Cathy Clark, Center for Advancment of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University

Twitter @cathyhc 

Cathy is the lead faculty member at the award winning Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, where she has taught since 2007. She is the Founder and Director of CASE 13, Initiative on Impact Investing. She co-leads the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), a $10 million USAID-funded global health accelerator, in collaboration with Duke Medicine's International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD) and the Duke Global Health Institute. 

She has been an active pioneer, educator, consultant, and practitioner for 25 years in the field of impact investing and social entrepreneurship. She has worked with hundreds of budding social entrepreneurs. She helped set the standards for B Corporations. She managed impact investments for Flatiron Partners and the Markle Foundation. "She was named America's Top 20 Women in Philanthropy" (article).  

As part of her role for CASE, she coordinates global research for data from $4.5 billion of impact assets under management and from 11,000 impact entrepreneurs in 29 countries. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from University of Virginia. She has sat on the US National Advisory Board for the G8 Taskforce on Social Impact Investing established in June 2013 by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.  


In this interview, we discuss:

  1. What constitutes an impact investment and how it is unique from traditional investing. 
  2. How the purpose-driven mentality is infiltrating the marketplace, and how millenials are driving it. 
  3. How start-ups and blue chip corporations are responding to market trends?
  4. The "Collaborative Capitalism" model. 
  5. The innovative work taking place at Duke's CASE i3
  6. Where the field of social enterprise is heading, and why it is so inpsiring. 


"What inspires me everyday is seeing the spark when somebody realizes that they have the potential to work on a goal that is really important to them, as opposed to sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best." 


  1. "The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism"
  2. Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship 
  3. Initiative on Impact Investing (CASE i3) 
  4. Top 100 Reads on Impact Investing  (Highly Recommended!)
  5. In Memory of Gregory Dees



