Innovative Finance Fundamentals
Finance isn't broken. It's built to extract. Learn how to build it differently.
Innovative Finance Fundamentals
Doors close Thursday 17 September 2026
You've built a career trying to make capital do more good.
Somewhere along the way you've probably run into the same wall: a term sheet that assumes your enterprise wants what venture capital wants, a fund term that forces an exit before the mission has had time to mature, a compensation structure that quietly rewards growth over the outcome everyone actually cares about.
None of that is an accident. Finance wasn't broken by people trying to do good within it. It's working exactly as it was built to work, which is precisely why doing good within it takes more than good intentions.
IFI 101 is where you learn what it actually takes: not a longer list of instruments to memorize, but a way of looking at any deal, any fund, any allocation strategy, and asking who decides, who defines what good looks like, who bears the risk, and who captures the value.
Four questions. Three sessions. One tool you'll use on every deal you touch afterward.
Who is the 101 course for?
This course is for anyone working to make capital better serve people and the planet, whatever altitude you work at.
If you're structuring individual deals, as a founder, an investor, or an advisor, you'll recognize yourself in the deal-level content. If you're building or running a fund or investment vehicle, that's vehicle level. If you're allocating across many funds, grantees, or instruments, whether that's your own capital or capital you advise on, as a family office, a foundation, or an advisor to either, that's portfolio level. Most participants move between more than one, and the course is built for that, not for a single fixed role.
Level: introductory to intermediate. No prior innovative finance training required. What matters more is a real, current question in your own work you'd like a sharper way of thinking through.
What can participants expect to learn, and how?
Format: three live online sessions (90 minutes each), each built around a short exercise, a facilitated walkthrough grounded in real, named examples, and a small-group breakout where you apply that session's question to your own work. Pre-reading before each session and a workbook afterward mean you arrive prepared and leave with something to actually use, not just notes from a webinar.
By the end of the course, you'll be able to:
- Ask four questions of any deal, fund, or allocation strategy that cut through the technical language to what's actually being decided, and who's deciding it
- Recognize when an impact-first structure is genuinely different from a conventional one, and when it's the same default with better intentions attached
- Locate your own work at the right altitude, deal, vehicle, or portfolio, and know exactly where to go deeper afterward, whether that's a specific IFI course or the community itself
- Walk into your next term sheet, fund design conversation, or allocation decision with a sharper, more deliberate set of questions than you walked in with
The three sessions map directly to IFI's core framework, with each session covering one of the three levers. The arc moves from understanding how capital is aggregated and allocated (Structures), to how decisions get made across the investment lifecycle (Processes), to what drives behaviour inside any structure or process (Incentives). The four questions framework runs as a connective thread across all three.
Session 1
Structures
How do we aggregate and allocate capital?
Structures opens with an honest argument: finance isn't broken, it's working exactly as designed, and a good mission statement wrapped around an unchanged structure produces the same outcomes it always has. From there, the four questions that run through the whole course, and a look at what it actually takes to build a fit-for-purpose deal and fund, grounded in real examples of investors and founders who built something genuinely different rather than a better-branded version of the default.
Session 2
Processes
How are decisions made?
The data is clear that funding gaps aren't a pipeline problem, they're a process problem: identical pitches get scored differently depending on who's presenting them, and controlled research shows that redesigning the evaluation process alone, without ever mentioning bias to the people doing the evaluating, closes much of that gap. This session looks at who gets in the room, who decides once they're there, and who ends up holding something real when it's over, closing on a fund that answers all three questions at once, built around Indigenous governance and community-led origination from day one.
Session 3
Incentives
What drives behaviour inside structures and processes?
You can build the most thoughtfully designed structure in the world and still watch it drift if nobody redesigned what it actually pays for. This session asks a simple, sharp test of any incentive, at deal, fund, or portfolio level: is it bolted onto something that hasn't changed, or built into something that has?
Your facilitators
Aunnie Patton Power
Founder of the Innovative Finance Initiative, has designed hundreds of millions of dollars of innovative financing instruments, and is the author of Adventure Finance and Brave New Capital.
Esme Verity
IFI's Head of Learning, leads breakout facilitation and the session close throughout the course.
Participants also benefit from pre-reading and post-session resources, session recordings, and a course workbook.
When does the 101 course take place?
Our next 101 cohort runs across three Wednesdays in September and October 2026. We're running one session in the morning and one in the afternoon, both on the same dates, so you can choose whichever fits your schedule.
Morning Session
- UTC
- 07:30
- CET/CEST
- 09:30 CEST
- GMT/BST
- 08:30 BST
Afternoon Session
- UTC
- 15:00
- CET/CEST
- 17:00 CEST
- GMT/BST
- 16:00 BST
Each session is 90 minutes. We'll run the same format again in January 2027.
How do participants sign up and pay?
Choose the time that works best for you. Both options cover the same three sessions and the same content.
Doors close Thursday 17 September 2026.
Can't make September? Join the waitlist for January 2027.
Can't make it?
Our 101 courses take place multiple times a year. If September doesn't work for you, join us again in January 2027, when we'll run the same morning and afternoon format. Take a look at our calendar for upcoming dates. Times listed here are UTC, convert to your own time zone using this tool.