2021 Fellows Spotlight
Rising 3rd year Lauren Coppins is spending her summer interning with Invest Appalachia as a member of the 2021 Tadler Fellowship program. Poppins was introduced to social entrepreneurship and impact investing through Profit for Purpose, an undergraduate impact investing club at UVA, which she joined as a first year. Building on her interest on the measurement of social impact, she later interned at the Walden Cooper Center for Public Service where she conducted research on renewable energy and sustainability. Wanting to continue down the path of social entrepreneurship and impact investing, Coppins took on an internship at Invest Appalachia.
Invest Appalachia (IA) is a blended regional capital investment fund set to launch a $40 million investment pool by the end of 2021. Focused on the central Appalachia region, IA strives to expand community investments in the region and create a better relationship between community and capital by overcoming common investment obstacles.
“The main problem is that in Appalachia, a lot of [businesses] don’t have the credit and collateral to back up loans, so investors are scared to invest in the region because it is a high-risk investment…making it hard for capital to flow into the region.”
At IA, the $40 million investment pool will be supported by a $17 million catalytical capital pool which is a grant fund that acts as a safeguard against loan defaults. They are currently in the process of building the investment pool, for which Coppins is building a framework for investors and stakeholders to quantify their impact.
“I am developing metrics that they can use across their four sectors (food and agriculture, clean energy, creative placemaking, and community health) that will allow both investors and the borrowers in Appalachia to see [if] these investments successful and [if] industries are improving to help them guide their work to make sure the investors are getting a financial return but also a social return on their investment.”
Coppins notes that given how new impact investing is, there are not yet standardized metrics making it challenging to quantify impact. This problem is compounded by the difficulty of managing different stakeholders’ values and definitions of impact.
At UVA, Coppins is perusing concentrations in Management and Finance through the McIntire School of Commerce with a minor in Data Analytics. In the future she is looking towards going into consulting and wants to be able to weave an element of social impact into her work. Coppins recommends that anyone interested or who want to learn more about social impact and impact investing to investigate the related student organizations (SEED, Profit for Purpose) and the Center for Social Innovation to get connected to valuable resources and opportunities.