Lars Boggild
When it comes to effecting positive change, the right financial support can have a big impact. Lars Boggild (Honours BA 2013: ESS/POLI) is an impact investment professional based in Toronto, Ontario, and in June 2023 he accepted a new portfolio management role supporting the leadership of Realize Capital Partners, a fund-of-funds manager for the Government of Canada’s Social Finance Fund.
Realize Capital Partners is a joint venture of Relay Venture and Rally Assets, and is currently in the process of launching one of the largest impact funds in Canadian history, with a target of raising and investing more than $400 million CAD from government and private investors. The fund will be deployed to support positively impactful sectors across Canada, in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and is expected to begin deployment this summer.
“My role is really to enable people driving deeply innovative technologies towards social and environmental change,” says Lars, reflecting on the balance of contributions in impact investment partnerships. “For every individual involved in finance, the reality is that you need dozens of those people doing (what I consider to be) the harder work of driving that change.”
He’s had plenty of experience with this type of work. From 2017 to the spring of 2023, Lars was employed with Canadian financial cooperative Vancity, starting as an account manager and gradually working up to the position of senior manager for banking and investments. Long considered a “progressive champion” within the financial services industry, Vancity offers retail finance (e.g., residential mortgages), but also invests in external impact investment funds across the country, with a focus on helping businesses and ventures create positive social and environmental change.
As one of his projects with Vancity Community Investment Bank in 2021, Lars worked with the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust to acquire affordable housing stock that was at risk of being sold and gentrified. He and his team successfully helped the Trust purchase 36 units of affordable housing, proving the effectiveness of a new financing solutions model. The positive results of the project have since been used to advocate for more Canadian government programming to directly support affordable housing acquisition.
In his more recent Vancity work, conducted on a fund-of-funds level, Lars worked with Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, the first Indigenous-owned and -led venture capital fund in Canada, which invests in early-stage Indigenous entrepreneurs.
“That’s a partnership I was very excited to be able to lead from our side of the table as an investor.”
Social finance wasn’t always part of Lars’ career plans. Originally from British Columbia, he stumbled across Dalhousie’s Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) program purely by chance. He began his undergraduate degree studying ESS and urban planning, but made the switch to ESS and political science when he realized how much influence political economic systems can have over society and urban spaces.
In his first year of the ESS program, Lars was introduced to the power of collaborating worldviews and disciplines in the context of sustainability. A marine biologist and an engineer jointly taught one of his courses—he remembers it as “a beautiful contrast” of ideas and perspectives.
He became involved with climate activism during his undergraduate studies, and grew interested in climate finance work and the ways that finance can be used as a “change lever” to shape the economy. Lars wrote his ESS honours thesis on social finance, exploring whether public institutions in Canada were supporting social enterprise initiatives, and he graduated from Dal with the 2013 University Medal in ESS. He subsequently went on to complete a graduate diploma in Social Innovation from the University of Waterloo.
Lars gained on-the-job finance experience in some of his first career roles, and eventually completed formal training as a chartered financial analyst (CFA). He credits the ESS program for some of the flexibility in thinking and learning that he has drawn upon when reviewing different prospective funds and projects in a variety of sectors.
“The interdisciplinary literacy that the College of Sustainability focused on was valuable in giving me the mental agility to ramp up quickly into sectors where I didn’t necessarily have formal training,” says Lars. “It required an intellectual curiosity to learn very quickly in different domains—while also appreciating what you don’t know and going to outside experts as well.”
On top of his main work, Lars also spends evenings and weekends supporting Reimagine LABS, a new startup consultancy, as its CFO. Reimagine LABS aims to develop tools and research to help projects in the social and public sectors improve their program design processes, supporting a “front end, forward thinking” approach to innovation.
As an undergrad, Lars co-founded initiatives such as the Dalhousie Campus Food Strategy Group and the SEED Investment Fund—and the Halifax Tool Library, which is still active today. Entrepreneurship is an experience he recommends for everyone, especially new graduates.
“It’s one of the most empowering things you can do, and also one of the most difficult, challenging things you can do,” he says. “But in accomplishing things you’ve truly taken from zero to one… you develop a sense of ‘hyper-agency,’ and you begin to realize how much of the world is plastic and is a choice, and how much of our lives is fundamentally a queue of choices that you make every day.
“If that hyper-agency can be channeled, hopefully together with some strong ethics and values, you can accomplish a lot.”
As Lars begins his new chapter with Realize Capital Partners this month, he’s excited to be contributing to the broader impact investment landscape in Canada.
“I’ve really seen the need for and the opportunity around what a vibrant ecosystem could look like and the potential for it in Canada, for there to be more robust infrastructure,” he says. “Fund managers, intermediaries, community groups—all of these partners are going to be a part of this work to effectively and efficiently channel capital and resources to social and environmental change on the ground.”
In future, he envisions continuing to take on roles at the intersection of capital, social justice, and environmental justice and sees himself finding new ways to support entrepreneurs more directly. He hopes to continue enabling change-making projects in Canada—a powerful impact itself.
(June 2023)