Adam Wolfensohn

Adam Wolfensohn is the Managing Partner of Encourage Capital, a New York–based investment firm that seeks to make profitable investments that solve critical social and environmental problems such as ecosystem decline, climate change, and the lack of financial services for the world's poor. Encourage Capital was formed in 2015 through the merger of Wolfensohn Fund Management with Scott Kelley and Ricardo Bayon's EKO Asset Management Partners (a firm specializing in environmental markets like fisheries and forestry). Before the merger, Wolfensohn served as a managing director at Wolfensohn Fund Management — the private-equity firm associated with his father, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn — where he managed the family office's cleantech and environmental-markets strategies.

Wolfensohn's path to investing was unusual. Before 2002, he founded and ran Red Ramona, an award-winning music and sound-design studio in New York City, composing music for films, television commercials, and theater productions. From 2002 to 2003 he worked with Conservation International to help create a market for carbon credits from avoided-deforestation ("REDD") projects, and from 2003 to 2006 he produced the climate-change documentary *Everything's Cool*, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.

He holds a B.A. from Princeton University and a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (now the Yale School of the Environment). Beyond his investing work, Wolfensohn is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as a trustee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Yad Hanadiv (the Rothschild family foundation in Israel), Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the new-music organization Bang on a Can.

• Invests to generate market-rate (or near-market-rate) financial returns while solving specific, measurable environmental and social problems — an "impact-first but disciplined-returns" approach rather than concessionary philanthropy.
• Core sectors: clean/renewable energy finance, climate and cleantech, environmental markets, sustainable fisheries and seafood, water, sustainable infrastructure, and financial inclusion.
• Works with major asset owners (foundations, DFIs, family offices) to structure funds and vehicles around a defined "blueprint" thesis — e.g., Encourage's research (funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Rockefeller Foundation) laid out six blueprints for financing sustainable fisheries at market rates.
• On the clean-energy thesis, Wolfensohn has framed the opportunity in terms of unmet financing needs: "With increasing energy demand, high electricity prices and decreasing costs of solar, MSMEs can find rooftop solar to be an attractive, low-carbon solution for their electricity needs, but financing is still a key barrier."
• As an angel/seed investor, he is drawn to founders and companies addressing climate, energy, and natural-resource challenges — consistent with his decades-long focus on carbon markets, cleantech, and environmental finance.