100 books like Social Impact Investing

Using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as the framework, this book offers deep insights into why we think, feel, and function the way we do.

I first read this book years ago and still find myself referring back to it on a regular basis when new issues come up in my life, such as a potential career change. This book truly does help me to understand myself better as well as to understand significant others in my life.

How I’m wired affects how I work, the work I’m drawn to, and how I interact with others. This insight, I have found, is crucial if I am to help make the world a better place. 

If you want to understand the importance of cultural differences across countries and within our own communities, this is a phenomenal book!

I appreciate the tables and charts throughout the book that give me quick access to concrete ways in which people differ culturally. These differences affect our work environments, male/female relationships, and even our life goals, but we are too often oblivious because we don’t know to look for them. 

I’ve used this book for years, and I’m a strong believer that we can’t contribute to positive change around the world unless we understand more about the many ways that we all differ culturally. 

This is a quick read that gives me fascinating insights into the American culture. The authors wrote it for international students who come to the U.S. and find the cultural differences confusing at best.

Reading this book, I feel like I’m observing conversations between Americans and catching insights that I would otherwise miss simply because it’s all so natural and comfortable to me as an American.

Understanding how Americans operate and what we most value is crucial if we are to effectively function in another culture and help to improve vulnerable people’s lives. 

David Brooks thinks deeply and writes thoughtfully. He challenges me through this book to be a better person and to live a more courageous, authentic life. 

As I conducted interviews with scores of social entrepreneurs and development leaders for my book, several commented on the toxic hero culture that exists in this space. 

People want to change the world for a variety of reasons–and some of these reasons have more to do with what success would do for them rather than for the people they are trying to serve. This book shines a light on this problem, and I appreciate David’s courage in writing what he did. 

I recommend this book for any leader seeking to better understand their ‘why’. I have long admired Jacqueline Novogratz and Acumen and while not her most famous book, this one really gets deep into the inside of what motivates Jacqueline and the work she does at Acumen.

As someone who considers themselves to be values-led, I deeply admire how Jacqueline doesn’t shy away from the ethics of financing social and impact enterprises and instead leans in to explain her thinking in this book and to challenge our collective moral imagination about what is right.

It is also filled with useful examples and interviews with changemakers across the globe, which helps bring her work and the concepts in the book to life. A must-read for anyone interested in impact-first investing. 

I recommend this book because after carefully reading it and completing the exercises with my 13-year-old niece, I found myself having fun and enjoying the quality time while also teaching the basics of money and how it works in our economy.

This eventually led to my niece asking questions about money and how to manage, save, and invest it. That's amazing to hear a young person start to think about money.

I love all four of this Nobel Peace Prize laureates' books, including his first (Banker to the Poor) that I helped edit, but this one is the best of them all.  He describes his vision of a new economy that is driven by social businesses – companies that are created to drive social change, through a business strategy.  By the time this book came out, he had multiple successful examples of this new hybrid model to describe to the reader – and he does so in a succinct and highly compelling way.  Importantly, he explains how his model is distinct from not only traditional nonprofits but also from social enterprises funded by impact investors. 

An illustrated book of long-form nonfiction that examines poor Black, Indigenous, White, and Migrant communities in the United States, and how they have all been broken by extractive capitalism and racist public policy. Hedges’ writing is intentionally polemical, designed to shatter any illusions about the welfare of our fellow citizens living in communities ruined by racism and industrial-scale environmental degradation. Sacco’s long-form graphic illustrations are equally haunting. I’ve taught this book continually for many years.

One of the most important new issues faced by rights advocates is climate change. Macarthur genius award-winner Catherine Coleman Flowers is on the front line of that fight, based on her own childhood as the daughter of an activist Black family in Lowndes County, Alabama. This memoir captures Flowers’ essence: someone who just can’t let an injustice slide by. And she will talk to anyone who might be able to help, including with cleaning up the raw sewage that continues to poison the homes of many poor Alabamians. Flowers clearly describes the link between local rights issues and the global campaign to deal with climate change.

I have long believed that development economists rely too heavily on reductive formal models that ignore on-the-ground realities and are backed by scant empirical evidence. This book makes a compelling case for observation—particularly in the form of randomized controlled trials that approximate scientific experiments “in the field.”

I admire its rigorous use of the scientific method to critique theoretical approaches that draw much of their legitimacy and influence from technical sophistication and abstraction.