Building an Integrated Organisation While both sets of activities – credential evaluation and systems change – coexisted under the WES umbrella, figuring out whether and how to integrate them created a continual challenge. What should the relationship be between the legacy WES, with its more traditional non-profit focused exclusively on credential evaluation, and the new WES, in which the credential evaluation work generated revenue supporting a much broader range of social impact activities? “A social enterprise integrates the best of traditional non-profit and business models, helping organisations like WES drive sustainable, scalable progress. But a social enterprise must also be able to balance its priorities around revenue generation with its priorities around social impact and systems change, which are sometimes at odds. Ultimately, for our team, it comes back to the mission – and if the actions of today will make us better stewards of our mission tomorrow. That doesn’t make balancing these priorities easy or straightforward – it requires ongoing conversation and adaptation at every level of the organisation.” Esther Benjamin, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director In 2024, WES launched a rebrand which was intended to unite the organisation internally and refresh its image externally. Even as the rebrand aimed to capture and convey WES’s enhanced focus on social impact, the communications team decided to leave the WES logo largely intact, given how synonymous WES’s branding and reputation had become with quality credential evaluation to its longtime partners.
Through this continued growth, WES continued to explore how to leverage its social enterprise model for maximum impact. In 2022, WES began considering how to use capital allocation as a lever for systems change, by rethinking the organisation’s investment and cash management strategies. Leveraging learnings and organisational capabilities that had been developed under the WES Mariam Assefa Fund’s impact investing initiatives, Benjamin, Munn, and Smitha Das, then Director of Impact Investing, pushed for a new mission-aligned investment policy, which was approved by the board in November 2023. The policy committed WES to invest its financial surplus in assets that met certain social impact criteria. To ensure support and expertise for this new approach to investing, WES created a Senior Director of Investments position reporting directly to the Chief Financial Officer, and Das took on this role. WES also engaged an external partner who advised on creating an investment policy that fully aligned with WES’s mission, selecting Bivium Westfuller from 25 potential firms. “Often within the impact investing landscape, ‘impact’ is defined by who we invest in and what we invest in. To truly create systems change and drive greater impact, we must evolve our definition of impact to also reflect how we invest in and support our partners. Ultimately, we have to dismantle inherent power dynamics and shift power to the communities we invest in. That’s part of what we’re trying to demonstrate at WES.” Smitha Das, Senior Director of Investments
Guests mingle at WES’s 50th Anniversary Celebration, New York, 2024
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