Business experts and Catholic leaders attended a three day conference at the Vatican looking at how impact investing could support the church's social work.
"Impact investing brings in a new source of capital for solving big social problems," said Carolyn Woo, President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services who cohosted the event with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, reported Vatican Radio.
Impact investing is a way to finance a business or organization so it can offer social assistance to those in need, while delivering financial benefit to the investor.
"Previously, we were very dependent on charity and philanthropy in order to address these issues, but we know that charity and philanthropy will not bring sufficient resources to address the problems with the scale and the frequency as we [now] see them," said Woo who was born and raised in Hong Kong.
Woo said impact investing provides long-term sustainability when compared to conventional philanthropy. She discussed how it can function and gave examples of how it has been done through the church's history.
"The pope actually says we need to use the market. We need to use capitalism to serve the poor, not to exploit the poor. So this is a very creative use of capital to do good while still delivering a return," she said.
The Impact Investing Conference was held June 26-28.
