Seth Benziger, Impact Capital | As a community development financial institutition, Impact Capital has focused on providing financing for affordable housing projects in Oregon and Washington. In the past year, however, we branched out by making a bridge loan to the University District Food Bank, so the Seattle nonprofit could move into a bigger space and serve more clients. As we turn the page on this impact investment, we can review five parts of the story: what prompted this investment, what's been easy, what's been challenging, what have we learned — and what's next?

Tim Crosby, Cascadia Foodshed Financing Project | Impact investing seeks to combine financial returns with social and environmental benefits. We have long held the tools to assess financial returns, but measuring social and environmental returns is far more complex. Impact investing in food systems gets even more complicated, because we're aiming for environmental and social goals that may not necessarily be aligned — for example, investing in small farmers who use organic growing practices while funding strategies to make healthy food more available and affordable to low-income families.