Place · Recruitment & Training for Capital-Deploying Organizations
Trained, Matched, and Ready
Closing the gap between finance education and finance employment: trained fund associates for capital-deploying organizations, and the organizational readiness that helps them thrive.
The gap
Education and employment are not the same thing
The past decade produced a wave of programs designed to open the doors of venture capital, impact investing, and finance to people historically locked out. They proved the talent exists. But without a direct and structured pathway from training into a paid role, we risk producing a generation of people who are over-educated and under-employed: they know the language of impact investing but cannot access a seat where capital actually moves. Access to a curriculum is not access to a career.
Trains the fund associates
A full solidarity-economy curriculum that moves graduates from curriculum into career, paired with the Restorative Finance Academy for organizational capacity-building.
A trained associate alone is not enough. A fellow cannot carry the weight of institutional buy-in alone, which is why placement and organizational readiness work together.
How it works
From identified candidate to embedded associate
Select a step to see what happens. The current pilot places associates April 2027 through April 2028.
The onboarding difference
The step most placements skip
Even highly trained talent and well-run funds can struggle when expectations are left unsaid. The onboarding is a deliberate intervention: a structured, facilitated session where the incoming associate and the fund manager surface working styles, define the scope of the role, establish feedback rhythms, and discuss growth milestones before the first day of the placement year.
Fund-embedded practice
The associate contributes to real investment activity: due diligence, portfolio support, deal sourcing, underwriting, specific to the fund’s thesis.
Peer & cohort exchange
Associates across the cohort connect for case study sessions, peer reflection, and group learning, building the professional networks practitioners from non-traditional backgrounds rarely inherit.
Ongoing job coaching
Dedicated coaches help associates reflect on growth, navigate workplace dynamics, and map a career trajectory, cultivating long-term professional agency and retention.
What each party gets
A career created, not a certificate awarded
A paid career
A paid, full-time placement, not an internship, with salary and healthcare. An entry into impact investing that doesn’t require family wealth, connections, or the ability to work unpaid.
Talent that fits
A curriculum-trained, thesis-matched associate, recruited, prepared, and onboarded, plus an aligned organization ready to receive them.
Measurable impact
Field-building impact: a career placed, a fund and its team strengthened, and proof that education and employment can be connected by design.
A replicable on-ramp
A credentialed pathway into impact investing that the field has needed and never had, now proven at pilot scale.
Investment
What it costs to place a trained associate
Your investment funds two things at once: a trained, paid fund associate inside a justice-aligned fund for a full year, and, recommended for a first placement, the organizational readiness training that helps the whole team move in the same direction.
| Associate compensation: salary and healthcare, April 2027 to April 2028 | $90,000–$120,000 |
| VP Capital Activation Fellowship didactic curriculum & training | Included |
| Fund-specific practical training & investment memo workshops | Included |
| Structured pre-placement onboarding facilitation | Included |
| Quarterly mentorship, job coaching & accountability support | Included |
| Subtotal: fund associate placement | $90,000–$120,000 |
| Recommended for first placement: Organizational Readiness Training (Restorative Finance Academy). See the details | $15,000–$30,000 |
| Total per fund (placement + readiness training) | $105,000–$150,000 |
The 2026–2028 pilot places five associates across five employer funds, for a total associate placement investment of $450K–$600K.
Organizational readiness training for employers
A new hire can’t carry the weight of institutional buy-in alone
A new fund associate arrives ready to work in solidarity economy frameworks, underwriting fundamentals, and restorative finance models. But if the board approving grants is screening deals through a status-quo lens, or volunteers aren’t familiar with the language of integrated capital, the associate will spend their placement year selling ideas upward instead of deploying them forward. The Venture Partners Restorative Finance Academy closes the gap by training your entire organization (staff, board, and volunteers) in the same frameworks, models, and ways of thinking.
Organizational identity & inner work
- ●Organizational audit: how your fund's current roles, processes, and decision-making structures reflect or contradict your stated values
- ●Your relationship to capital and how it shapes your practice as a leader
- ●The trauma of money: 8 facets of identity and how individual histories with wealth and scarcity show up inside organizations
- ●Change archetypes: where each team member fits in the ecosystem of systemic change, and how to build a team that moves together
Economic frameworks & underwriting
- ●Economies throughout history, from Indigenous models through post-capitalist frameworks
- ●Macroeconomic Theory 101: capitalism, its assumptions, and what comes after
- ●Grant, debt, and equity underwriting: sourcing, screening, due diligence, with full transparency on where biases enter each process
- ●How underwriting criteria encode assumptions about risk, creditworthiness, and return, and what changes when those assumptions are interrogated through a justice lens
Solidarity economy & taking action
- ●Solidarity economy in practice: cooperatives, CLTs, PRECs, community loan funds, shifting-power examples
- ●Trust-based philanthropy, decentralized finance, and revenue-based financing
- ●Two Loops Model: top-down vs. bottom-up change, and how to build organizational momentum for capital redeployment across your full team
Choose your option
Full RFA curriculum across all 5 sections: asynchronous video modules and companion workbooks for the people who work directly alongside the new associate. Includes a shared organizational reflection guide and facilitated integration sessions.
Pair it with a placement
Add a trained, paid fund associate and see the combined investment per fund.
Placement plus readiness training totals $105K–$150K per fund. See how recruitment & training works.
Explore the full pathway