WIP-Tracy-Palandjian

Innovative investment tools financing economic mobility

A conversation with Tracy Palandjian, CEO & co-founder, Social Finance
-

Joining me on the Work in Progress podcast this week is Tracy Palandjian, CEO and co-founder of the national nonprofit Social Finance.

One of the big topics of discussion as we come out of the pandemic is how do we rethink ways in which to finance career readiness, helping job seekers afford to get the skills they need in today’s workforce.

For more than 10 years, Social Finance has been doing just that. Palandjian explains how the nonprofit has been pioneering innovative investment tools and creating unique public-private partnerships to better prepare people for the “future of work, build pathways to economic mobility, and measurably improve (their) lives.”

“We’ve worked with governments, with traditional nonprofit service providers, with philanthropies, with the investment community to rethink how we make decisions, how we allocate capital with impact at the center, and to realign incentives and to share risks in a way to achieve the greatest impact for our communities,” she adds.

Palandjian details a successful example of how Social Impact Bonds worked to upskill immigrants and refugees in the Boston area through a project called Massachusetts Pathway to Economic Advancement.

“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a service delivery partner called JVS Boston—which is a Jewish Vocational Service Boston—and over 40 investors came together to build this ($13 million) bond. The idea is to raise investment capital to provide education and employment opportunities for more than 2000 immigrants and refugees in the area.

“If you really think about the economy in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, immigrants power more than half of the workforce in key critical sectors, in health care, in hospitality, and a few other sectors. And this is a very important workforce that the state is very focused on.

“One of the tracks in this social impact bond is called English For Advancement. So these newcomer style community, they need to learn English. Two years later, they’re seeing a wage bump of north of $3,500. Investors are repaid based on job placement, based on how many of them go up that economic escalator.”

Palandjian goes into detail of how the success is measured in the podcast and in a new book from Social Finance called Workforce Realigned: How New Partnerships Are Advancing Economic Mobility, written in partnership with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Philadelphia.

You can hear more in this podcast. You can read more about the book which has more than a dozen examples of the private-public financing collaborations and their workforce successes here.

Episode 187: Tracy Palandjian, CEO and co-founder, Social Finance
Host and Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, editor-in-chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

Download the transcript for this Work in Progress podcast episode here.
Catch up on all the other episodes here: Work in Progress

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.