In this episode, Sarah sits down with Rachel Mavrothalisitis, founder and principal at Reach & Root Partners, to explore how impact investing in affordable housing is creating stability, preventing homelessness, and shaping healthier, more resilient communities.
About Our Guest
Rachel Mavrothalisitis is the Founder and Principal of Reach & Root Partners, an advisory firm that helps real estate organizations design, implement, and evaluate social and environmental impact strategies. Her firm supports clients across the financial return spectrum with services that include investment due diligence, stakeholder engagement, employee training, and impact measurement and reporting.
Before founding Reach & Root Partners, Rachel served as Director of Impact at Turner Impact Capital, where she developed and refined the firm’s suite of key performance indicators, oversaw resident service program evaluation, and helped establish Turner’s leadership in impact-focused real estate investing. She also served as Director of Housing Advocacy at Safe Place for Youth, a nonprofit that empowers young people experiencing homelessness by providing lasting, community-driven solutions to address inequity.
Rachel holds an MBA and a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and a BA in Public Health and Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also an advisor to the Multifamily Impact Council, helping shape frameworks that promote transparency and accountability in impact investing.
Through her work, Rachel is committed to bridging the gap between capital allocators and communities by ensuring that investments in housing and real estate create measurable social value, improve resident well-being, and build healthier, more resilient communities.
Transcript
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 0:00
We know that behind unforeseen medical expenses — which is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. — housing costs are the biggest financial stressors that families face. And often it is the economic pressures of supporting a household that can drive parents to make choices which may end up being harmful to their children. And so I see the availability of quality affordable housing stock as this upstream intervention that increases health and stability and can help prevent homelessness, trauma, and crisis. It’s one of the biggest motivators for why I’m doing the work that I’m doing now and why I joined the Turner team over six years ago.
Sarah Johnson 0:38
Welcome to the Pathway Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Johnson, and thank you for joining us for this episode. Pathway to Tomorrow is a non-profit with initiatives in housing, environmental conservation, and water security. In this podcast series, we engage with leaders working on solving some of the world’s most challenging problems by exploring innovative solutions being implemented by leading NGOs, non-profits, think tanks, companies, and institutions focused on issues like homelessness, environmental conservation, climate change, and water security.
Sarah Johnson 1:11
Our guest today is Rachel Mavrothalisitis, founder and principal at Reach & Root Partners, an advisory firm that supports real estate organizations across the financial return spectrum design, implement, and evaluate their social and environmental impact strategies, with a focus on investment due diligence, stakeholder engagement, employee training, and impact measurement and reporting. Rachel previously served as the Director of Impact at Turner Impact Capital, where she led strategies surrounding impact measurement and management, helping design and fine-tune Turner’s suite of key performance indicators that track social and environmental impacts, and overseeing the design and evaluation of Turner’s on-site resident services.
Sarah Johnson 1:50
Rachel has also served as Director of Housing Advocacy at Safe Place for Youth, a non-profit that empowers young people experiencing homelessness to thrive by providing lasting, community-driven solutions that address racial and social inequity. She holds a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Social Work from USC, and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health and Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. Rachel, it’s such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 2:16
Thanks, Sarah. It’s really great to be here.
Sarah Johnson 2:18
To start us off, Rachel, can you tell us more about your current role at Reach & Root Partners and what led you to start your own firm?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 2:24
Sure, I’d be happy to. I started Reach and Root Partners for a host of personal and professional reasons — probably as most people do when they’re launching their own initiative. First, there was a bit of the sense of personal challenge. I’ve always loved building things, and I think there was a part of me that wanted to see if I could take on my own endeavor. Second, and more pressing at the time that I was making the decision, was that I had reached a moment in my family life where I was really craving more flexibility and time to soak up what I know to be a very fleeting chapter in people’s lives when their children are young and while their parents are still with them and in their lives.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 2:57
And then lastly, and what I was seeing really as the market opportunity, was more and more of a focus on real estate — specifically, multifamily housing — as a viable impact investing platform, with more operators wanting to position themselves as impact funds without always having a sense of what the true blue impact investors are looking for. And so I wanted to leverage the experience and exposure I had gained into impact investing best practice and investor priority with my first-hand experiences as a housing program operator to help close that gap between capital allocator and investee.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 3:31
What that means for me today is that my role with clients really is to act as a translator. First, to tease out what within their strategy is most important to their key stakeholders, whether that’s their leadership or their capital sources or their end users or their partners, and to make sure that there’s a lot of internal clarity around their theory of change and the critical data points, which will be necessary to elucidate or prove out that thesis.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 3:56
It’s one thing to claim that this is what we’re here to do, but it’s another thing entirely to prove it and back it up with data. And then the next is to put those performance indicators into terms that resonate and align with leading industry framework — things like the UN SDGs or the social determinants of health, for example — and build that internal vocabulary to describe and understand their work while laying the foundation for deeper layers of impact management and reporting that may come.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 4:20
And then the last piece of this upfront, sort of onboarding, work with clients is to serve somewhat as corporate stress reduction and help offload some of that internal pressure associated with building an impact strategy, freeing up the team to stay focused on what they do best, which is often serving residents or operating real estate.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 4:38
Knowing where to start can be really overwhelming, and so when we break down this first sort of initiation phase in this way, and provide the tools and language to guide and measure their work, it can really ease some of that burden and help get us to the implementation phase with a lot less heartache.
Sarah Johnson 4:53
Thank you so much for sharing that, Rachel — it’s much needed work. I think a lot of organizations need today. I’m really happy that you’re providing that service. So for my next question, Rachel, I’d like to discuss your prior role to founding Reach and Root. You served as the Director of Impact at Turner Impact Capital. Can you tell us more about this role and what attracted you to the field of impact investing?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 5:15
Sure, sure. And maybe I’ll start with what drew me to impact investing because it’s what ultimately led me to Turner, and both feel like these pivotal, sort of life-altering moments, when I look back on them now.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 5:27
When I went to graduate school, I pursued my MBA and my Master of Social Work because I wanted to bring business acumen into the non-profit sector. Specifically, I wanted to develop supportive housing programs for young parents who’d grown up in foster care. I was really seeking both a clinical and a leadership training to serve a very specific population. And at the time, what I saw to be really the only way to do so: traditional, nonprofit service model funded by grants or donations — no matter how inefficient that might be — because it was really all I’d been exposed to up until that point.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 5:58
While I was attending USC, the Marshall School of Business offered two programs that ended up defining my academic experience. One was the Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab headed by Adlai Wertman, and the other was an impact investing course taught by Fran Seegull, who now runs the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance and is a really powerful voice in the impact investing ecosystem. Her class was this lightning bolt moment for me that I think many people in impact investing have had at some point along their career; which is to say that just because it’s always been done this way — social good living in this entirely, mostly entirely separate sphere from profit-generating ventures — does not mean that it has to continue being done this way.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 6:39
In fact, investing with an eye toward social and environmental risk and opportunity is actually just really good investing and can drive sustainable impact outcomes — often upstream of many of the crises that can unfold before someone becomes a user of nonprofit or social services. It was in that course that I learned about Turner Impact Capital and connected with my predecessor who ended up passing on mining when she was departing from her role.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 7:04
And, ultimately, the five years that I spent in-house at Turner was the best possible training I could have had into how a for-profit impact-focused real estate fund functions. There really isn’t a more seasoned or successful team out there than the leadership team at Turner Impact Capital. And Bobby Turner has been a driving force in establishing U.S. impact investing in so many ways, and I just feel really incredibly lucky that I was able to learn from that group of people in such a deep way.
Sarah Johnson 7:31
Thank you so much for sharing that, Rachel. It’s always so interesting to learn more about the paths that we take to end up where we are, and you’ve had a really interesting path to where you are today. So for my next question, Rachel, as you know, affordable housing developers are facing growing constraints on their ability to develop projects that serve our most vulnerable or lowest income community members. And this is due to limited availability of public funding, and limited availability of low income housing tax credits relative to the number of new housing units that we need to be built. And impact investing has emerged as a promising solution to this challenge. Could you speak to how you’ve seen impact investors leverage private capital to drive access to affordable housing?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 8:08
Sure, yeah. You know, it would be great to say that there was enough public funds to go around and to cover it all. And unfortunately, we just know that that’s not a reality. If we think about what affordable housing offers, as strictly an investment opportunity, it is in many ways the ideal impact investment for a few reasons.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 8:26
One, it provides stable, steady cash flows and is best matched by patient long-term capital, which often impact investors are willing to be. Second, it offers collinearity, meaning that what is good for residents and for reducing environmental harm is often what is most accretive to the financial bottom line, either in driving resident retention — and therefore property income — or in decreasing operating expense. And so those things move hand in hand.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 8:55
And then it is always in high demand. We know that there’s, unfortunately, always going to be a need for affordable housing. And it is often in higher demand during market downturns, meaning that it offers diversification and de-risking to a mixed portfolio of investments. And so impact investors are using private debt and private equity to support both affordable housing development and affordable housing preservation, sometimes in concert with public funds and sometimes entirely independently.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 9:23
This can be structured in the form of a private REIT, offering fixed returns in terms, in exchange for exposure to a pool of affordable housing portfolios or via direct investment or ownership structure, such as a joint venture into a specific asset. It may also be in the form of a closed or open-ended equity fund that may require longer term investment, but offer higher returns accordingly.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 9:47
And so it really just depends on the capital provider, the market, the availability of public funding in that market and the structure that the operator is putting forth as to how best private funds can be leveraged and put to use.
Sarah Johnson 9:59
Thank you for sharing that, Rachel. And can I ask what emerging trends you’re seeing in impact investing through your consulting work at Reach & Root with various firms?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 10:08
Sure. So one of the things that I’ve been most excited about — across impact investing as a whole — is that we’re seeing more and more industry-specific collaboration and consolidation come to the fore around minimum bars of performance for that industry and expected best practice. For example, in the multifamily industry, Bob Simpson and the Multifamily Impact Council have been facilitating and leading this work and building a collective voice for multifamily investors, operators, and service providers to define what is realistic and meaningful impact targets for that industry.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 10:41
This helps bring transparency and consistency to the field, which ultimately drives more capital and combats greenwashing and sort of criticism calls that there is greenwashing taking place and therefore further impact for residents and for end-users of those properties and of those housing units.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 11:00
In today’s political climate, this is really, really important because it builds rigor and defense around the fiduciary duty being upheld through this type of investing in the face of attempts at discrediting. And I think that we’ve seen this proliferation of impact investing in ESG as sort of these “hot button,” or really widely talked about, opportunities. But the industry — the deep industry-specific work — is where we’re seeing some of that clarity and nuance begin to be built around what that really means for those operators.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 11:30
I’ve recently come on board to support the Multifamily Impact Council as it continues to evolve its framework and promote framework adoption. And I find that those types of groups can be incredibly powerful, particularly when they function to continually raise the bar and expectation of performance for their own members as the MIC intends to do.
Sarah Johnson 11:49
Absolutely. I think that’s such important work. So you’ve also served, Rachel, as the Director of Housing Advocacy at Safe Place for Youth, an organization that’s working to empower homeless youth in Los Angeles. Can you tell us more about this role and how it’s informed the work that you do today?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 12:05
Sure, yeah! I mean, it’s honestly hard to distill down all the ways that that work, and the work that I did prior — with young children entering foster care — changed me because I think they’ve become so fundamental to how I see the world and think about human nature and human potential in sort of the most pragmatic cause and effect sense.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 12:26
The most common reasons that young people coming into Safe Place for Youth would cite for leaving their family home or ending up without housing was either because of some kind of familial abuse or trauma experienced in the home, or because they believed that they were a financial burden on their family. And they wanted to strike that on their own to make things easier on their caregivers or younger siblings.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 12:47
We know that behind unforeseen medical expenses — which is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. — housing costs are the biggest financial stressors that families face. And often it is the economic pressures of supporting a household that can drive parents to make choices which may end up being harmful to their children. And so I see the availability of quality affordable housing stock as this upstream intervention that increases health and stability and can help prevent homelessness, trauma, and crisis.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 13:19
It’s one of the biggest motivators for why I’m doing the work that I’m doing now and why I joined the Turner team when I did over six years ago. But then on the more personal side and sort of less logical side of things, the young people we worked with at Safe for Youth were some of the wisest, most loving, most resourceful people I’ve ever met and would turn some people’s stereotypes about homelessness immediately on their head.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 13:45
We’re all really eager, I think, to build distance between ourselves and others, usually as some form of self-defense mechanisms. But at the end of the day, people are people are people, in my view. And I don’t think there really is any human who isn’t touched by the power of food or art and music or a patient ear, for example. And Allison Hurst, who founded Safe Place for Youth, did this incredible job of demonstrating day in and day out that our members were valued and were valuable and were people just in the way that we were and everyone else was.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 14:18
So I try to bring those young people in the lessons I learned there to mind as often as possible, particularly when I’m letting myself get overly caught up in my to-do list or daily stressors or whatever it may be. There are a lot of paths into impact investing, but I think if you’re lucky enough for your path to include some time spent working with and serving people that you might not have otherwise met, you will be much better for it in the long run.
Sarah Johnson 14:45
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that, Rachel. So many great insights in that answer. So for my next question, I want to ask about some of these frameworks you’ve alluded to in your prior answer to my question. So there are an increasing number of frameworks centering the impact investing and real estate multifamily space. Which do you think are the most relevant right now?
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 15:05
Sure. I mean, I’ve already mentioned one, which is the Multifamily Impact Framework overseen by the Multifamily Impact Council. It’s really a great resource for providing a straightforward, well-rounded starting point for the multifamily industry to focus efforts on those highest priority items such as affordability and economic mobility. And it helps act as a link to the other big picture frameworks out there, like the UNSDGs, IRIS, and others.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 15:31
I find the Multifamily Impact Framework to be one of the best places to start if you’re in the multifamily industry and getting started on your external reporting journey. But there are lots of others as well that can be really useful on the property level and from an environmental perspective. Certificates like LEED and BREEAM and the IRM Certified Sustainable Property Program are all great to demonstrate specific on-site initiatives at varying degrees of intensity and depth.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 15:56
On the social side, I also really like FITWELL, which focuses on the health impact of buildings. And CORS, which is really the only certification I’ve seen out there that is specifically used to demonstrate depth and quality within resident services. And while this might sound like a lot at first, and it certainly can feel like a lot at first, these tools are doing a better and better job all the time of incorporating and leveraging one another where appropriate and building cohesion across reporting efforts, if not quite efficiency yet. For example, GREZ, which is one of the most rigorous tools that I’ve mentioned, folds in all of the frameworks that I’ve already described.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 16:32
And you’re really seeing some of that overlap begin to be generated by these processes within themselves. And really, if we think about what these efforts are intended to do, build broader benchmarking, help us get clarity on what we’re doing today and where we want to go. If we think about the scale and need of the climate crisis facing us and of the level of investment required to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, all these efforts help combat greenwashing and impact washing and help build us in our ability to meet those really audacious big goals that are required at this stage of the game.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 17:08
If we look to the regulatory landscape and how environmental and ESG legislation has evolved over the past few years, some of the earlier market-based frameworks, such as the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosure, were really the basis for how those rules were designed. And the SEC Climate Disclosure Regulation that was recently announced is exactly an example of that. And so I see participation in these efforts not only as providing helpful operating guidance and really helping you identify best practice — or being used for capital-raising tools or kind of communication tools with investors — but I also see them as this opportunity to shape how our industry evolves and where potential legislation may end up.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 17:52
Once legislation is passed, it’s not really open so much for comment or for input, but if you are participating in these market-based frameworks along the way, you do have voice and you do have influence. So I think it’s a really great way to get involved early and help shape our industry as it continues to grow and develop while there still is that space and opportunity to do so.
Sarah Johnson 18:17
Thank you so much for sharing that, Rachel, and again for joining us today. It’s been so great to learn more about your current work at Reach & Root and the ways in which you’re supporting organizations and implementing and evaluating their social and environmental impact strategies. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in and don’t forget to subscribe to the Pathway Podcast to get alerts on new episodes featuring thought leaders working in housing, environmental conservation, climate change, and water security.
Rachel Mavrothalisitis 18:43
Thanks, Sarah.