World Education Services has spent half a century helping immigrants and international students get their educational and professional credentials recognized in their new countries.
That social enterprise became a successful business, amassing a balance sheet in excess of $300 million. Now WES is investing those assets in a diverse portfolio of investments intended to extend its mission of helping immigrants contribute their considerable skills and thrive as they move about the world (view WES’s profile on ImpactAlpha Edge).
Such laudable goals may have once been unremarkable, but now count as courageous in a world that erects innumerable obstacles for individuals and families as part of a backlash against immigration more broadly.
“If you look around our local and global economies, individuals are moving around the world at a pace that is not going to stop,” WES’s Smitha Das says on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. “Given our financial independence, given our set of resources, WES, if anything, is really looking to double down on our commitments and stay in solidarity with our communities.”
The organization’s new 10-year strategy continues WES’s evolution from a self-supporting social enterprise to an economic engine for economic inclusion (for a full history of WES, see this case study from the Skoll Centre at the University of Oxford). One in five workers in the US is an immigrant, making them crucial for bridging skills gaps, contributing to Social Security and driving economic growth. “Unlocking immigrant talent is essential to our collective economic future,” Das says.
WES is a founding partner of Impact LP, ImpactAlpha’s platform for asset owners for whom LP stands for “Leadership Potential.”
“How do we actually activate every single dollar, every single resource, at WES to drive towards our mission and values?” she says. “That’s the journey that we’ve been on over the last five years.”
Capital-market fit
The organization formalized its commitment to 100% mission-alignment in late 2023 and has expanded from a 4% or 5% carve-out of the balance sheet to 60% alignment, by Das’s calculations. With its advisor, Bivium Westfuller, the organization evaluates investments through four lenses: risk, return, liquidity and impact.
“We are rotating every asset class at WES to be mission-aligned, from our cash, to our public equities and fixed income, right through more commercial-rates-of-return-seeking capital within the private markets as well,” Das says. “We are trying to demonstrate and be yet another data point in the market to show that you can advance mission alignment as well as adhere to the fiduciary duties of being a strong investor as well, and reduce risk.”
The diversification allows WES to back ventures such as JUST, a community development financial institution in Austin, Texas, that is helping its small-business micro-borrowers buy their own homes and begin to build generational wealth (for background see, “Collective ownership, renter payouts and neighborhood trusts expand access to housing wealth”). WES is also a limited partner in two funds from Apis & Heritage Capital Partners, which are benchmarked to traditional private-credit rates of return.
“I do think the impact can happen across the spectrum, and that’s why we take this capital market-fit approach,” Das says.
The majority of the shift is the result of the rotation of WES’s public-markets equity holdings. At the center of the strategy is “immigrant-lens investing.” That means investments that provide good jobs for immigrants, targets workforce development, and advance the growing “care economy” and, significantly, employee ownership of businesses, where WES has carved out a leadership role among asset owners (see, “Building an ownership movement to close racial wealth gaps”).
A broader bucket of mission-aligned holdings targets what might be termed the “social determinants of good work,” including investments in climate, health, financial inclusion and responsible AI. WES targets a 4% to 5% real return overall, consistent with institutional norms, says Das.
The portfolio also includes a “catalytic” sleeve, targeted at the rate of inflation or, broadly, capital preservation, with “highest fidelity to impact, risk tolerance, flexibility and patience,” according to Das. That “impact first” portfolio includes 30 partners in which WES holds positions in debt, equity and blended finance. WES is testing instruments such as private credit, guarantees and recoverable grants to better match capital to enterprise needs.
That flexibility is particularly important in addressing what WES sees as a persistent financing gap in enterprises that enable the transition from education to work. Some services are grant-funded, while some tech-enabled startups are able to attract venture capital. But what about strong businesses with real revenues and growth potential but not venture-scale exit potential.
The strategy is not concessionary by default. The goal is to “rightsize the capital structure to the investment,” in order to build a pipeline of scalable, impact-driven businesses that may not fit conventional VC models, Das says.
“We understand we can invest across the spectrum of capital while still adhering to WES’s financial goal.”
Operating balance-sheet
WES’s commitment to 100% mission-alignment was one of the first among the small but growing set of nonprofit entities that grew up as operating companies. Others are following suit. The California Endowment, one of the many healthcare conversion foundations around the country, said in 2024 that it would move its entire $4 billion endowment to investments that align with its mission of supporting health and racial equity (see, “California Endowment goes ‘all-in’ on impact”).
Next50, a foundation in Denver Next50, established in 2016 with the proceeds from the sale of InnovAge, a Denver-based senior care operator, is on its own journey to align 100% of its approximately $265 million in assets to value and support aging (see, “Building foundation – and personal – portfolios that value and support aging”).
A number of former student-loan servicers have established impact funds, including Britebound (fomerly American Student Assistance), Strada Education Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
WES is distinguished from most of those peers by the fact that it continues to operate as a social enterprise, and a cash-generating one at that. Unlike foundations or family offices, it is actively generating revenue while allocating capital, giving it a corporate-style balance sheet with a social mandate. That makes its assets more like a corporate balance-sheet than even a corporate or private foundation.
With its grants and in-kind support the organization does invest in system-change and narrative shifts, seeking to reframe immigration as an economic advantage rather than a political liability. In the US, for example, immigrants have been a huge net positive for the economy, as a source of talent and innovation and entrepreneurship and of young people in an aging world.
“Where do you see intersections with immigrant communities?” Das says she asks partners and other investors. “There are plenty – we just need to uplift that perspective.”
“That’s really what we’re trying to bring to the table: that intentionality and focus on immigrants.”
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