#42 Michele Giddens: driving scale and speed, for change and impact

“The scale of the Impact Investing industry as a whole is not nearly enough to reach the Global Goals by 2030. There’s a burning emergency to act faster and at greater scale.”

This episode was recorded at the Impact Investment Summit in Sydney at the end of 2019, where I was lucky enough to speak with Michele Giddens.

She’s co-founder of Bridges Fund Management, she’s based in the UK, and during our conversation she summed up really well how poignant and emotional it was to be here in Australia, in Sydney, having these conversations about climate change and about investing in sustainability, while… we were quite literally… surrounded by fire.

Michele co-founded Bridges Fund Management in 2002, alongside Philip Newborough and Sir Ronald Cohen, she has more than 25 years experience in sustainable and impact investing and, as she explains, she began to see the power of using capital markets to solve social problems in her formative years when she was working in development finance for the World Bank and the IFC.

On this episode…

… We talked about the potential of the SDGs, the urgency of the need to shift our economic models, and the shift Michele has seen in the finance industry since she co-founded Bridges almost 20 years ago.

My key takeaway this week…

… “The scale of the industry as a whole is not nearly enough to reach the Global Goals by 2030. There’s a burning emergency to act faster and at greater scale.”