EA-Aligned Impact Investing: Mind Ease Case Study

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2021·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ch5NZ7LhsY3mumMzn/ea-al...

Authors

Brendon_Wong·Will Roderick·jh

Credibility Rating

3/5

Good(3)

Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.

Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum

This post is relevant to EA funding strategy discussions rather than core AI safety research, but offers a useful framework for evaluating mission-aligned capital allocation that could apply to AI safety organizations seeking impact investment.

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Forum

eaforum

Forum Tags

Cause prioritizationGlobal health & developmentSocially responsible investingFunding high-impact for-profitsImpact assessmentInvestingMental health (cause area)

Metadata

Importance: 38/100blog postanalysis

Summary

This EA Forum post introduces the Total Portfolio Return (TPR) framework for evaluating impact investments through an EA lens, using Mind Ease (a mental health app) as a case study. The authors estimate $150 in averted DALYs per dollar invested, arguing that rigorous impact investing may outperform both traditional donations and investing-to-give strategies. The post advocates for greater EA community engagement with impact investing as an underexplored funding mechanism.

Key Points

•Introduces the Total Portfolio Return (TPR) framework to systematically evaluate impact investments across financial returns, user impact, investor impact, and strategic value.
•Uses Mind Ease mental health intervention as a concrete case study, estimating ~$150 in averted DALYs per dollar invested.
•Argues impact investing is neglected by the EA community despite potentially outperforming traditional donate-or-invest-to-give strategies.
•Proposes that impact investing can align financial incentives with social good, enabling sustainable scaling of high-impact interventions.
•Highlights the importance of counterfactual impact assessment when evaluating whether an investor's capital meaningfully changes outcomes.

Cited by 1 page

Page	Type	Quality
Lionheart Ventures	Organization	50.0

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# EA-Aligned Impact Investing: Mind Ease Case Study
By Brendon_Wong, Will Roderick, jh
Published: 2021-11-15
Summary
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*   We use the term “impact investing” to refer to any investment made for the dual purpose of having a positive impact and generating a financial return
*   Impact investing has received relatively little attention from an EA perspective
*   We review an investment case study produced by the Total Portfolio Project (TPP) leveraging research from Lionheart Ventures, Let’s Fund, and Rethink Priorities
*   The case study uses TPP’s Total Portfolio Return (TPR) [framework](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934090), a rigorous framework which can be used to assess the value of an impact investment relative to other ways of generating impact
*   The case study estimates that an impact investment into [Mind Ease](http://mindease.io/) averts [DALYs](https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/158) at $150 per dollar invested in expectation, comparing favorably to GiveWell top charities *before* financial returns are taken into account
*   We show how the TPR framework can be used to determine that, for a donor who is **already** making the best possible use of donations and investing to give, investing in Mind Ease appears better than either additional donations or more investing to give
*   Given the lack of prior research in this area and the potential for impact investing to significantly benefit many cause areas, we recommend that the EA community direct more research and attention to this area.
    *   We highlight several ways to contribute including: dialogue and movement building, evaluations, research, entrepreneurship, and shifting money towards impact investing.

Background and Implications
===========================

Impact investing has largely been neglected by the EA community. This is perhaps due to the perception that most impact investing is relatively low impact per dollar invested. In turn, EA principles are largely neglected within impact investing. We believe there could be benefits on both sides to exploring the potential of impact investing to produce effective results.

Complicating things is the fact that the term “impact investing” has many possible interpretations and connotations. It generally refers to one or more strategies within a disparate [range of financial strategies](https://hbr.org/2016/01/making-sense-of-the-many-kinds-of-impact-investing) that are associated (correctly or not) with “impact,” from buying (or not buying) certain stocks, to providing loans to nonprofits and disadvantaged communities, to funding early-stage startups with a specific social mission.

We only want to distinguish an investment as impactful if results are generated that would not occur in expectation without the investment. Among the various interpretations of the term impact investing, we believe that only some of these approaches offer potential for impact. Thus, we wi

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