Charity with Upside
When you support Venn PRIs with a donation or grant,
you are directly advancing charitable goals,
but with the potential for upside.*
PRI's: The Direct Charitable Impact of Grants...
With PRIs, the glass is half full. Even a PRI with a -50% return is attractive compared to a grant's -100% expected return. For-profit investors would see this as failure. Charitable investors using donations see only upside.
...But with Potential Upside
PRIs are so powerful because, like normal donations and grants, they directly advance a charitable purpose; but they also have potential for financial return, even if the terms are below-market. This is why PRI capital can be so transformative and go where no capital has ever gone before. The starting point for expected return is -100%. The glass is always half full.
Reuse Your Donations
Normally donations have an expected financial return of -100% and generate charitable impact once. What if you could use the same donation over and over again for charitable impact? It's possible when you support with Venn PRIs through a Venn Account.**
Today, no for-profit investor would ever consider making a 0% investment. But for donors, a 0% real rate of return on a PRI means that a donated dollar can be used for impact over and over again forever. There is a big difference between one-time use and infinite use. Even a PRI that purposefully loses $0.20 on the dollar allows donors to get a 5X use of their donations for impact.
* Except for Venn Accounts established by charitable entities and funded through PRIs, donors supporting Venn PRIs never receive money back from a Venn Account. Money donated or granted to a Venn Account can never be withdrawn by the donor or used for personal benefit. Financial returns from PRIs generally go back to participating Venn Accounts, where donors can recommend distributions in support of new PRIs or as grants to charitable entities.
** Venn Foundation makes no guarantees about the financial performance of any PRI. PRIs are below-market rate investments and can be very high risk.