Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Laina Greene of Angels of Impact Is Helping To Change Our World

Life is short, and it is important to focus on what matters for your spirit I always felt the need to prove my worth to others. So I worked harder to make it to the top universities, get as many certifications as I could, get lots of experience in top organizations, and just keep working hard to be seen and respected.

As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Laina Greene of Angels of Impact.

Laina Greene is chief executive officer and founder of Angels of Impact. She is also a senior adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore, School of Business. Ms. Greene worked in the telecom, clean tech, and impact investing space for more than 30 years and she has worked, lived, and traveled in more than 52 countries worldwide. Ms. Greene considers herself a Global Citizen.

Previously, Laina Greene has worked at the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva and INTELSAT in Washington, DC. Ms. Greene became one of the early female techpreneurs in Singapore, where she started an e-learning company in 1997. In 2000, she founded Silicon Valley-based consultancy GETIT Inc, focusing on greening the IT and telecom industry.

During her international work and travels, Laina Greene became passionate about the potential for technology to change lives for the better. She quickly realized that technology access in rural and poor regions was also tied to energy access and the ability to pay, so she worked on innovative business and financing models to enable remote and poor communities to access technology.

At Angels of Impact, Ms. Greene focuses her efforts on supporting women and indigenous led community-based enterprises that support UNSDG #1 — No Poverty, #5 — Gender Equity, and #12 — Responsible Production and Consumption.

The intersectionality of gender and race is one of her passions, and ensuring new forms of integrated financing and support is her current focus. She serves on the Board of the Patricia Locke Foundation (an indigenous-led foundation), on the Investors Task Force of the JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Collaborative, on the International Steering Committee of the Global Telecommunications Women Network, spearheads the Restorative Investing Task Force at the American Sustainable Business Network, Advises the Food Funded Network, serves on the Inclusive Capital Collective Investment Committee, Cartier Womens Initiative Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Jury member, among her other volunteering commitments,

Laina Greene has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for organizations of all sizes in commercial, start-up, non-profit, and investment funds. Previously, Ms. Greene served as Senior Advisor to Ashoka, Advisor to Unltd Indonesia, Associate Director of the Asia Center for Social Entrepreneurship & Philanthropy at the NUS Business School, and Advisor to the Plus Acumen chapter in Singapore.

She is also the co-author of the book “Sustainable Impact: How women are key to ending poverty” (2017) and two recent reports written for Angels of Impact, funded by Oxfam and Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

An alumna of the National University of Singapore, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, and Harvard Law. Laina also graduated from the AeA Institute Executive Program held at Stanford University and the Executive Program at Singularity University. She is a certified intercultural trainer from the Intercultural Communications Institute and lives between Silicon Valley and Singapore.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I was born and raised in Singapore. My humble immigrant parents worked hard to send me to top universities so I could have a leg up on opportunities as a woman of color. It was my upbringing where my parents, despite the little they had in the early days of Singapore, always found ways to give back to the less fortunate that brought me to the work I do today.

My parents even celebrated my birthdays in orphanages and homes for the elderly so I would see some people are less fortunate than me and that I should always do something to serve them. As an impressionable teen, my mother also made us watch the TV series “Roots” about slavery in the United States to learn more about social injustice.

In my teens, I became more aware and impacted by the racial and gender prejudice in Singapore, the movie “Gandhi” spurred me to want to live my life like him fighting for social justice.

My upbringing also influenced me to embrace the Baha’i Faith, which I learned about while studying at the International Court of Justice in Haque, Netherlands. I was attracted to this notion of living your life in service. Eradication of extreme poverty and gender equality are fundamental tenets of the Baha’i Faith and are vital issues to address to achieve global peace and prosperity.

So in the mid-90s, when I started my own tech company in 1996 in Singapore, I ran it with a clear social mission to bridge the digital divide. I saw telecom and the Internet as critical tools to unite humanity.

When I started guest lecturing at Stanford in the late 2000s, it was only then that I first heard the term social enterprise. By this time, my development work had already taken me to more than 40 countries. The many technological innovations and new business models for social justice I saw being developed excited me.

After selling my tech business in 2006, I came across Prof Yunus’s book “Creating a world without poverty,” where he challenged us all to put our money into ending man-made poverty. His book inspired me to put my money into social impact investing, and I started working on setting up a fund for women entrepreneurs.

With World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Sweden funding, I managed to do a gap analysis about this funding gap, but just as we were about to launch the fund, the financial crisis set things back. I had to put the idea on hold and worked first for a significant US nonprofit.

I worked and lived in Indonesia for a large family office exploring social impact investing. It was during my time in Indonesia that I realized I didn’t need to wait for a fund to invest, so I started investing my money into women-led small and medium enterprises offering decent work to other women.

After I finally returned to Singapore in 2015, I convinced others to join me in investing in women-led social enterprises, and when they said yes, it gave me the impetus to start Angels of Impact in 2016.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

Before entering the social impact space, my life was predominantly in Internet/Telecom industries.. I started my career in 1986 as one of the few women interns in professional roles at the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, Switzerland, in their Legal Department.

Since then, I have worked at INTELSAT, Singapore Telecom, consulting for tech companies such as Cisco Systems, and ran my technology startup, which I sold in 2006. I was the first policy advisor to the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) and the Secretary General of the Asia Pacific Internet Association (APIA), leading the region on Internet Governance policies at the OECD, APEC, ASEAN, ITU, and other key organizations. I even had the opportunity to be on the ITU delegation to COP15 to speak at a side event on Green ICT.

Throughout this pioneering leadership in technology policy work, I always reminded people about the need to focus on the social dimension of technology — Tech for good instead of tech for the sake of tech. These suggestions were often left unheard and seen as being out of touch with technological advances everyone was getting excited about.

I knew it had a lot to do with unconscious biases, so after struggling to get heard, I decided to move to the social impact space and focus on women’s empowerment. While working in the social impact space, I was surprised to see that many of these unconscious biases still existed, especially in the work of finance and international development.

Thankfully, after all these years, social impact has finally kept up with tech, and tech has caught up with social impact, and so now I strangely find my two worlds finally coming together. Recently, the Institute of Social Entrepreneurship Asia (ISEA) nominated me to be

the Technology Innovation Steering Committee co-convenor and represent them at the Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Internet Governance and their dealings with APNIC.

It was such a strange feeling to see my connections from the world of Internet Governance and the people I interacted with within the social impact space sit at the same table to discuss common issues.

Much stride is also being made around women in tech and overcoming unconscious bias, and I almost wish I was young again and not have to deal with the harsh ceilings I had to deal with during my time. I am glad that we are making strides in the right direction, and it was nice that many male fellow pioneers in the respective fields still remember me and my contributions to the sector.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of my first investments into a community-based enterprise was to help them get connected to an online tool that would make their work more effective and efficient. That organization had done its homework and found this software solution from Malaysia made by another women-led social enterprise, which they felt would fit them the best. They needed someone to invest in buying the village members’ handphones, pay for training, and a service provider to help these women implement this solution.

After investing in what they thought they needed, I found that the village women still needed financing to afford the data plans from the telecom company. So I negotiated with the telecom company to offer them a discounted program.

Sadly after these efforts, the women still could not use the solution. They had to go to the top of the mountain and put their phones on sticks in the air to get coverage. Ultimately, they gave up and reverted to visiting each other instead of using the software to communicate and coordinate their orders.

I had never experienced the realities of the ground in a developing country, so that was a big wake-up call. I realized that technology must only be seen as a tool, and community based solutions must come first to address the real needs on the ground; not all technology-driven solutions are appropriate. Sometimes the simple things go further.

Technology can never replace the human to human connections. And sometimes, it is as simple as checking if there is even basic telecom connectivity for any technology solution to work in the first place. Things are not much better today, and I wrote an article about this for the Global Telecommunication Women’s Network on “Bridging the Digital Divide — are we there yet?”.

Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?

Angels of Impact funds and supports women and indigenous-led community-based entrepreneurs doing the hard work on the ground, alleviating poverty, and achieving gender equality through responsible and sustainable businesses. We work with empowered women who empower other women by aggregating and creating more value, thereby effectively taking them out of systemic poverty and gender transformation. We listen to what they see as solutions and resources needed to succeed.

The community-based enterprises are deeply entrenched in their community and share the wealth, creating lasting impact to get them out of poverty. The community based enterprises are the “weavers” of the fabric of a just and resilient society.

Angels of Impact focuses on critical systems change agents, yet they are still undervalued, underestimated, and underfunded by the social impact investing space. The women and indigenous-led community-based entrepreneurs are “missing middle” enterprises, i.e., too large for microfinance and too small for impact investing.

We recognize that we need new forms of restorative finance with innovative and less extractive terms — the goal should be to steward resources to shift power and wealth back into these marginalized communities with the lived experience to restore the harm done and rebuild self-determination and ownership to those most harmed,

From the beginning, having had our lived experience as entrepreneurs at Angels of Impact, we value their lived experience. We also understand that money alone is not enough– often, an entrepreneur needs help to break down how much they need, how to prioritize their needs, how not to take on terms they can’t afford, etc.

The type of integrated funding is uncollateralized and called relationship-based lending. Part of this relationship-building process is our technical assistance program. Ultimately our goal is to build relationships and solve actual business problems.

Our goal is to propel their visions and strengthen their business models. At the end of our technical assistance program, they better understand their needs, and only then do we converse about funding needs and what they think they can bear. We ensure work out terms that work for them, and this also ensures they can return the funds so we can help another enterprise.

We are honored to be named Transformative 25 fund and be listed among so many brilliant funds, such as Beneficial Returns, RSF, and Mission Driven Finance, to name a few. Because ours is an Evergreen revolving fund, mostly from funders looking at more impact than return, we can be very bespoke in our approach and be as close to non-extractive as possible.

We take inspiration from the work of Prof Yunus Social Business Fund and Nwamake Agbo’s Restorative Economics Fund, among many others. As a conservative way of calculating impact, since our founding in 2016, we have impacted 64,000 lives in 12 countries across the Asia Pacific region.

Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?

I have many stories, but the one I love to tell about most is about Vanntha Ngorn, a successful social entrepreneur from a family of weavers in one of the poorest regions of Cambodia. Her village was a weaving village, and they were pushed to poverty when weaving was no longer as valued as before, and hand-made weaving could not compete with machine-made goods.

Her mother was determined to have her daughter break the shackles of poverty, so she saved money to send her to school in the city. Her mother faced opposition from relatives, as it wasn’t usual for a young girl to move away from her family. Vanntha Ngorn worked hard and went on to get a business degree.

After graduating, Vanntha Ngorn entered a business plan competition and created a business to revive the weaving industry in her village. She made it to the finals, and many were impressed with her ideas.

Then she found a lady procuring silk for her business in Europe and proposed that her village could weave the silk she needed. The lady was willing to give her a test order, and she convinced her fellow villagers that this was a good opportunity.

They did, and the lady was impressed with the quality and started giving orders. So Vanntha Ngorn was able to use her business education to start a social enterprise called Color Silk finally. She later attracted funding from Starbucks Foundation and Maybank foundation to help set up training centers to train and ensure quality; she even supplied households with weaving looms so they could work from home.

Vanntha Ngorn now supports 450 weavers, and she has helped revive weaving in her village and introduced end-to-end transparency in the supply chain, i.e., from mulberry leaves to the silkworm, to the dye, to the threads, to the woven cloth to the finished product. This enabled her to sell ethical, sustainable products beyond Europe, and she has done well for herself and her village.

Having succeeded this far, Vanntha Ngorn had bigger dreams for her village. While weaving happened in the village, higher-end products, such as garments and accessories, were hand-made in the city. She wanted to move higher-end production to the village so the rural weavers could earn more. Vanntha Ngorn needed money to help with training and buying machinery to help the villagers learn how to make high-end products. So she took a short-term low-interest loan from us to help her expand her production facilities and paid us back within a year.

Through this loan, Vanntha Ngorn increased the income of 40 women by 39 percent and started the process of high-end product development in her village. However, she lost 75 percent of her revenue during the pandemic, so Angels of Impact helped her through grants and technical assistance to survive the pandemic. Now she is ready to expand again and has come to us for another short-term loan, which we gave her.

To us, Vanntha Ngorn is an excellent example of a young woman with a vision to help her village. Through her work, Vanntha Ngorn has enabled many young girls to stay in school, stay close to home and still earn a good living for their families without them needing to work in factories for low wages, suffering much hardship, and even breaking up families as the young women often have to leave to work in the cities.

Vanntha Ngorn has restored dignity and quality of life for her village, and our work is to amplify and elevate the position of women such as Vanntha Ngorn.

Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?

1) Recognize that poverty is man-made and can be solved by us if we commit to ending it. The usual mindset is to see poverty as inevitable and that the only way to help poor people is to do charitable or social work. Prof Yunus reminds us that poor people are like bonsai trees.

The difference between a bonsai tree and a tree in the forest is the resources it has to grow to the size of the tree in the forest. All people have potential and are “gems of inestimable value” (quote from the Baha’i writings).

Let us shift our mindset and start seeing poor people as innovators, changemakers, leaders, and the solution. Stop having this “beneficiaries” model of a top-down approach to solving poverty. Invest in the solutions that the communities are creating.

2) Invest in restorative investing. “It is impossible to dismantle the systems that created wealth inequality in our country while upholding the power structure of those same systems.” a quote from Rodney Foxworth, chief executive officer, Common Future.

We need to recognize that it is this extractive economic system that commoditizes people and the planet, which is the root cause of the problems of Inequity and Climate Chaos we face today. To create a more just, restorative, and regenerative world, we do need a new system of finance called Restorative Investing.

“Restorative economics centers on healing and restoration of vulnerable communities who have been marginalized and oppressed by a polluting and extractive economy by investing in strategies that create shared prosperity and self-

determination for a just transition to the next economy,” says Nwamaka Agbo, chief executive officer, the Kataly Foundation, and also known as the mother of “Restorative economics.”

We need to unlock more funding for restorative investing. Regan Pritzker gave her inheritance to start the Kataly Foundation and made Nwamaka Agbo the chief executive officer. We need more such significant funding to make systemic change.

3) Find ways to collaborate and unite in a common mission to create a more just, restorative, and regenerative world where everyone can prosper. Unite, consult, and collaborate to create better chances of success. This is too much work to be done for us to be divisive and competitive.

We often believe when we solve the problems of the world, we will have unity. But in truth, we need to unite to solve the world’s problems. We need to see ourselves as citizens of the world tackling global crises that require all of us to work in unison.

Angels of Impact is excited to collaborate with WE in the World on Restorative Economies. We have seen their power of convening and using their collective power to raise funds and help us succeed. Common Future also has amazing examples of how they brought together like-minded groups and funds raised together successfully. This is the time for us all to work on these issues to unite.

How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?

For me, leadership is not about your position but the currency of respect and trust you have among the people on your team. If you focus on a common mission and enable everyone to shine, then they all become leaders to fulfill that common mission.

It is about how you interact and get people along a journey with you and how you help them shine. Being able to bring your authentic self to the table and allowing others to do the same.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

1) It takes many years to build a new venture, so take time to make sure this venture is what you enjoy doing.

On average, it takes five to 10 years for any new venture to take off. So it is better if it is something you feel passionate about and enjoy doing.

My first venture was a technology company that I started because there was a business opportunity to do so, but given it was a male-dominated field I faced many hurdles. Even my team was male-dominated with very toxic work habits, so I didn’t enjoy the interactions, and the work became very dreary for me.

During this time, I got burnt out, and my health was badly impacted. I ended up selling the business and was glad I did so. I got better and was able to take time to reflect before starting on my new venture, Angels of Impact. This work brings me great joy.

2) When working on a venture with a social mission, it is important to work with people who are values aligned.

When you work in a profit-maximizing company, this rule still applies but not to the same extent. For a mission-driven venture, co-founders, partners, and team members must share the vision and passion of the venture.

I have many stories of people joining us because they love our work but they are not fully values-aligned with our mission.

Today, we interview people to understand their values and if they are aligned with our mission. This process has worked so much better for us.

3) Internationalized racism is a real thing, and it is important to break from this cycle of oppression and take time to heal

In the goal of achieving success, I often put my health and well-being last. As a woman and a racial minority, I had to work harder than others to succeed. Even my parents were raised to see self-care as selfish or lazy.

My parents were just passing on what they thought was needed to survive the gender and race injustices I might face in life. I got very ill in my 40s, and my body shouted at me to stop working so hard. I wish I had understood internalized racism better, and I now spend time mindfully deprogramming the stereotypes to overcome that I have come to judge myself by.

This is a lesson I hope other women of color realize early enough so they don’t live their whole life as a trauma response.

4) No one is thinking about you; they are all concerned about how others think of them, too

I have always felt judged for doing well as a woman of color, so failure has never been an option for me. This brought undue stress into my life, and now I understand that I can only do my best, and the rest is up to the universe.

I remember once listening to Oprah Winfrey say “that she regrets having spent so much of her life dieting and thinking about what other people thought of her. She realized that everyone is also thinking about what others think of them and realized she lost so much of her life unnecessarily.“

I am now more data-driven, and if something is not working, I either shut it down or pivot to make it work better. I think I judge myself harder than anyone does, and it took me this long to come to this realization.

5) Life is short, and it is important to focus on what matters for your spirit I always felt the need to prove my worth to others. So I worked harder to make it to the top universities, get as many certifications as I could, get lots of experience in top organizations, and just keep working hard to be seen and respected.

Recently, I have been on the deathbed of dear friends and realized that what matters is the joy and love they make others feel. Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

One of my friends had friends of all races, religious backgrounds, and even social statuses come from far and wide to pay their respects to her, calling her their sister. She had impacted their lives so deeply that they wanted to say goodbye to her. It was after her death that I reflected more about this and started Angels of Impact in her memory.

Also, the Baha’i writings teach us that just as a baby develops limbs it needs in the world but not in the womb, we are building our spiritual limbs for the world to come. So now I focus more on whether my work impacts my spirit and the spirit of another.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would love to see a movement of restorative investing toward eradicating the racial wealth gap and see this as a critical part of solving the climate and inequity crisis. We only see small pockets of charitable donations go to reducing the racial wealth gap and impact investing dollars stay away from this as they seek market returns while doing good.

Imagine if we can shift money and power back into marginalized communities that have the solutions, and they help us build a more just and regenerative world for us all to benefit from. Today, there are so many BIPOC (Black Indigenous and People of Color)-led

restorative investing funds and intermediaries working with community-based enterprises, and it is an opportune moment to invest in them to make a difference.

There are many sources to find these different initiatives, including Angels of Impact, WE in the World, Inclusive Capital Collective, Common Future, Kataly Fund, and many more. The Transformative 25 list is also another source. What we all need is the right sources of funds to grow our impact, and together, we can all make a difference.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit they’re from.” (Baha’i writings)

This quote has guided us in our work at Angels of Impact. We value the lived experience of the women we work with, and we work with them to reverse the power balance where they work with us as peers and even teachers. We serve them as they have the treasures we all need to find the solutions that benefit mankind as a whole.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Mackenzie Scott as she has the right attitude in how she gives her money away with no strings attached. She has been focused on racial equity, and I feel she has the potential to help fund more BIPOC-led restorative investing funds and intermediaries to help shift power and wealth back into communities and build a more just, resilient, and regenerative world for us all.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Visit Angels of Impact and email me at laina@angelsofimpact.com

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!