Job Creation & Impact Investing with Don Lee

Today, we are moving to the Impact Investing Inglenook to talk to Don Lee. Don has been quite a visionary around social enterprise local investing and has begun to change the way many people are investing in the Detroit area. His has passionate rationale and incredible enthusiasm – It is quite contagious actually. We have a very special surprise artist at the end of this episode for your listening pleasure so stay tuned!

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Introduction
Hi there! This is Romy and welcome back to another episode of the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Today, we are moving to the Impact Investing Inglenook to talk to Don Lee. Don has been quite a visionary around social enterprise local investing and has begun to change the way many people are investing in the Detroit area. His has passionate rationale and incredible enthusiasm – It is quite contagious actually. We have a very special surprise artist at the end of this episode for your listening pleasure so stay tuned! Before we jump in, let’s see what Luke has for our Fun Fuel…

Fun Fuel
Hi, this is Luke Trombley, and I am bringing you the fun fuel for this episode.
Don Lee makes a huge impact on businesses with his investing, much like how meteors make huge impacts on earth itself. The world's largest crater is located in Australia, before impact, it split into two pieces, each 6 miles across. This created two craters covering around 250 miles of Australia's beautiful countryside.
The second biggest crater is located in South Africa. The meteor was between 5 and 10 kilometers and was traveling around 20 kilometers per second. That is around 12 miles a second!
Thank you for tuning into this fun fuel. Enjoy the episode!

Transition
Thanks, Luke! I love this idea of thinking about Impact Investing making large scale impact. That just gave me a different visual. In some ways, impact investing has turned the financial markets a little sideways when it comes to local investing. Many said it couldn’t be done, but, as you will hear from Don, it is happening right now! Let me not delay one more minute and let’s jump over to my conversation with Don…

Main Interview
Don: Romy, thanks for having me. Man, it's been ... it's just been so cool what's been happening the last couple of years when we connected and what we're doing with, in the city of Detroit. It's just amazing, creating over 44 jobs in three entities, that we invested in with your leadership and help. It's been great so thanks for having me.

Romy: Gosh, I feel like, I'm just an administrator here, you've been part of the visionary and I think it's been, I'm glad you said only a couple of years because I think it's been closer to four years that we've been doing this. But that's good, time flies.

Don: Scary.

Romy: I know. Hey, you know what? This has been awesome to have you on here because I've been wanting to have you one here, we get so many questions around impact investing and you are a walking example of somebody who kind of caught the bug a little bit, had the idea, and you've journeyed from actually putting your money into it, both direct and private equity funds that you help design and now help oversee. You, sort of, we'd say, officially caught the bug for impact investing so I'd love to just start at the beginning and take the listeners back to how did you even become interested in kind of local impact type investing. Do you remember?

Don: Yeah, well if you go...