Brian Trelstad is a partner and board member in the New York offices of Bridges Fund Management, a global impact investment firm based in London and New York. Brian has over 15 years of impact investing experience, having served until 2012 as the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen, where he oversaw investments into companies that were delivering health, water, energy, and agriculture services to economic base of the pyramid in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As CIO, he was a member of Acumen’s management team and helped build out the network of country operations that worked closely with the entrepreneurs.
Brian was also a co-founding board member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and was one of the principal architects of the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS). Prior to Acumen Fund, Brian worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, was a lead environmental staff person at the Corporation for National Service, and has been involved in a range of non-profit and for-profit start ups. Brian serves on the board of VisionSpring, Guidestar, and New Jersey Future and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Brian has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and an MA in City & Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 2012, he has taught a graduate course in social entrepreneurship at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
The article discusses the factors to consider when seeking to practice impact investing, which include the kind of impact preferred by the investor, the intensity and immediacy of impact, and the impact risk profile.
Over the last decade, impact investing has become an increasingly-discussed topic in the realms of both business and public policy. Impact investors are motived by a desire to advance social or environmental goals and an intuition that pursuing two goals at once - investment returns and social or environmental returns - is more effective than keeping them separate. This article reviews the recent history of impact investing, addresses some of the issues confounding the nascent field, and offers a few definitions that might bring more rigor and clarity to what remains, as yet, a simultaneously confusing and promising investment strategy.
The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), a new regional planning institution, is a governor-appointed body of 15 regional leaders with broad authority over land use and transportation planning throughout the state. Created in the summer of 1 999, GRTA emerged from a public-private process that sought to reform transportation planning in the Atlanta region, but its authority far surpasses what was initially conceived by that public-private effort, the Metropolitan Atlanta Transportation Initiative(MATI). Thispoper is a case study of the MATI process and the emergence of GRTA that illustrates in some detail theformation ofa new and innovative regional planning institution. What it lacks in comparative breadth, it supplies in step-by-step analysis of how a group of business people and civic leaders reformed the planning process in a major American metropolitan region. One tentative conclusion is that theprivate sector can play a major role in regional planning, as they did in the development ofthis new regional planning institution. The case study also illustrates that while GRTA's initialfocus will be to solve Atlanta's transportation problems, GRTA may become an implementation vehicle for the Georgia Planning Act, a comprehensive but underutilized statewide land use planning statute.
“Little Machines in their Gardens: A History of School Gardens in America, 1891 to 1920” explores the rise and decline of the school garden movement in the United States. The paper first documents the early history of the gardens and establishes them as a national phenomenon that weaves together Progressive governance, the Back to Nature Movement, and early education reform. The paper then seeks to explain the sudden demise of the school gardens after 1920 by exploring the changes in American urban life and the nature of the professions that promoted the gardens.
This analysis of the Presidio Trust legislation places the recent developments on the Presidio in the context of a century and a half of environmental planning. By first exploring the Presidio's history, and then tracing the more recent legislative background to the Presidio Trust, the author establishes a clear frame through which to explore the current challenges that face the Presidio Trust. This paper argues that history, legislative intent, and specific legal precedent will protect the Presidio from being "sold off," despite growing local concerns that the Presidio Trust's mandate to become financially self-sufficient within 15 years may drive the public's interests from the park.
