About Us
The Predistribution Initiative (PDI) is a nonpartisan, multistakeholder non-profit that works with investors and their stakeholders to improve financial analysis and investment decision-making processes in ways that more adequately value workers, communities and nature.
We were founded in early 2019 by a team of professionals focused on sustainability issues and impact investing. We realized that while the sustainability and impact investing fields have made significant progress, the guidelines and frameworks that have emerged as industry standards focus primarily on portfolio companies and the investments of investors. Meanwhile, investment practices and structures themselves may be exacerbating the problems we seek to solve and creating systematic risks for large institutional investors, as well as systemic risks for society. Given increasing stakeholder concerns about these issues, we recognized that there were major blind spots that needed to be elevated and addressed.
Reforming capitalism and true responsible investment requires looking at the full equation:
Portfolio Company Impacts + Investor Impacts = Responsible Investment
As an example, one of the first issues we identified relates to fund manager compensation and economic inequality. In existing ESG frameworks, metrics exist for investors to assess corporate executive compensation in their portfolio companies, including the ratio between CEO pay and the average worker. However, the pay gap ratios between asset portfolio company management executives and the average worker in a portfolio company are often even greater.
To understand the full story of how a particular investment decision may affect society, asset owners and allocators would need to evaluate fund manager compensation in addition to corporate executive compensation.
Furthermore, there may be opportunities to develop new fund and investment structures (with risk-adjusted returns for mainstream investors) that share more wealth with workers and communities. The potential to develop these structures was of strong interest to our founding team members, and is an area of ongoing focus.
To learn more about overlooked issues related to investment structures, please read PDI’s flagship paper ESG 2.0: Measuring and Managing Risk Beyond the Enterprise-Level
Our Vision and Mission
Our vision is a world in which the meaning of investment success is aligned with the health of the natural and human systems upon which the economy and financial system rest, aligning with the principles of Predistribution. A predistributive economy is one in which financial capital more adequately values human, social, and natural capital. In this paradigm, investors – who set the incentives for companies and other investees – factor the risks that people and nature take, and the value that they create into investment decision-making, financial analysis, and the distribution of returns.
Our mission is to align institutional investment governance and financial analysis practices with the principles of Predistribution.
Meet Our Team
Leadership Team
Delilah Rothenberg
Co-Founder | Executive Director
Delilah Rothenberg is a Co-Founder and the Executive Director of the Predistribution Initiative (PDI), a multi-stakeholder non-profit organization designed to support investors in aligning their investment governance, financial analysis, and asset allocation practices with the principles of system-level investing and systematic stewardship.
Delilah brings nearly two decades of experience in finance across asset classes – particularly private capital markets – having worked with private equity investors, lenders, and project developers on growth financing, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) integration, and impact strategy for over 12 years. Prior to private capital markets, Delilah worked in sell side equities with Bear Stearns and investment research with Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG).
Delilah serves on the Council of Institutional Investors (CII) Markets Advisory Group; is on the Advisory Panel for the Capitals Coalition; is an Advisor to For the Long Term (public treasurers focused on ESG); is an Executive Fellow at the Rutgers SMLR Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing; was an advisor to New York City Comptroller-elect Brad Lander’s campaign; and, is a former Open Society Foundations Fellow. She has served on various committees, advisory groups, and working groups for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD); among others.
Raphaële Chappe
Co-Founding Partner | Program Director, Economic Research
Raphaële Chappe is Director of Economic Research and a Co-Founding Partner at PDI. Raphaële brings over 20 years of experience in law, economics, and finance with positions spanning academia, research, and industry. In addition to impact investing and sustainable finance, her research interests include monetary policy, shadow-banking, and the link between financial markets and wealth inequality. She has worked in fintech on innovations in decentralized finance and earlier in her career, specialized in tax structures for investment banks and private equity deals at Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young, and KPMG. Raphaële is a former Open Society Foundations Research Fellow, and has taught courses in finance and macroeconomics at various institutions, including NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Parsons School of Design, and Drew University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research, and an LL.M from New York University School of Law.
Shannon Mullins
Program Director
Shannon Mullins brings almost 20 years of experience in corporate sustainability, societal impact and responsible business practices. Prior to PDI, she spent two years focused on advancing ESG integration throughout the investment lifecycle via private equity firm and portfolio company engagement and collaboration. Shannon was a practitioner with Deloitte’s sustainability and climate change team for seven years and held progressive internal responsibilities centered on the firm’s annual global impact reporting process during this time. Earlier in her career, Shannon provided client services related to human capital total rewards communications. Other relevant roles have included internal ESG-related advisory for business teams at Export Development Canada; philanthropic consulting services; and (actuarial) pension funding valuation activities for large, corporate clients.
Juan Jardon-Pina
Associate Director
Juan is a trained economist and has a background in public policy, investment banking, impact investing and innovative finance. He previously worked as an Investment Officer at Deetken Impact, analyzing investment opportunities with an impact and gender lens in the Latin American region. He also served as a Researcher for the Impact Finance Innovations Programme at the University of Oxford, where he had the opportunity to contribute to a Impact-linked Compensation research project in partnership with The ImPact, global membership community of families committed to aligning their assets with their values. Before transitioning to the impact investing and innovative finance sectors, he worked as an Investment Banker at Evercore Partners and as an economic adviser for the Mexican Ministry of Finance and the Mexican Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade. He regularly serve as a mentor and judge in the Turner MBA Impact Investing Network & Training (MIINT), an experiential lab designed to give graduate students at business schools a hands-on education in impact investing.
Advisory Committee / Board of Directors
Amanda Feldman
Impact + ESG Advisor | Co-Founding Partner
Amanda is the Impact & ESG Advisor and a Co-Founding Partner at PDI. She brings experience from the 2021 G7 impact Investing Taskforce, UNDP’s SDG Impact, the Impact Management Project, Bridges Fund Management and Volans.
She serves as an Impact Advisor at MAZE, a member of the Independent Panel for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), and a mentor for entrepreneurs at Bethnal Green Ventures, MAZE and BMW Foundations’s RESPOND Accelerator. Amanda holds a B.A. in English and Spanish literature from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Public Administration from the London School of Economics.
Communications and Creative Partners
