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Elizabeth Garlow is Lumina's impact investment officer. She most recently served as a community solutions fellow and domestic policy advisor at The White House during the Obama Administration, where she[…]
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Lumina Foundation
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Elizabeth Garlow: Lumina Foundation is working to make quality post-secondary learning available for everyone across the US. And in order to do that, we are employing a number of different strategies. We provide grants. We do work to shape policy at the federal and state levels. And we have an impact investing strategy. And through our Lumina Impact Ventures Program, we make investments in ventures that we think can be critical partners for us on this mission. So when it comes to looking at an investment opportunity, there are few things to keep in mind. The first is we want to identify those entrepreneurs that have some good product/market fit traction. So do they have some demonstrated ability to actually address a key problem or a pain point for a customer, and are there some indicators that their product or solution is really working well? The second thing that we're looking for is the ability to scale. And this is where this idea of capital intensity comes in. How lightweight is your solution? How many resources do you have to put into your solution to make it scale and work? Lumina Foundation is working to help 16.4 million new individuals get a quality credential by the year 2025. To reach that goal, we want to partner with entrepreneurs that are reaching tens and hundreds of thousands of new students and helping them on those pathways to a credential. So often this means that we're looking for technology-enabled products and services or technology platforms that have some sort of lightweight way of scaling to reach more people. And finally, we want to ensure that there is a strong mission alignment between what you're doing as a company in the world and what we are trying to do at Lumina Foundation. Are there ways that we can be a strong value-add partner for you? Can we add expertise as a foundation that helps really drive your mission as a company? And how can we work together to ensure that we're making quality post-secondary learning available for everyone in this country?


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