Cathy Clark

Biography

Ranked #4 most influential academic in business and society, as well as one of the top 20 women in the USA working in philanthropy, social innovation and civic engagement, Cathy Clark has helped define and build the fields of impact investing and social entrepreneurship for over 30 years. She serves as Faculty Director at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where she founded and directs the CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing and co-leads the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), an accelerator working to scale impact of global health ventures in India and East Africa. She is also lead author of CASE’s online learning series for impact entrepreneurs, CASE Smart Impact Capital, and a co-author of CASE’s #ScalingPathways series, in partnership with the Skoll Foundation, USAID’s Global Development Lab and MercyCorps.

Clark’s work has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, intermediaries, and governments around the globe improve their ability to use business as a tool for good. In 2007, she helped create the standards for B Corporations, which have been used by over 50,000 companies globally, including the thousands of companies who are now certified or legally incorporated as B Corporations or public benefit corps, including several subsidiaries of Unilever, Danone North America, and Patagonia. Clark was also the sole academic member of the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce US National Advisory Board, and was invited to track $2.5 billion in new impact investments by the Obama White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement. She is co-author of The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism, which reached #18 in finance textbooks on Amazon in 2014.

Cathy holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Columbia Business School, and has published over 25 books, articles, and case studies. Prior to her academic career, Cathy was an impact investor at Flatiron Partners, a grantmaker and PRI investor at the Markle Foundation, and a policy convener at the Aspen Institute. She remains very involved on corporate and nonprofit boards. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from the University of Virginia, and tweets at @cathyhc.