Sarah Gordon
The Catalyst
Ideas with a spark, energy, range and the ability to start things.
Sarah Gordon emerges in this interview as a Catalyst: someone who identifies inflection points and mobilizes disparate actors toward systemic change. Gordon draws on her FT career to frame impact investing not as niche altruism but as a coming market imperative, connecting pension trustees, policymakers, and the public into a single movement.
“I think also I'd been trying for many years I'd been making contacts in a number of the areas in which I'm now working and really increasingly interested in the role of sort of purpose in the business world and around positive impact and how some of these issues and it meshed very much with my interests in workplace diversity that I'd bee…”
“And if you don't earn your own money and have your own career, you just don't have that power. So I think that's a very important lesson. I mean, it's less relevant now because my mother's generation, a much larger proportion of my mother's generation, women weren't working.”
“And of course, there are a number of already sort of indices that have been constructed more around ESG than around impact, so more around the avoiding harm end of the spectrum of capital rather than what we talk about is we talk about that spectrum moving from avoiding harm to benefiting stakeholders to contributing to solutions.”
“I mean, some of the things that happened when I was running the company's desk or indeed writing at the FT, we had obviously the financial crisis, which was, I mean, it was awful, the impact on people was absolutely terrible.”
Money Maze Podcast: “Sarah Gordon, CEO, Impact Investing Institute”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE