How Betty Francisco Rewrites the Rules on Impact Investing

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When Betty Francisco first walked into the Boston Impact Initiative (BII) office seeking capital in 2016, it wasn’t as CEO of the nonprofit impact investment fund and Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in small businesses and community controlled real estate in New England. She was a successful corporate attorney who had moved into the entrepreneurial space herself.

“The BII team told me, ‘We don’t take personal guarantees. We don’t use credit scores. We’re trying to structure capital around the needs of the business,’” Francisco recalls.

It was disorienting in the best way. For someone who had spent years helping high-growth companies court investors, watching capital bend toward small, local entrepreneurs of color, rather than to well-resourced startups, planted a seed she didn’t yet know would fundamentally reshape her career.

Her connection to BII deepened in 2018, when founder Deborah Frieze invited her to join the fund’s investment committee. For three years, Francisco sat in on decisions, helping the organization allocate funding to businesses in need of flexible capital.

Francisco jokes that she had to be “deprogrammed” from her life in venture capital. Investor returns would be capped. Risk would be assessed in conversation with the entrepreneur and their community, not by defaulting to FICO scores. Impact would focus on supporting living wage jobs, worker ownership and environmental sustainability. Deals would blend loans, equity, and grants, and they’d be wrapped in social capital through mentorship, introductions, and hands-on support. This is what BII calls integrated capital and trust-based impact investing.

For Francisco, who had once imagined herself launching a classic venture fund, the experience was transformative.

In 2021, Frieze asked Franciso to step in as BII’s CEO. BII’s first, integrated capital fund—about $7 million—had already backed dozens of enterprises. The next fund would aim higher with a $20 million goal. To shape it, she immersed herself in data about the capital gap facing entrepreneurs of color in Massachusetts, listening to business owners and investors alike. The data was sobering. Boston Indicators’ The Color of the Capital Gap report identified a $600 million annual funding gap for entrepreneurs of color in Massachusetts. Fund II was designed to directly address that gap, with a focus on patient, flexible capital for businesses that traditional finance had long overlooked.

Fund II took longer to raise than expected, but it also exceeded its goal by $2 million. In one of the most volatile economies in recent memory, that is a victory. By late 2025, BII had already deployed nearly half of Fund II into twenty-six enterprises and community-owned real estate projects, from worker-owned home-care companies to tenant-led housing purchases designed to keep buildings affordable. The broader portfolio supports over a thousand jobs and has helped businesses leverage BII’s early capital into well over a hundred million dollars in follow-on funding.

At the same time, BII has become one of the few Latina-led CDFIs in the country, and its staff has grown from five to fifteen. For Francisco, every new hire and every strategic milestone is a small victory, creating real change.

BII is also building the field of impact investing through education. Through its training program known as the ARC Fellowship, BII has trained over ninety diverse fund managers—91 percent people of color and 63 percent women — who have launched twenty-eight integrated capital funds. BII is seeding new funds across the country, each tailored to its own community’s needs. A pilot pool of first-in capital now backs some of these emerging managers, giving them the early, risk-tolerant dollars that are so often out of reach.

“What we’re doing now is creating the next generation of impact fund managers who are launching community-based funds like BII across the country and even in Canada,” the CEO says. “And now we want to help capitalize those funds.”

Together, BII and this growing network of impact focused fund managers have set a shared ambition to collectively move at least $100 million into communities of color by 2030.

That scope—and the urgency of the moment—has taken a toll.

The work, Francisco says, has been all-consuming. So she’s doing something unusual in finance. She’s taken a minute to rest. On a three-month sabbatical, she’s gone back to painting, to the creative practices that shaped her before law school, before boardrooms, and before balance sheets.

“If I want to be effective, and I have this opportunity, I want to do it while modeling the kind of behavior I want to see more often in the world,” Francisco says. Rest and reflection should not be treated as indulgences.

When she returns to her day-to-day activities, the goal is clear: Move $100 million by 2030 through BII’s own deployments in service of entrepreneurs, through a growing network of ARC Fellows launching impact funds across the country, and through an unshakeable conviction that community-centered capital is the future of finance. Francisco has spent her career building the proof. Now she is fueling the movement for a just economy.

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