A conversation with LEAF’s newest team member, Nathan Hixson.
Q: What was your original role at LEAF?
NH: When I first joined LEAF in 2014, we were smaller and less specialized. I underwrote loans and spoke with investors, wrote grants, managed compliance, and occasionally published a newsletter or article. As our assets and staff grew, I focused on our reporting capabilities and growing the portfolio.
My last year at LEAF, 2019, I spent time with Franklin Country CDC developing the MA Food Trust Program. I’m thrilled to see that it not only continues but thrives, supporting dozens of companies and over 500,000 Massachusetts residents with SNAP- & WIC-ready healthy food options.
What is your role now at LEAF?
NH: I am responsible for growing our assets, both debt and equity (“net assets”). LEAF doesn’t need to grow to maintain our existing relationships or drive towards an IPO. We grow to bring financial access and developmental assistance to more small companies and households that need it but cannot find it elsewhere. LEAF has great programs and solutions. So, now we can scale, do more, measure it, and report on it.
LEAF’s mission is, and always has been, focused on jobs for low-income people. As long as our society faces the steep inequality we see today–and LEAF has resources and effective solutions to combat that inequality–we will continue to deploy capital in a prudent manner that furthers the solidarity economy. I’m excited to be back at LEAF and help tell our story because I see it as a story of empowerment, intentionality, and inclusion.
What did you do between leaving and returning to LEAF?
NH: In 2019 I moved to North Carolina to pursue graduate school at Duke University. I was fortunate enough to work with asset managers who wanted sustainability and impact investing in their portfolios. I gained exposure to many different asset classes (public equities, venture capital, fixed income etc.) and saw a full spectrum of how investors attempt to report on their portfolios’ and funds’ impacts. After school, I joined PNC Asset Management’s responsible investing team to analyze impact-focused managers and help clients assess their portfolio’s alignment with their values and goals. I’m excited to come full circle and bring those viewpoints back, to strengthen LEAF’s institutional offering and reporting.
On the personal side, since leaving LEAF in 2019, my wife and I had approximately 100 children (okay, actually two, but we already had one and three feels like a lot) so I enjoy seeing them develop their own strong personalities and goofy senses of humor. I also got into watching and playing basketball (blame Duke) for the first time since I was six years old. I’m happy to report my skills have improved a full 70% since the aforementioned six-year-old season.
Q: What does LEAF bring to impact finance that you’re excited about? Why?
NH: LEAF has a stellar, earned reputation in several different communities, from cooperative businesses to community land trusts to healthy food businesses. Flexibility and a true partnership with our borrowers has always brought more work via word of mouth. LEAF’s development team provides top-tier services. LEAF’s patient capital, combined with an openness to creative structures and partnerships to get borrowers what they need, is a particular strength. Dozens of businesses would be closed today and employ no one, and hundreds of affordable homes would have been lost to large developers, if not for LEAF. I’m excited to share that story with a broader audience because LEAF is still a far-too-well-kept secret.
Of course, I’m also excited to work with the people. LEAF attracts smart, low-ego professionals who have a genuine drive to see the power of capital and small businesses deliver broadly shared economic gains where mainstream capitalism has failed to do so for a generation. I am not surprised this group has grown a few nascent but high-quality products to a point where scale can augment our impact and show others the immense need for capital that flows directly to Main St.
Q: What do you do for fun?
I play soccer, racquetball, and basketball whenever I don’t have a broken bone (something of a biannual tradition for me). I also read a lot of Harry Potter series, Bluey books, and chewable board books to children. My newest hobby is raising a couple of small frogs with my kids–I’m in obsessive research mode and need to start growing the plants in the vivarium but frogs will be here before the year is out!