By Elizabeth Garlow, 
CEO, Charism Capital Fund

October 9, 2026, Adrian, Michigan – Long before "impact investing" had a name, women religious were already practicing it. Congregations like the Adrian Dominican Sisters directed their retirement funds and other savings into community development credit unions, loan funds, and the earliest community development financial institutions (CDFIs) – patient, affordable capital moving toward the neighborhoods and enterprises the conventional financial system wouldn't touch. It's an approach rooted in discernment, an openness to asking "what is enough of a return?" and the instinct to ask what capital owes to relationships rather than only to the financial bottom-line.

This legacy has had a profound impact, and it is evolving. Many of the congregations that pioneered this work are smaller now, with fewer sisters and leaner staff to carry it forward. 

Community investing was never simple to administer. It means dozens of investee relationships, each with its own documents, reporting expectations, and due diligence, spread across a landscape of projects and funds. Left to run its course, that kind of administrative weight could mean these programs struggle to stay afloat. Naming that clearly, though, is also what has made it possible to do something about it. 

At the same time, a different kind of barrier has been keeping newer people out of this kind of investing. Lay collaborators, foundations, families, and smaller congregations who want to put their own capital to work on mission keep running into challenges: private impact funds are usually built for large checks, with minimums in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and multi-year holding periods that some funders simply can't meet. Doing this work also requires expertise. None of this is a reason the work can't grow. It's simply been missing a front door. 

Those challenges – a legacy in need of continuity, and a newer generation locked out of community and impact investing by structural barriers – were the starting point for a participatory design workshop in May 2025, where sisters, lay practitioners, and other collaborators sat down together at the Casa Iskali in Chicago (a former Cabrini Retreat Center) to ask what it would take to lower those barriers without diluting what made this work distinctive. 

What came out of that room was the vision for Charism: a new nonprofit organization built to sponsor and manage a pooled fund of funds, moving capital toward partners both in the United States and in the Global South where communities are especially vulnerable in light of declining global aid. The fund is structured specifically so both legacy investors and newer investors – including smaller monasteries, congregations and organizations – can participate in the same kind of relationship-first investing the sisters have been practicing for more than 50 years. Charism launched this July with a founding circle of 12 investors, including 10 congregations of women religious, alongside ten donors, including the Adrian Dominican Sisters, who chose to be part of building it from the start.

The fund itself is just the vehicle. What makes this collaboration unique is the weaving together of multiple communities for a sustained practice of impact-first investing as a way of concretely living out our charisms to build a more life-giving economy. It helps all of us live our charisms in how we relate to money and to people, ensuring the treasures of these practices are handed down, tested, and re-embodied by whoever picks it up next – which, increasingly, means lay collaborators working alongside sisters. 

For the Adrian Dominican Sisters, whose own history in this work helped shape the field well before Charism existed, being part of the founding circle is a continuation of their work as well as planting seeds for the next evolution of how they express their mission and values through investing, in deep partnership with others. Charism is an exciting effort to build something all of us – women religious and others – can lean on.

Learn more. 
 

Caption for above feature photo: Standing near a display of Charism Capital are, from left, Bill Hatch, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Charism Capital; Molly Harmon, fund investor; Elizabeth Garlow, founder and CEO of Charism Capital; Sister Molly Brockwell, OSB, fund investor; and Sister Marilín Llanes, OP, fund investor and Director of the Portfolio Advisory Board. 
Photo Courtesy of Sister Marilín Llanes, OP

August 20, 2020, Adrian, Michigan – Cynthia Curry Crim was named Vice Chair of the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Portfolio Advisory Board (PAB). In this position, she will be working on the PAB’s executive team with Associate Dee Joyner, Director of Resilient Communities for the Congregation, and Sister Marilín Llanes, OP, Chair.

Established by the Adrian Dominican Sisters more than 40 years ago, the PAB helps the Congregation to use its resources justly, in ways that resonate with its mission. The Corporate Responsibility aspect focuses on using dialogue and shareholder resolutions to keep corporations accountable in areas such as the environment, treatment of workers, and responsibility to local communities. The Community Investment aspect offers low-interest loans to community-based enterprises that serve communities and people in need.

Now in her second year as a PAB member, Cynthia is excited to be serving on the executive team as Vice Chair. The executive team is involved in behind-the-scenes work and strategic planning – “a lot of planning to make sure that each time the PAB meets, we have a productive meeting,” she said. “We’re just trying to make sure that the Board members have the right information, to make the meetings more engaging.”

Cynthia said serving on the PAB fits right in with her work experience. From about 1993 to 1998, she worked in Chicago as director of nonprofit organizations. “All my work centered on family and children, but I also realized you have to look at housing, education, and health,” she said. She wanted to change focus, “not to leave the nonprofit community but I really wanted to see a bigger part of the work.”

Cynthia then served as Associate Executive Director of the Steans Family Foundation in Chicago. The Executive Director was “totally committed to the community and really believed in engaging community residents about the decisions that were going on,” Cynthia said. She compared this work to the Congregation’s focus on helping to form resilient communities in specific geographic areas of the country.

Cynthia and her family moved to St. Louis in 2002. After working for Nonprofit Services Consortium, an intermediary that collaborates with local nonprofit organizations, Cynthia was hired 15 years ago by Dee Joyner to work at Commerce Bank, managing part of its corporate foundation and two family foundations. 

Cynthia said Dee invited her to serve on the PAB. “I had known about her work with the Adrian Dominican Sisters while she was at Commerce,” Cynthia said. “She would talk about being on the PAB, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be asked [to serve on the Board].”

Working on the PAB has enhanced her knowledge. “What I have learned is that investment in the community can be direct or indirect,” she said. She sees the corporate responsibility aspect, and particularly shareholder advocacy, as having an indirect but profound effect on the community. 

“How many people in underserved communities have any idea of the impact that corporations have?” she asked. “So the work that the Sisters are doing – advocating that corporations look at what they’re doing in terms of how they’re polluting the environment – has a major impact on those who have no voice. That is a powerful tool to use.” 

Cynthia sees the work of community investment as being directly involved in the local communities. “I like that during this time of COVID and Black Lives Matter, I have really seen in our last meeting this commitment to walk the talk and try as best as possible to make a difference in the communities, making sure that people who are already struggling can somehow get some relief,” she said. “To be part of this is pretty special.”