Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have 1 request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Tanya Beja, and our topic is how to launch and grow an impact fund.

Tanya is a senior leader who's passionate about for profits with a social conscience and nonprofits with a sustainable business model. She is a general partner at Alicorp where she leads the social impact team. Tanya, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Paul. Super happy to be here.

And, Yeah. I think you've you're a speaker. You've been doing that stuff, but I think I can also say welcome to your 1st podcast interview. Is that right?

That's exactly right.

Yeah. So welcome to the world ball? Yeah. Welcome to the world of welcome to the world of podcasting. I hope you'll do many, many more interviews because you're doing incredible work. So Okay. Tanya, before we get into all the great things that you're doing at Alicorp and how our listeners can find out about an impact fund and what it is and how you start 1 and all that kind of stuff. Let's wind back a little bit. If somebody wanted to know just the short version of your backstory, like, where did this interest had 4 impact investing and impact funds come from.

What would somebody need to know about how you got started in this work?

Yeah. Absolutely. So I grew up in Mexico City, Paul, and saw poverty day in and day out. And since I was a small child, I I Really ask myself the question of how can you alleviate poverty the fastest and most efficient way? And that drove me to public policy school. And after going through public policy school, I shifted towards businesses as a force For social change. And I've spent by and large my entire career, in this impact investing space. I I started investing and supporting for profits at one of the largest impact investing funds, out there called Ignium. I then shifted gears slightly and invested and supported nonprofits at Robinhood Foundation, who's the largest philanthropic funder of pretty much all social services in New York City.

And most recently, I spent some time building businesses from the ground up at Blue Marble, piloting and scaling commercially viable and socially impactful New ventures in the financial inclusion space. And I was really lucky to get a call from Aliecorp where I get To do all 3, which is investing in for profits, investing in non profits, and incubating at the same time, with a really fantastic team. But I I think I think my motivation really started with the question of how can we alleviate poverty in the fastest this way, and I think businesses as a force for social change can be

incredibly powerful. Yeah. And this space of impact investing has grown tremendously. Like, I've been in the social entrepreneur space for 16 years and definitely on the entrepreneur side. And a different call, but I also got a call. I've told you listeners about it before, but I don't know. A little less than a year ago, I got a call from a had colleague of mine, Drew Tolchin, who was the 1st chief financial officer at Meow Wolf, one of the largest b corps just ever come out of New Mexico and out of the Southwest. We knew each other from the impact world here in New Mexico, and Drew said, hey.