Georgia Levenson Keohane ’94 is Applying Private Capital Strategies to Tackle Global Social Challenges 

Georgia Levenson Keohane ’94 is the CEO of the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), the impact-investing arm of the Open Society Foundations, a group of grantmaking foundations founded by George Soros with the international goal of “promot[ing] democratic practice, human rights, equity, and justice,” according to the SEDF website. SEDF works in mission investing, offering risk-tolerant capital that leads with impact over financial returns and seeks to attract other investors to mission-focused causes. SEDF provides loans, buys equity, and offers guarantees (promises to cover losses that unlock financing from other investors), while also offering grants depending on the needs of the organizations they support. “Our typical investment size is $5 [million] to $15 million, though we have made investments smaller than $1 million and as large as $100 million,” the SEDF website explains. 

“A lot of what we’re working on has to do with climate change and inclusive economic development in places like sub-Saharan Africa or Brazil. We’re working on issues of independent media and…the idea that freedom of speech, dissent, and accountability…[are] really important for democracy,” Georgia said. SEDF’s goals go well beyond generating returns: “It’s equivalent to public policy making or grant–making; they’re not commercial investments,” she added. 

Georgia’s three-pronged career focus on responsible business and investing, innovative philanthropy, and public policy began during her time as an undergraduate student at Yale. Georgia graduated magna cum laude majoring in History and International Studies. “I wrote two senior essays. [For History, I] focused on US educational challenges…and, [for International Studies,] I focused on some of the relationships between population policies and access to reproductive rights and global development trends,” Georgia said. These two essays shaped the direction of her career in economic development and public policy. 

After Yale, Georgia worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, DC. “I worked for the president of the Endowment, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz…We worked on global economic development, the war in the Balkans, [and] issues relating to global conflict and humanitarian crises,” she shared.  

She went on to earn her first master’s degree in Development Economics and International Development from the London School of Economics as a Fullbright Scholar. She then returned to the United States, where she ran a nonprofit, Boston ACE (A Chance to Excel), and earned her MBA from Harvard University. During this period, in Yale’s own Dwight Memorial Chapel, Georgia married Nathaniel Keohane ’93, whom she met as an undergraduate student at Yale, with Yale Chaplain Rev. Frederick J. Streets officiating the ceremony. 

Georgia then joined McKinsey, where, after being in New York on 9/11, she worked on the McKinsey team that helped create The September 11th Fund. In partnership with the government, private companies, and private donors, the Fund made over half a billion dollars available to rebuild small businesses in Lower Manhattan and communities across New York City. From McKinsey, Georgia went to work at The September 11th Fund full-time. “[The Fund] was what got me into philanthropy,” she explained. 

Georgia Levenson Keohane ’94 giving a lecture at the Yale School of Management 

“Most of my career has been as a practitioner; however, pretty early after the September 11th Fund, I also started a parallel track working on these issues through teaching and writing,” she recalled. Georgia returned to New Haven as a Yale College Lecturer while her husband, Nat, taught at the School of Management and the School of the Environment. During her time teaching at Yale, Georgia also served as a faculty advisor at Dwight Hall, working in nonprofit management and social entrepreneurship. “For a couple years, I taught a college seminar that was focused on social welfare and poverty/anti-poverty policy… it was one of, if not the first, service learning classes for Yale undergrads,” Georgia said. Students in her class got paired with internships at New Haven nonprofits while earning a course credit. 

After her time in New Haven, Georgia continued her career as an independent nonprofit and social enterprise consultant. Then she worked as a fellow first at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank based in New York City, and then at New America, another think tank she led as Director. She then worked as Executive Director of the Pershing Square Foundation, a philanthropic grant and investment making organization founded by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Continuing her work in philanthropy, she served as president of the Navab Capital Partners Foundation, the impact branch of Navab Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and headed the firm’s responsible investment practice. From there, she became President of the New York City Impact Partnership, an advisory firm focused on public private partnerships, philanthropy, and sustainable and impact investment. She also joined a number of nonprofit and for-profit boards focused on these issues.  

“I’m the first to say that most public-good problems are not typically investable and need to be addressed by government and policy, but there are times when we can use the resources, ingenuity, and energy of the private sector [for social causes],” Georgia explained. “If you can harness the capital markets responsibly and harness businesses, you’re unlocking huge resources to address these [social] issues.” 

Georgia pointed to artificial intelligence as one such emerging issue requiring innovative solutions. “Most companies right now are focused on the idea that there are significant efficiency gains they can harness. Ultimately, one of the ways you do that is by replacing some human labor with AI. This is going to be a major industrial transformation, not unlike previous industrial revolutions, and there will be significant job transitions and job displacement. If that becomes very destabilizing, the government will have to step in with very thoughtful policies and partnerships” 

She continued, “If you take a medium- to long-term view as a company, those seismic and somewhat destabilizing changes that are coming will require a longer-term vision than typical quarterly earnings require.” Because companies and markets are not always structured or incentivized to think that far ahead, coordinated government and private sector policies will be necessary, Georgia concluded. 

Another emerging challenge is the political pressure to cut public foreign assistance and investment in light of domestic economic strain. “Public resources for development aid and assistance finance are hundreds of billions of dollars and philanthropy can’t fill that gap,” Georgia explained. “The reason, historically, that government grants funded a lot of this is because investing in energy access in sub-Saharan Africa or nature-based solutions to climate change in Latin America is great for the world, but it’s really risky. We are able to do them because we have philanthropic dollars. What we have to figure out now is how do you actually make some of these investments less risky, because private sector dollars on their own won’t flow; [these investments] do not yet have the returns that commercial investors require.” 

In her own work, philanthropic impact investing takes a different approach. “In impact investment, like philanthropy, there has been a move to what’s called trust-based philanthropy, which is basically saying, ‘It doesn’t make sense to have a group of funders sitting in an office in midtown Manhattan tell folks working on the front lines and in communities what the measures need to be and how to do the work.’ The idea is: we trust you. You’re the experts. You’re close to the problem; you have the solutions. We need to know how the money is being spent, but we’re not overly prescriptive about what that work looks like,” Georgia explained. 

Reflecting on her work and the dozens of investment projects she has overseen, she viewed her most gratifying projects as those that had simplest solutions. One example is what she described as fixing a problem in the “plumbing” that significantly improved healthcare and journalism. By helping doctors access a new kind of malpractice insurance, Georgia and her team allowed them to work effectively across state boundaries. Similarly, SEDF was approached to help stand up a new kind of libel insurance for newsrooms that had no or inadequate insurance coverage — and therefore were at risk for frivolous libel suits (with a chilling effect on investigative reporting). “With very little money, we were able to help them. I get to do a lot in lots of different parts of the world, but these two specific interventions will have a pretty outsized impact,” Georgia said. 

“In my role at SEDF, I’ve been very fortunate in that the organization as a whole doesn’t just give us the license to do really hard things; the mandate is to do really hard things that other people won’t do,” Georgia said. Indeed, she is fulfilling that mandate. In an era of mounting global challenges, from climate change to democratic backsliding to AI-driven employment disruption, Georgia’s work at SEDF exemplifies a pragmatic yet ambitious approach to social change. Her work as both a practitioner and academic is helping pave a path toward harnessing the power of the private sector to address some of the most pressing issues of our time. 

Georgia Levenson Keohane ’94: author of Capital and the Common Good 

Georgia has continued her work in academia and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School teaching social entrepreneurship. She is the author of two books, Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private, and Public Sectors and Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Problems. Georgia also hosts Capital for Good, a podcast with the Columbia Business School where, in her most recent episode, she interviewed Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a free-speech champion, journalist, entrepreneur, and dissident. “The thought-leadership and ideas piece of it has also always been very important to me and connects me back to a number of positive classroom experiences [at Yale],” Georgia said.  

Georgia’s work and Dwight Hall experience embody the Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model, developing students’ intellectual, moral, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest with experiential learning, internships, fellowships, mentorships, and training.