreds of component funds, so this event was built specifically with that complexity in mind.
In building this impact investment ecosystem, we’re working to make Kansas’s community foundations more powerful for the communities they serve and Kansas as a whole.
The current cohort will wrap up this fall with the goal that the participating community foundation boards will formally adopt impact investing policies and programs by the end of the year. From there, the Kansas Health Foundation hopes to make joint investments alongside these community foundations in 2027, so there’s more to share on the way.
For now, we’ll continue to tune the ecosystem and invite more musicians to join our symphony.