VC Include, a project of Tides Center

• We created a fellowship for BIPOC first-time fund managers designed to educate and train historically underrepresented fund managers into best-in-class General Partners.  We have training in preparatory needs for a successful fund, mentors and one on one time with leaders in the VC space and with our founder. We have fellowship showcases for interested Limited Partners. We have fireside chats. We created a peer network that we connect to our larger ecosystem. We created over 200 hours of content in our inaugural year. We have funds that have closed or nearly closed their funds in an accelerated timeline in no small part due to the exposure and guidance of our program.  They in turn seek out seed stage businesses to support that are the in their intimate pipeline and provide women, people of color and a broader geography of founders opportunity for support and success.

  
  

  
  

• With just 1% of the $70 trillion of assets in the U.S. managed by diverse asset managers, VC Include meets this market opportunity by building an ecosystem of women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ fund managers in alternative investments.

• There is a vast chasm between the asset managers who are women and of color vs. the cis white male gendered cohort.  Some of this is driven by the industry recruiting from "people we know" so similar people with similar backgrounds.  Some is due to implicit bias.  Some is due to systemic issues such as not enough diversity in asset allocators who can even recognize underrepresented founders and support them to across the stages.

VC Include’s founder Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson recognized a dissociation between technology development and social impact early into her career. She found that “institutional investors” or “late-stage investors” viewed impact investment as an act of charity—they did not see prioritizing ethical or environmentally-focused companies as an investment strategy that can drive alpha and achieve a high rate of return. Through her current role as CEO of VC Include, along with her other initiatives, Bahiyah aims to help create a paradigm shift—to prove that impact, inclusion, and innovation can drive higher rates of return in the asset management field, which is severely homogeneous. 

The ecosystem VC Include built connects policy makers (such as the SBA) with institutional investors, family offices and invested allies to the GP's that are looking to create funds to change the paradigm and support businesses that are valuable socially and fiscally. These exist in the form of our training and education fellowship that exposes GP's to the vast network of financial collaborators and helps poise them to be funded sooner and through a wider network of asset allocators.

Women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and LGBTQ — working to drive economic growth through the power of diversity. These are typically educated and experienced financial specialists who find themselves locked out of access to large and private capital.  They don't have the family and friends resources other fund managers have to start.  They didn't have places to get education or training to seize opportunities they did receive.

The program engages them through content- subject matter experts who walk through the essential needs and back office requirements of a fund. They receive one on one mentorship with Bahiyah, scions in the industry and board members.  There are fireside chats where successful individuals who look like them and have similar backgrounds describe the journey.  Also we encourage them to leverage their peer network which is a vital part of engagement.  Aside from aforementioned demographics, we serve funds working across different geographical areas, with diverse background in education and focus on having near equal gender makeup.

Our fund managers come from and operate in places as diverse as Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Washington D.C. and Tennessee. Along with our Climate Justice initiative we have managers located in Chicago, Boston, Kenya, Miami, North Carolina. We also have fund managers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Jersey.

Yes, we accelerate investment into historically underrepresented emerging managers at scale. We support fund managers who then make direct investments in early seed small businesses.  These small businesses benefit from the guidance and partnership of our fund managers to grow their business.  These businesses are diverse, impact- and ESG- driven and generate outsized returns while delivering value across mostly underserved communities.

VCI was created to evolve the traditional investment industry and create an inclusive ecosystem of mission-aligned Limited Partners and General Partners from diverse backgrounds, specifically women and people of color. 

Currently only 1.4% of US based assets are managed by diverse firms (minority-owned, women-owned or both. Further, strong general and ethnic diversity was shown to drive a higher chance of financial outperformance, when compared with non diverse firms.

Inputs: Diverse VCI experts provide insight and training to recruited and motivated diverse fund managers. Experienced staff and consultants design and deliver the programming and create the welcoming peer support community.  Corporate and philanthropic entities seeking to address these inequities provide general support and program-specific funding that underwrites the program and operational costs of VCI.

Activities: VCI provides emerging fund manager fellowship and educational events to provide the tools, training, best practices, introductions and coaching to prepare fund managers from diverse backgrounds to be successful in launching and raising capital to become top rated VC investors.

Outputs: Position fund managers for investment opportunities +relationship building. Create feedback loops to support their strategy. Provide fund managers with best in class education +training for institutional readiness. Ensure that Fellows have a strategy + framework for integrating ESG metrics into their portfolio. Support fund managers with professional development resources to build their team + leadership capacity. Provide fund managers with opportunities for media exposure. Serve as a sounding board for fund managers as they continue their fundraising through Fund I and beyond

Impact: 10x increase in diverse (women and POC) fund managers in next 20 years. Expected increased chance of financial outperformance when compared with non diverse firms.

We are in growth mode and expect to train 20 funds next year (small businesses themselves), who will then invest an estimated 20 small businesses each (400 total).  In growth mode, over the next five years we anticipate a total reach of 150 diverse-led fund management firms investing in 3,000 small businesses (mostly led by women and people of color). In the coming year we will also build out our alumni network to strengthen connections between current and past program participants.  This network will grow each year by the number of fellows graduating per year.  We are also developing shorter length training programs to be delivered via video, online and other means to help bridge the gap between the extraordinary interest in our programs and the available fellowship slots.  We also anticipate an as-yet-unknown number of recipients of our research and reports who will be able to enhance their awareness and progress as a result.

We serve women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBT historically underserved early seed to series A new majority fund managers. We also work closely with  investors, financial institution leadership, and policy makers to create more opportunities for diverse fund managers to succeed. We provide women- and diverse- led entrepreneurs and technology startups to gain confidence in securing investments and to seek out the growing network of diverse fund managers.

VCI recruits and selects funds from across the US who have a well-developed impact, ESG and diversity focus. Examples are Apis and Heritage who leverage an employee stock ownership program to buy business with black and brown employees and give ownership interest and capital to those communities. With a broad geographical footprint their work is manifest in communities across the country.

We have been building an ecosystem, a coalition of the willing with values and mission aligned groups and individuals throughout and before the program initiation. VCI leadership, instructors, and advisors leverage their lived experiences and unique networks to create trusting supportive programming that will honestly prepare the next generation of diverse fund managers to compete and lead in the investment field

We have ecosystem dinners, speak at panels, forums and conferences, generate a newsletter, have LP showcases and attend industry events. We build relationships and demonstrate our value over time as we find trust is the price of access. We choose these methods because it's efficient and allows us to scale while learning and optimizing.

This allows us to leverage relationships with change agents on the local and grassroots level. This also serves as a way to generate introductions to individuals and organizations who support our mission.

VC Include’s goals:

• Increase the supply of capital managed by gender diverse & inclusive teams

• Increase access to capital and growth of gender diverse & inclusive small & micro businesses

• Increase employment of women in the Venture Capital and Impact Investment industry

• Increase tools & resources to address social & structural barriers affecting women’s participation in the impact investment and VC industry

VCI will achieve these impact goals through voiced recognition of the current inequities and challenges inherent in the VC field. VCI leaders and trainers will leverage their lived experiences and unique networks to create trusting supportive programming that will honestly prepare the next generation of diverse fund managers for to compete and lead in the investment field. VCI has already developed a successful fellowship program and will continue to improve the trainings and monitor the fellows’ performance afterwards.  Additionally VCI is creating a research think tank to present means tested analyses of the challenges and solutions on the way to creating a more diverse industry.

We have the relevant experience in our Founder/CEO. As a Senior Consultant with Ashoka’s Changemakers (2010-2012), Bahiyah Robinson devised value-added propositions for clients in government, NGOs and the private sector—including ExxonMobil, G20, Amgen, eBay Foundation, Omidyar Network and Google. It is from these experiences that Bahiyah was poised to identify and cultivate strategic linkages between established capital sources and emerging and diverse communities and assume a leadership role in advocating and creating meaningful change

VCI’s  mission and the execution of our program is a demonstration of our commitment to these goals. We are allied with our fellowship cohorts, ecosystem coalition and institutions to facilitate critical changes to meet needs of the underserved communities. We are the people we serve, embodying the ideas we look to foster.

The rest of the team is staffed with experts in their fields.  As noted elsewhere our program director is uniquely positioned to lead program design and delivery with deep experience in the DEI space as well as substantial knowledge of the finance industry.  The COO, also mentioned elsewhere, is skilled in organizational growth and staged scaling solutions.  The heads of partnerships, business development, marketing are all very experienced in their fields and have deep knowledge of the challenges faced by addressing systemic change and awareness of deep inequalities in our society.

We are interested in working with esteemed funders and consultants like Truist Foundation and MIT Solve to build critical aspects of our scaling organization at an important moment in our development;  specifically helping our fellows have access to working capital to sustain themselves from inception throughout growth stages and building our infrastructure to support a greater capacity for us to have impact and to sustain the network of stakeholders who support our programs and mission.

Human Capital: VCI has developed a human capital scaling plan to drive our success during our growth phase.  We are seeking staff design, positioning, and recruiting assistance to find the top, preferably diverse, candidates motivated to help lead our organization forward

Product: We need support to increase the capacity and impact of our programs. There is tremendous demand already for our programs.  In our first cohort there were over 200 applicants for 15 fellowship slots.  The opportunity to make a real impact will be achieved by a well developed and executed program scaling approach.  As we scale or our programs we seek support to help us expand the modes and mediums we deliver our programs.  As we develop, deliver and evaluate our programs, we seek expert support to design and implement effective monitoring, measurement and evaluation so that we can continue to invest in the most valuable elements of our programs’ impact.

Monitoring and evaluation: We have an opportunity to capture our data in a more quantitative and attributable way to show impact of our programs across time and stakeholder verticals. We would use support to refine this information and leverage it to further demonstrate the impact of our fellows the returns of their funds and the value of their investment theses.

We would like to partner with banks, foundations and family offices that are mission and values aligned and are committed to increasing investment to women and new majority entrepreneurs.