ICA has nurtured small businesses in the Bay Area through capital investment and mentoring for nearly thirty years. A central part of their approach is a form of impact investing that focuses on buying equity in promising companies rather than offering loans. As those businesses succeed, ICA creates pathways for the original owners to buy back that equity over time.
ICA Fund is known as an innovator in the CDFI field because it extends patient, flexible capital on founder-friendly terms to the small businesses in which it invests. This approach is in contrast to most CDFIs, which typically offer small businesses loans rather than convertible notes or equity investment options that have extended, flexible repayment expectations aligned with the businesses growth. It’s also in contrast to venture funding, which typically focuses on high-growth businesses and expects a high rate of return over a short period of time.
Since its founding, ICA Fund has invested in small businesses with the potential to positively impact their communities. It does so by supporting founders who often have a difficult time securing capital through traditional financing institutions.
Still, a noble mission isn’t enough to sustain and prove a financial model and theory of change. That’s why ICA Fund has turned its attention to answering three interrelated questions about its investment approach.
Building on our five-year partnership, we created this new series of case studies to spotlight ICA Fund’s work to shape a more inclusive economic system: one where entrepreneurs can access the capital and partnership they need to grow, where local economies thrive, and where quality jobs expand alongside profit. Each case study speaks to a core audience and a core belief: investors can generate both social impact and returns; business owners deserve capital designed for their success; policymakers can drive widespread economic growth by supporting equity investing that works for real people.
Kylan Rutherford is a Siegel Research Fellow at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, where he studies the complex relationship between social media content creators, platform consumers, and the platforms themselves. We sat down with Kylan to learn more about his research on how AI is affecting search, misinformation, and data voids.
Our Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Jumee Song, recently spoke with a leading Korean outlet about how Siegel Family Endowment approaches “technology and the public good” and what it means to fund bold, long-term ideas that drive systemic change.
We know that philanthropy is strongest when working in collaboration, and right now, there is an opportunity to come together, imagine, and support new ideas about what our future with AI can be. We’re excited to work alongside the Humanity AI advisory board and other coalition members to ensure that AI is developed in ways that protect and enhance human creativity, labor, and security.
With support from our co-hosts and sponsors—the GitLab Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Public Interest Tech Fund—we designed a day-and-a-half agenda that focused on strengthening community across boundaries, expanding our collective imagination of the futures technology can enable, and advancing the field’s shared capacity to turn vision into action.
We sat down with Joshua Elder, Vice President and Head of Grantmaking at Siegel, to reflect on the Learning Landscape Challenge’s journey and what he and his team have learned along the way, exploring the gaps in the education investment landscape, the evolving concept of multidimensional infrastructure, and how the challenge model unlocked new avenues for invention and collaboration.
At Siegel Family Endowment, we’ve spent the first half of 2025 contending with profound uncertainty—not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to navigate with intention, curiosity, and collective wisdom. A bit past the midway point in the year, Siegel President and Executive Director Katy Knight would like to share three questions that have shaped our thinking in the hope that they might resonate with your own.
This summer, The Maintainers enters a new phase. The organization is transitioning from a fully grant-funded organization to a distributed leadership model (with carry over funding sourced from network outreach in 2024) in which a Steering Committee and network members take ownership for building on the community of practice established during the organization’s first phase.