How Candide Works

Candide Group works with families, foundations, and other investors who believe that finance can serve as a tool of empowerment rather than a weapon of extraction. As a Registered Investment Advisor, we focus on private assets — debt, private equity, real assets, and innovative new structures — where there are both real capital needs and opportunities for mission-aligned investors to build impactful portfolios.

That's why we…

  • Prioritize intersectional and systemic change approaches, both amongst our portfolio and within specific investments.

  • Connect entrepreneurs with investors who can provide capital and serve as flexible, supportive partners, having directed over $215M into over 110 companies and funds thus far (as of June 2023).

  • Help investors make the transition to a 100% impact strategy, including those who may already have a strong public market impact strategy and are seeking more private market impact exposure and expertise.

Shifting Investor Practices

  • Challenging shareholder primacy and conventional definitions of “risk” and “return” in finance, as well as promoting alternative multi-stakeholder models

  • Re-imagining the tools of finance that were designed to support historical extraction

  • Structuring investments to promote increased community wealth-building and self-determination

 

Unlocking & Directing the Flow of Resources

  • Facilitating the flow of capital from wealth holders toward BIPOC communities and climate solutions

  • Ensuring that investors who share our values can express them through action

  • Sourcing and researching social impact investments that both meet investor goals and real community needs

  • Providing in-depth diligence memos, in accessible language, that highlight impact storytelling as seriously as financial data presentation

  • Striving to ensure all stakeholders involved in our investments processes have a positive experience from start to finish

Collaborating with Community Stakeholders

  • Designing for community engagement and accountability in decision-making

  • Using media access to tell the finance story of a community stakeholder advocacy issue (with consent)

  • When called upon, collaborating with movements to make the tools of finance more accessible to social change actors

 

Our Theory Of Change

COMMUNITY WEALTH-BUILDING, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE REQUIRE THE CREATIVE FACILITATION OF CAPITAL FLOW TO COMPANIES, PROJECTS, & FUNDS THAT CENTER THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE FROM WHOM WEALTH HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY EXTRACTED.

This theory guides our work as we contend with the realities of the world in which we live. Wealth has been globally extracted and then concentrated into a few hands globally. Structural racial and gender inequities exist in the ownership of wealth, access to capital, and levels of autonomy and self-determination. The short-term focus businesses tend to place on shareholder returns is harmful to communities and encourages theft from future generations. 

Finance has been a tool of pain, oppression, and trauma to poor and working-class people as well as Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities in the US as well as the Global South. Finally, impact investors tend to focus on themes in silos, rather than a holistic, intersectional approach to social issues in their investment consulting. We believe in a new reality where all communities are able to thrive, sustain and innovate — leveraging finance as a tool of empowerment rather than a weapon of extraction.

 

Our Story

Our Values

  • Community collaboration and accountability

  • Investment flexibility, creativity, and accessibility

  • Listening, learning, and story sharing with humility

  • Taking action to move money at scale

  • Racial, gender, economic, and climate justice

Our History

Candide Group is an impact investment firm that strives to center the needs of people from whom wealth has been historically extracted. Founded in 2019 by Aner Ben-Ami and Morgan Simon, Candide has supported over 100 transactions in companies and funds on behalf of clients. We are a Registered Investment Advisor, registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and we only accept new clients by invitation. Candide Group's overall journey and strategy are further outlined in Morgan Simon’s book, Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change, published by Perseus Book Group in 2017. 

Note: Please see important disclosures regarding this book on our disclosure page.

Our Name

Our name, Candide Group, is inspired by the classic French novel, written by Voltaire. Candide is the story of a young man who travels the world and is confronted with overwhelming suffering and injustice. He ultimately returns home and overcomes his powerlessness and despair with a call to concrete, immediate action. The final, famous line of the book is: “we must cultivate our garden.”

As impact investors, like the character Candide, we struggle every day to understand the nature of good and evil. We prioritize taking action as we attempt to plant the seeds of justice by influencing and organizing capital, alongside others who are working to grow a new economy from the ground up.

 

 For Prospective Clients

Candide Group brings impact investing to values-aligned individuals, families, corporate partners and foundations.   

NFL player-turned-investor Derrick Morgan and Candide Group’s Morgan Simon talk impact investing and growing your legacy. Watch their conversation here.

  • We can lead the process of transitioning portfolios into 100% impact alignment across asset classes or focus on our speciality: private equity and debt allocations. 

  • We direct investments on behalf of entities that have a broad range of risk/return mandates, and typically seek to advise private assets between $5M and $500M per client. View our Client Relationship Summary here.

  • We can build customized impact portfolios that pursue purely risk-adjusted commercial returns, are focused on capital preservation and/or that have much greater risk appetite. 

  • With over 100 investments supported to date, we review over 500 potential deals a year for clients across direct debt, debt funds, direct equity, equity funds and funds of funds.