About Us
The Predistribution Initiative is a nonpartisan, multistakeholder non-profit designed to co-create improved investment structures and practices that share more wealth and influence with workers and communities. Our ultimate goal is to address systemic risks like inequality, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which manifest as systematic risks in markets and investors’ portfolios.
We were founded in early 2019 by a team of professionals focused on ESG issues and impact investing. We realized that while the ESG 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 ESG 2.0 paper on “Measuring and Managing Risk Beyond the Enterprise-Level
Our Vision and Theory of Change
Our vision is a world where the cultural meaning of success is aligned with the principles of predistribution, which means the sharing of influence over, and wealth derived from, the value creation process. This requires an evolution of our financial system through collaborative engagement of diverse stakeholders, including investors, companies, workers and communities.
In this world, investment success is aligned with the health of the natural and human systems upon which the financial system rests. The risks that workers, communities, and nature take, and the value that they create, are factored into investment decision-making and financial analysis.
The Predistribution Initiative leverages the momentum around system-level investing and Universal Ownership to align asset owner and allocators’ investing activities with their stewardship and risk management goals. Our work is focused on:
- producing research on the roots of systemic and systematic risks for society and investors;
- facilitating diverse stakeholder engagement to co-create approaches to regenerative investment; and,
- fostering accountability and transparency to push the industry forward.
Meet Our Team
Leadership Team
Delilah Rothenberg
Executive Director | Co-Founding Partner
Delilah Rothenberg is a Co-Founding Partner 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 Universal Ownership 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 an Advisor to For the Long Term (public treasurers focused on ESG); was an advisor to New York City Comptroller-elect Brad Lander’s campaign; is a Contributor to Rights CoLab; and, is a former Open Society Foundations Fellow.
Victoria (“Vic”) de Castro
Associate Director
Vic brings six years of diversified experience in the public, private, third, and multilateral sectors, across three continents. Her experience includes doing research and publications in economics and corporate sustainability, as well as operational experience in sales, cost control, event organization, public speaking and more.
Vic has acquired relevant knowledge for PDI by working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), the Federal Regional Economics Council of Rio de Janeiro, and private equity sustainability reporting solutions provider Novata. Victoria holds a Master of Public Administration for the SDGs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, a Master of Innovation, Human Development and Sustainability from the University of Geneva, and a Bachelor of Economic Sciences from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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.
Raphaële Chappe
Chief Economist & Co-Founding Partner
Raphaële is the Chief Economist and a Co-Founding Partner at PDI. Raphaële brings over 20 years of experience in law, economics and finance. Her research interests include monetary policy, the shadow-banking system, and more generally the link between financial markets and wealth inequality.
She was most recently Assistant Professor of Economics at Drew University, where she taught students about the political economy, monetary policy and different investment strategies (e.g. private equity, hedge funds). She has also taught at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and was an Open Society Foundations Research Fellow. Earlier in her career, she worked with Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young, and KPMG, where she specialized in tax structures for investment banks and private equity deals. Raphaële holds a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research, and an LL.M from New York University School of Law.
Communications and Creative Partners
