Welcome to this episode of Courageous Capital Stewards. Today we’re joined by Kathleen Simpson, CEO of The Russell Family Foundation, who is redefining what philanthropy can do by activating capital for impact—not just grants. If you think “doing good” means giving away only five percent, get ready to rethink everything. Under Kathleen’s leadership, the foundation shifted from 7% to nearly 95% impact-aligned investing. We’ll explore how they made that transition through Total Resource Activation—leveraging grants, investments, and even loan guarantees as one unified strategy—and their bold Net Zero commitment. From starting with the problem (not the capital stack) to the surprising power of loan guarantees, Kathleen shares practical lessons for investors, philanthropists, and community builders who believe we already have the resources to solve our biggest challenges. Tune in to learn how one foundation is not just imagining a better world—but actively investing to build it.
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Beyond The 5% Rule: Activating Capital For Good With Kathleen Simpson
Welcome to Courageous Capital Stewards. I’m your host, Dr. Stephanie Gripne. As the founder and leader of Impact Finance Center, I’m thrilled to bring you insights and stories from the forefront of financial innovation and impact investing. Our show is for bold visionaries and trailblazing organizations, reshaping how we think about and manage capital for the greater good. Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, or just curious about the world of impact finance, this is the place for you.
We are honored to welcome Kathleen Simpson, Chief Executive Officer of The Russell Family Foundation. Kathleen collaborates with the board to guide the foundation’s strategic planning programs and community affairs while overseeing its groundbreaking impact-investing initiatives. Under her leadership, the foundation’s investment portfolio has transitioned from 7% to nearly 95% impact aligned with a bold commitment to net zero and a strong emphasis on decarbonization education. Kathleen brings a wealth of experience spanning both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
As a certified public accountant with an MBA, she has led transformative initiatives at the foundation and other organizations, including founding a public accounting firm that served businesses, high-net-wealth families, and nonprofits. Kathleen also serves on the boards of Confluence Philanthropy, Sierra Club Foundation, the Bainum Family Foundation, and the American Leadership Forum of Tacoma Pierce County. In this episode, we’ll explore Kathleen’s inspiring leadership at the foundation, her approach to transitioning portfolios toward impact alignment, and the foundation’s net-zero commitment. We’ll also discuss her perspective on integrating financial innovation into philanthropy and lessons learned from her extensive career.
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Kathleen, we’re so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us. For my first question, I love talking to accountants, especially in the philanthropy world. Tell us a little bit about your personal journey, how you found yourself eventually at a foundation, and your journey within that foundation.
Kathleen’s Background & Path To Philanthropy
First of all, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Stephanie. My journey is not a traditional journey into philanthropy. My role currently at The Russell Family Foundation is my first philanthropic role. I have been here for about a decade. My background is as a CPA. I had a CPA firm for over a decade, providing CFO services to high-net-wealth families, individuals, nonprofits, and medium to small-sized businesses. I did that for about a decade. During that work, I also served on many of my community boards, typically as the treasurer.
If you’re a CPA, you’re always put into that treasurer role. As my daughter was heading off for college, I decided it was time for me to return back into the industry. I always knew that I was having my CPA firm provide flexibility, but I knew I wanted to return to just a one-employer role. I had the opportunity to land as the Director of Finance at a wealth management firm, which was owned by The Russell Family. I’ve been with The Russell Family for about fifteen years, serving as the Director of Finance of that wealth management firm that was providing the back office services for The Russell Family Foundation.
When the foundation decided to bring those services in-house, I had the opportunity to come to the foundation side as the CFO and served as a CFO for five years, and as the CEO since 2020. That opportunity to come to the foundation really was the blending of my trained finance skills with my community personal passion. I felt like it was just the intersection of the training and my personal passion. It felt like the right role.
I love that. What’s really interesting is that the wealth management firm itself was doing impact investing. Kathleen, do you remember the first time you were investing for good? Was it before you joined the wealth management firm, or do you have a remembrance of when that time would have been for you?
The awareness of impact investing came from working at that wealth management firm. It was really a new concept at the time. The foundation had the opportunity with that sister organization to be able to be innovative and to think about what this means if we use our investment portfolio for impact. I learned along the way. I feel like this has been my learning journey as the foundation continued to evolve with the portfolio and with the partners that we have within us, our investment advisors. It’s been a learning journey for me as well.
That’s absolutely fantastic. I haven’t seen the most recent stats of how many foundations there are in total, but an older statistic is that there are 76,000 foundations. When you think about it, most of them are just giving away their 5%. They’re investing the 95%. You’ve been on this pretty extraordinary journey to say, “We don’t want to just give away the 5%. What if we could actually align that 95% alongside our mission?”
Tell us a little bit about the mission of The Russell Family Foundation, the areas you support right now. Start to talk to us a little bit about the journey of that foundation, because even though in our circles, we talk about this a lot, at the end of the day, there’s got to be less than 20, 40, or 50 foundations in the world that have aligned at least 90% of their resources towards mission. It’s got to be a small club.
The Russell Family Foundation’s Mission & Impact Alignment
There was a Bridgespan report that was done in 2024 that about 5% of foundations are doing that. Don’t quote me on that. I don’t have the stat in front of me. The Russell Family Foundation has always been an environmental foundation. We started in 1999. The mission of the foundation is to invest in people and places to advance environmental sustainability and address the climate crisis. If I do anything else in this seat, it’s talking about total resource activation. What that means to me is that we first look at what we are trying to accomplish. We look at what tools we have available to us. Sometimes, that’s grant capital. Sometimes, it’s investments. Sometimes, it’s your communication and lifting up partners, or even convening like-minded individuals.
The mission of the foundation is to invest in people and places to advance environmental sustainability and address the climate crisis. Share on XWe are trying to work in verticals. In our catalytic climate finance program, which came about in 2021 when we went through a strategy review, the board said we wanted to put all assets towards climate solutions. They were asking about what more we could do with the investment portfolio. At the time, the investment portfolio was already 95% impact aligned. It was 80% more carbon efficient than the MSTI benchmark. We did a learning journey. We decided to make a net-zero commitment. With that net-zero commitment, we wrapped it with a program that is supported with grant capital.
This catalytic climate finance program leads with the investment portfolio, investing in climate solutions through technology and nature-based solutions. It’s supported with grant capital that is providing grant capital to mostly intermediaries and those who are making sure that the opportunities are getting to the front lines of the communities that are most impacted. We also have a food for climate solutions program that leads with the grant portfolio.
We’re supporting that with some investment capital that the grants committee is actually approving, which is a new concept to have the investment committee overseeing some grant capital. Our grants committee has access to investment opportunities that will support the food for climate solutions. We use our communications along that. How are we uplifting our partners? How are we transparently sharing the work that we’re doing in hopes that we can inspire others? We want to do it in a very transparent way, both the successes and the challenges we’re seeing along the way.
Integrating Grant & Investment Capital (Starting With The Problem)
You say that very easily and quickly, but let’s peel back some of those things really quickly. The first is that we’re getting ready to run our fourth Impact Investing Giving Circle with The Women’s Foundation of Colorado. They’re 100% invested with women and people of color. Every year-ish, we invite 20 to 40 women, non-binary individuals, to donate $2,000 into this pooled fund. Instead of giving it away, they go through a seven-part curriculum and learn how to invest. This year, it’s going to be about health.
Kathleen, you said a really important point. You said you start with the problem first and then use the tool. I don’t know why the norm is to do the other. I’ll share a quick story about the first time we did this. We were with a group of 50 women, non-binary entrepreneurs that were seeking capital. The first question they had for us was, “What do the investors want?” We said, “We want you to pay yourself a thriving wage, not a living wage, and your workers a thriving wage. It is what it is. If you need park ramp money, loan money, and pooled negative money, tell us what you need.”
They said, “No. You’re not hearing me. What do the investors need, or what do they want?” “We want a reverse engineer.” They’re like, “No. You’re not hearing me.” The third time, they start crying. It’s such a profound thing to say we start with what the problem is, and then we’re going to reverse engineer the capital stack. Do you find that you share that with your peers, or did you have to train yourself and the board to do that? You said it so simply, but it’s actually a really radical thing to do.
I am sharing it at every moment that I can. Because I come from a finance background, I have a real strong comfort in using both investments and grant capital. I come by it naturally and really want to encourage others to move beyond just one tool because there’s so much opportunity. Sometimes, it’s as easy as a loan guarantee and not even moving capital. I want people to open up their aperture and just think about the opportunity to find solutions. That comes in relationships. That comes in conversations.
We think a lot about some of our aspirational portfolios. When I have talked to peers, I frequently get, “How did you source those? What were the opportunities? How did you know what tool to use?” They have always come up because of talking with our partner and finding that they’ve got some barrier, and then coming up with a solution, whether it is a loan guarantee or providing loan capital with grant capital to make sure that there’s loan counselors if we’re going to be providing debt capital. It is gaining traction when I talk to my peers and share the concept. It resonates with many. I’m hoping that more will get comfortable with it and find like-minded peers who can help break down those barriers themselves.
We’ve done it on paper, but we’ve yet to get a foundation to combine. Maybe you’ve already done a grant with a PRI and an MRI for a single transaction to show that it is one bucket of capital. Your statement reminds me. We have an impact investor that attended our first conference, named Karen Brown. She sent me a card that had the Alice in Wonderland quote, “I’ve done five impossible things before breakfast.”
What was super cool is that she has an MBA, and she’s an angel investor. She’s also been the CEO of a foundation. She said, “I could see the silos I have placed on my own donations and investments in. My brain was working on opening the door to integration and collaboration between the investment and donation options. It sounds silly. The MBA or finance segment of my brain was talking with the donor segment of my brain, saying, “Let’s have coffee and talk about this.”
That’s what reminds me of what you’re talking about. It’s interesting because some of the foundations have started their PRI program with the PRI team. They get to know the program team. Others have started with the program team from that perspective. Any lessons learned you want to share about how you went from conventional to that integration that you’ve developed at the foundation?
We have the advantage of being a small foundation. There’s a small team. We all talk to each other. Also, it’s tapping each part of your team for what their expertise is. When I first came to the foundation, we had a mission-related investing committee. The program team would come to these committee meetings. I was realizing that it was not their strength to be looking at finance investable opportunities. As human nature, they put it to the side, and then you come to the meeting and try to work through it.
I realized we were asking our program team to be investment experts. What we really needed them to be were the mission experts. It is changing the dynamic of asking for those types of opportunities to come from the program team to actually sourcing the opportunities through relationships. Let the investment advisor and the finance team look at it from an investment perspective, but then rely on the program team on what impact these investments are going to have.
It is doing the same diligence that you would on a grant capital. It is trying to break those silos down, taking the scariness out of what an investment is, and leveling the playing field so that investment is really no different than a grant. You do have to have diligence and make sure that there’s financial viability behind it because of the outcomes and the returns you’re looking for. From a philanthropic investment, they’re still very similar.
Investment is no different than a grant. You still need diligence to ensure there’s financial viability behind it for the outcomes and returns you expect. But from a philanthropic perspective, they are still very similar. Share on XWe actually say that grants are investments with a negative 100% loss financial return. We think more money would go to impact if we didn’t have those silos, if we all were investors and all cared about impact. That supports it. It’s funny because we do investor training. We did this in Essex County. We’ve been fortunate to be training a lot of community foundations in Jackson Hole, in Pennsylvania, and in Essex County.
You would have said, “Stephanie, the most effective thing for you to do to teach the Essex County community is to turn into a part game show host, part preacher, and part professor.” At the beginning, I asked everyone, “Are you an investor, a donor, or a philanthropist, nonprofit or for-profit? It can be more than one.” Very few people raise their hands and say they’re an investor. We’re all investors. When you go to the grocery store and you purchase milk, you are purchasing a supply chain and how they treat their workers from that. I’ll say, “On a count of three, say I’m an investor.” I’m like, “I can’t hear you. Louder. Do it again.”
It’s this piece of we all get mission, we all can understand mission, and we all are investors. It’s really exciting to hear you do that. Speaking of that, what are you most proud of in the journey to shift the foundation from 7% mission to 95%? When you say that, other foundations are like, “She did that.” What does that mean to you every day? Tactically, how has life changed for your team or the investments that you’re making? What does that mean in real tactical ways?
The Pivot Point: Divesting From Fossil Fuels
What it means is that it has happened over a twenty-year period. We started our impact investing journey in 2005. Richard Woo, our CEO at the time, asked the board to be able to have $1 million to invest in what at the time was called socially responsible investing. We ended up putting that into some community banks, and then continued to have a little bit more capital to continue to invest in this impact investing or socially responsible investing way. The real pivot point for the foundation was in 2014, when we signed on to Divest-Invest. We divested of fossil fuels.
What that did was give us the opportunity of where we are reinvesting and becoming really intentional about knowing what’s in our portfolio and owning what we own. It took us a while to get to 95%. There are still opportunities. That’s a quantity. What is the actual quality of the investment center in our portfolio? It is where we are today. If we are focusing on the climate crisis, how are we using our investment portfolio for real-world climate solutions?
It is not only protecting our portfolio from climate impacts, but also investing in those climate solutions and nature-based solutions. It’s been a fun journey. There’s always going to continue to be work to do. There is the continued evaluation of what we are holding and where we can have a higher impact, including using all of the tools, which are the investments, but also your active ownership. How are we using our engagements and our active ownership to encourage those investments that we’re in to have similar commitments?
I love that. I got a call from a long-time mentor of mine at the Forest Service. He said, “What have you been doing for the last fifteen years since you left us?” I said, “I grow investors like you grow trees. You can think of an investor as a serotinous pine cone that needs fire to open it up to get activated. That’s for the seed of a ponderosa pine to get planted, grow, and germinate. Individuals, foundations, family offices, and companies need that same activation.” Just because you are smart, have access to money, and understand the mission doesn’t mean you know how to write a check for that.
You’re starting to go into the space, both just generally with your partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and also with your shareholder action cohort. I’d love to explore both of those. Let’s start with the fact that you’re in the “I’m growing the investor” business now. Talk about why we have so little time to spend. Why is that a priority for you? What does that mean?
Leveraging & Catalyzing Others (The Flywheel Effect)
It’s a priority for the foundation for me personally, because when I see the tools, I see the opportunity set. With the catalytic climate finance program, we are a relatively small foundation. We’re a $75 million foundation. We are making these big investments. We know that our portfolio is not going to move the needle. What’s going to move the needle is if we can smooth the path and bring in other philanthropic capital and family office capital for climate solutions. That can truly move the needle if we’re doing this collectively.
We have the opportunity to share this work with the National Center for Family Philanthropy in partnership with the Woodcock Foundation. Stacey Faella, the Executive Director there, and I have been talking about how there aren’t enough foundations using their full suite of tools. That’s really the opportunity that we’ve had, and building a learning action cohort through that platform. It’s been exciting to see because we’ve got foundations that are at various levels in their journey. Knowing that we’re untapping some capital is pretty exciting for us.
The other area that we participated in was the shareholder engagement project, which was a series of foundations that met with Eric Horvath, who was leading it. It is really learning about what active ownership is. How do you use your voice as an active owner through shareholder engagement? It’s a tool that we have been using for decades, but we’ve been doing it more opportunistically and less strategically. This is an opportunity for us to be thinking about intentionality around our proxy voting, on our shareholder resolutions, whether we are to file any, or co-filing with other partners.
There is so much to tackle here. Let’s start first on the concept of what I’m hearing you say is leverage. Sometimes, I use the analogy, do you want to give fish away or teach people to fish, or restore the fisheries? To me, you’re doing the restore the fisheries piece. When we have a lot of resources, it sounds strange to say a small foundation for some people with $75 million, but in the world that we walk in, that is small. You and your board have made this profound decision to say, “Let’s do good with our money, but let’s use our money to pave the way for others and catalyze others to do good.”
How do we get every government and every foundation to do the same? I should say it’s happening more and more. We’re slowly becoming truly a B2B organization, where a cohort of our team, a group of folks, foundations, a town, or a state will say, “Help us raise $100 million to $1 billion for our community.” You made that transition. Do you remember when that happened? How do you convince others? The leverage is huge. Thank you for doing it. How do we convince others to do that?
Some of that comes, at least from my perspective, from George Russell’s legacy of always thinking big and how we are bringing other people together. He always said, “If you have a problem, it doesn’t matter. You can solve any problem if you don’t worry about who’s going to get the credit.” For us, it’s that same concept of we want to be out and just be sharing what we’re doing, not saying, “You must do this.”
You can solve any problem if you don’t worry about who gets the credit. Share on XWe want to show the real benefits that we’re seeing by being able to really think through all of our philanthropic tools. Hopefully, it’s inspiring to others. What I’m seeing, especially in our catalytic climate finance, is that there’s a real hunger for foundations and family offices to lean on each other and that collective nature. That communication piece is a natural way for us to share and invite others to come alongside. It’s been inspiring because I’m seeing it’s the flywheel effect of the communications that we’ve been putting out there.
Is it difficult to make the case that it’s working to your board, your peers, or your team?
No, our board is excited. The real challenge is that we have a small team. How do we leverage time to be able to be collaborative, be in spaces with others, be in a relationship with others, in a way that we find is aligned with our values? The biggest barrier I’m finding right now is just that there’s so many so much time to be able to do it right and do it well in a true relationship.
Part of the work that we have the fortune of doing right now is this concept that there’s enough money to solve our problems, which is really wild to say at this moment in time, in August of 2025. I’ll give you an example. We keynoted the Pennsylvania Area Community Foundation Association. All 40 foundations are members of this association. I was the morning keynote. I said, “You have $1.25 trillion of private wealth. That’s not even your philanthropic wealth, government wealth, or corporate wealth to solve your housing problems, your nonprofit problems, or your small business problems.”
I loved it because the afternoon speaker was the state of Pennsylvania, the Center for Rural Economy. They’d actually done a detailed wealth study. I have a twenty-minute version that calculates the private wealth of a place. They said, “We love the morning speaker, but she was wrong. We have over $5 trillion of private wealth.” You calculate the amount of money it would take to house every single person.
Lately, every time I’ve done it for a region or a state, it’s always less than 1%. It is the concept that we don’t need somebody else to come rescue us, but we have enough capital to solve our own problems if we mobilize 1% of our private wealth. What I’m hearing you say is that the charitable dollars are to make that. Pave the way, do it first, and make it safer and easier. Before we dive into the shareholder action, you briefly mentioned a guarantee.
When people ask me what my favorite tool is in the toolbox, I will say guarantee. It’s the Harry Potter magic sorcerer stone. It can be used in so many fun, different ways. When did you get introduced to that? What do you think of it? For readers, when I explain it, I don’t use the word guarantee. I said, “Would you co-sign for your community? Have you ever co-signed for your kids, or did your parents co-sign for you?”
What we’re asking is, “Would you co-sign for climate? Would you co-sign for Washington? Would you co-sign for women and people of color?” Do you remember the first time you learned about it, because you probably have known for a long time? When did you see it as, “This is a tool that we can really use. I just want to put an exclamation mark on this specific tool.”
Strategic Use Of The Loan Guarantee Tool
There are two examples I can share of a loan guarantee on our side. One was several years back. It was a grantee partner. A conservation partner came to us. The University of Washington was divesting of real estate properties. One of those properties was an estuary here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a salmon-bearing estuary. It had a salmon hatchery on it. It is a prime property to be developed because it’s right on the Hood Canal, with beautiful views of the Olympic Mountains.
This conservation partner came to us and said, “We can pay and use our line of credit to hold this property for a nonprofit called the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group to be able to purchase the property, but they need 36 months to get through grant cycles to be able to buy the property.” Our conservation partner was willing to use their line of credit to purchase the property if we would guarantee it.
What that meant was that all we had to do was sign that we would guarantee the loan, and that we didn’t have to move into capital. It was a no-brainer. We were preserving property with a long-time partner, knowing that the exit strategy of the property was going to continue to have the Salmon Enhancement Group hold that property. It worked well. The nonprofit took out the loan about six months early. With that same example, we used our communications in their fundraising. We were uplifting them on their fundraising opportunity.
Another creative way that came about was with our banking partner. Our banking partner, knowing that we were focusing on climate here in the Pacific Northwest, knew of a local nonprofit that had just started up. The leaders of the nonprofit are well known, but this was a new nonprofit that had just received a grant from Washington State University to put in heat pumps. Those are reimbursable grants. They went through the first cycle. They put in 100 heat pumps in six months, but they did it based on relationships because the cycle, they get reimbursed, and they have to have that cash outlay.
Our bank had brought them to us. I was talking with their bank. I’m like, “How do we solve this problem for them? They’re a new nonprofit, so they don’t have any credit history.” We got creative. We allowed them to use a portion of our credit line that we have in place for if the markets are going to experience a shock. We’ve never used it, but we have it as a belt-and-suspenders approach. What this nonprofit needed was the opportunity to build its own credit.
We allowed them to use a portion of our credit line as their credit line. We are just now getting ready to look at a renewal of that. They went through the first year of it and are looking through it as a renewal. Another way for us to say, what are the barriers? We are seeing the work that you’re doing, the impact that you’re doing. What are those barriers to get you to really do the work well? Those are two examples, different opportunities. They each came with those conversations with the partner.
You have to figure out the barriers that are keeping you from carrying out your work more effectively. Share on XYou surprised me because I was at a conference. There are many conferences that you and I would not be surprised to see one another at, such as Confluence, Mission Investors Exchange, or Philanthropy Northwest. I was walking across the lobby at GreenBiz 25, which is the largest conference for corporate social responsibility. The GreenBiz is now called Trellis Group, which is a large group. They have a membership group that has over 160 companies with over $1 billion in revenue.
There, I will confess, I’m known as Dr. Stuff, ESG, and Magic Money. We’re seventeen for seventeen for creating a financial positive ROI on day one. How we explain it there is, you want to do something good and you don’t have a budget, call Dr. Stuff. We do a lot of one-on-one training. We do cohorts of that. I was introduced to shareholder activism through a private foundation I’d worked with, which had worked with Tom Van Dyck at RBC and As You Sow, and these powerful stories. Home Depot was selling old-growth Redwood.
A coalition of private foundations purchased the stock while they were giving grants to Rainforest Action Network. Rainforest Action Network was on the ground, getting on the intercoms, going, “Aisle five, you can be a part of destroying America’s last rainforest.” Meanwhile, the foundations were purchasing stock. These were different times and different rules. They said, “As a large shareholder owner of Home Depot, we don’t want to be selling old-growth forests.” That was my introduction to shareholder activism of hearing those stories.
I find myself hanging out with these really bright entrepreneurs in these large institutions who, frankly, in your and my world, we could take a two-year, three-year, four-year, or five-year payback to do something good on climate, governance, or social. The fact is, that’s not good enough for them to get to a lot of yeses. They need financial ROI on day one. You’re hanging out in both worlds. I’m not hanging out with our friends in the shareholder action. I’ve told them about what I’m doing. How do we connect the dots? There are a lot of corporations that have supply chains that overlap, where private foundations and community foundations are caring about businesses and nonprofits in those spaces. What are you seeing? What excites you in shareholder activism? Is there a pathway through?
My point is, most of the colleagues I know at GreenBiz know what our friends in shareholder action are going to say. They’re like, “I get it. I’m on your team. I just have to make a case to my CEO and to the board of trustees.” It seems to me that if we could combine impact investing with shareholder activism, there’s a huge potential power there to provide not just the sticks, but the carrots. What are you seeing, given that you were hanging out in my world of GreenBiz for a few minutes?
The Future Focus To Inspire Collective Climate Action
I wish I could say that I’m spending a lot of time in the shareholder activism space. That’s why I joined the shareholder engagement project. The reason I went to GreenBiz is that I know, for us as an organization, especially with our net-zero commitment and our engagement targets, that I want to be in those circles. I want to understand what their barriers are. If we’re filing resolutions, we need to understand what the challenges are on the other side of the organizations that are actually doing this work, and honestly, trying to have sustainability in their organizations.
What I’m getting excited about, though, is that a lot of times these shareholder opportunities actually reveal that businesses are doing better when they put together these good business practices. We just have a lot of work to do in the active ownership. Part of my goal is to really be thinking about how we can do this well. We just signed on with a platform called iconik, which allows us to have more visibility into our proxy voting. I am excited to be able to take that on board, too.
Let us know when you run into one that needs some magic money. We’ll help you reverse engineer the capital stack. It’s been really fun working with them. It’s a very different type of crew than we normally hang out with, but it’s been fun. As we wind to a close, you talked about a couple of your favorite impact investments. I’m going to skip that part. If you look around the corner, what excites you? Especially in these tricky times, people are surprised when I say, “I’ve never been more hopeful, and I’ve never been more scared.” Let’s talk about what gives you hope right now. What are you excited about if you look around the corner?
What excites me is the collaborations that I’m seeing. A lot of foundations in the current political climate may appear to have shifted their strategies a bit. What I’m seeing is the willingness to be transparent with each other, to put capital for solutions, and to continue on what we know we need to do to serve the planet and a healthy planet. Those collaborations and relationships are really what give me joy and give me the energy to continue this work.
Many foundations, in the current political climate, seem to have shifted their strategies. But we're seeing a continued willingness to be transparent with one another, to put capital toward solutions, and to stay committed to what we know is needed to… Share on XAs we come to the end of this episode, I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Kathleen Simpson of The Russell Family Foundation for joining us and sharing your valuable insights. Your perspectives have added immense depth to our conversation on impact investing and philanthropy. On a personal note, Kathleen, I admire you deeply. The work that you’ve done and how you lead is just extraordinary. Thank you for being with us here.
It was truly my pleasure. Thank you. I really enjoy working with you all the time, Steph.
Have a wonderful day. We’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you.
As we come to the end of this episode, I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Kathleen Simpson of The Russell Family Foundation for joining us and sharing her invaluable insights. Her perspectives have added immense depth to our conversation on impact investing and philanthropy. For our readers, stay tuned for our upcoming episodes where we’ll continue to explore groundbreaking topics in the world of impact finance.
We have some exciting guests and discussions lined up that you won’t want to miss. Also, keep an eye out for news and updates related to our show, which we’ll be sharing on social media channels and throughout our newsletter. Thank you again to everyone for reading. A special thanks to our guests for their time. This has been Courageous Capital Stewards with me, Dr. Steph Gripne. Until next time, keep making a positive impact with your investments.
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As we wrap up another insightful episode, I, Dr. Steph Gripne, would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for tuning in to Courageous Capital Stewards. If you found this conversation enlightening and want to stay updated on future episodes, please make sure to subscribe to our show. Your subscription helps us grow and continue to bring you valuable content. Also, if you have a moment, I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave a review. Your feedback is invaluable in shaping our show and ensuring we meet your interests. Don’t forget to follow us on social media for the latest episodes and behind-the-scenes content. Together, let’s keep exploring the world of impact finance and building a community of Courageous Capital Stewards. Thank you again for your support.
Important Links
- Impact Finance Center
- The Russell Family Foundation
- Confluence Philanthropy
- Sierra Club Foundation
- Bainum Family Foundation
- American Leadership Forum of Tacoma Pierce County
- Kathleen Simpson on LinkedIn
- Impact Investing Giving Circles
- National Center for Family Philanthropy
- Woodcock Foundation
About Kathleen Simpson
Kathleen is the Chief Executive Officer of The Russell Family Foundation (TRFF), where she collaborates with the board to guide the foundation’s strategic planning, programs, and community affairs, and oversees the Foundation’s impact investing. She has extensive experience with both for-profit and nonprofit industries.
As CEO of TRFF and formerly CFO, Kathleen has a track record of transitioning the investment portfolio from 7% to nearly 95% impact-aligned, leading the foundation to make a Net Zero commitment and supporting the education around decarbonization. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was Director of Finance for an independent wealth management firm serving individuals, multigenerational families, and foundations. She also founded and operated a public accounting firm providing CFO services to businesses, high-net-wealth families, and non-profits for over a decade.
Kathleen is a Certified Public Accountant with a master’s of business administration degree. She serves on the board of directors for the Bainum Family Foundation, Confluence Philanthropy, Sierra Club Foundation, and American Leadership Forum of Tacoma Pierce County. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Washington State Society of Certified Public Accountants.