January 31, 2026 – I’ve spent most of my career working both inside and alongside institutions that shape markets—family offices, foundations, and investment firms. Sometimes helping to build new vehicles, sometimes working within established ones—always with the same goal: ensuring capital is deployed responsibly, which means more than just fiscal responsibility, but with fairness and for long-term impact. I’ve believed that if you could demonstrate a better way—one that aligned values with performance—capital would follow.
This past year has forced me to confront how incomplete that assumption was.
I have been deeply disappointed by what I’ve seen from many of the organizations with the most power, capital, and influence in the impact investing ecosystem. Not because they were challenged—pressure and scrutiny are inherent to leadership—but because too many went quiet when clarity was required. Too many chose caution when courage was needed. Too many treated this moment as something to manage through, rather than a moment to lead.
And here’s the harder truth: disappointment without responsibility is just commentary.
After more than three decades in investing and impact—managing capital, advising institutions, serving on boards, and participating in the rooms where allocation decisions are made—I know what’s possible. I also know when we’re falling short. And what I’ve seen this past year has been more than discouraging, it’s been instructive.
Good intentions alone don’t carry the work forward—especially when the burden keeps falling on people without the authority or resources to change the system they are holding together. That gap between values and decision-making power forced a reckoning for me.
For a long time, I believed my role was to build the alternative—to prove, through Known and our partners, that capital could move differently. That strategy mattered. It still does. But this moment has made something clear: influencing and advising is not enough. Not when the institutions that shape markets hesitate to use their full influence. Not when imagination is treated as risk and fear is mistaken for caution.
So here is my decision: in January, Known will close its Private Wealth and Asset Management business (which I led), to focus on where I believe the market most needs help, less strategy, more action, which is its Built, Fund as a Service business. Grown quietly through word of mouth over the past couple of years, Known’s Built, Fund as a Service offering has provided the market what it most needs right now, the infrastructure to stand up much needed capital funds in a market that has increased the barriers to entry to anyone other than the usual suspects. While I continue to believe that advising on the management of private wealth and endowments is important work, I will be shifting my focus to work inside an institution with the scale, permanence, and leverage to move markets, policy, and norms. I simply do not believe that the needle will be moved by consultants. The owners and stewards of capital must be the ones to force the change that’s needed now.
This is not because the work of advisors is finished— but because the work now requires a different posture. I am choosing to operate from within well-capitalized institutions, where disciplined investment strategy and mission-aligned capital can drive durable, system-level outcomes.  These are the institutions I have been frustrated by—and the ones that could move the entire field, if they choose.
I don’t believe people failed because they lacked values. I believe they failed because systems reward short-term caution and penalize long-term conviction. And systems only change when the people inside them decide that the cost of inaction has finally become greater than the risk of action.
In addition to my new role (as CIO of Kansas City based foundation, Health Forward), I will remain in the role of Known’s board chair, and Known’s team will continue—with strong leadership, deep partnerships, and a community that understands that progress is rarely linear and often uncomfortable. I will remain closely connected to the organization and deeply invested in its success. I am proud of what we’ve built together and grateful to those who kept showing up when it would have been easier not to.
I believe that this is a moment to for all hands to get to work on multiple fronts—to stop theorizing about what powerful institutions should do, and to get behind the wheel and steer them in the right direction from the inside.
History doesn’t reward those who waited to be certain.
It remembers those who moved when the moment demanded it.
Without question, this moment demands it.
– Jim Casselberry