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Heading for Change puts together all the insights gained through Suzanne’s investment career into practice on a larger scale. Our legacy portfolio is dedicated to catalytic investments that will help build the investment vehicles, businesses, and institutions the world needs to battle the climate crisis and build a more just and gender equitable world. Suzanne’s magic was bringing not just financial capital to investments, but building the ecosystem around investors and entrepreneurs to catalyze the right combination of contacts, connections, and resources necessary to support innovation
A pioneer and respected thought leader in the gender-smart investing field, Suzanne Biegel dedicated her life and career to making finance more inclusive, impactful, and effective.
As co-founder of GenderSmart (now 2X Global), Suzanne played an instrumental role in connecting gender-smart investors across the capital spectrum into a cohesive field, as well as producing vital thought leadership and case studies on the intersection of gender and climate, JEDI, and the care economy.
Through her consultancy Catalyst At Large, she worked with BII, UBS, IDB Invest, Wharton Social Impact Initiative (now Wharton ESG initiative), the US DFC, Tara Health Foundation, Linked Foundation, Intentional Endowments Network, and many others, influencing hundreds of funds and institutional investors, and billions of dollars of capital to move in a way that is more "gender-smart.”
Both climate and gender were at the heart of Suzanne’s portfolio. Through GenderSmart’s gender and climate investment working group in particular, she spearheaded groundbreaking work and research on how these two lenses could be combined to achieve greater impact on both climate mitigation and adaptation and gender equality.
In the summer of 2021, Suzanne was diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer. As she considered the legacy she wanted to leave, Suzanne and her spouse Dani Maskit made the decision to establish a donor-advised fund to make investments and grants that would advance both climate and biodiversity solutions and gender equity. Heading for Change is the fruit of that vision, nurtured carefully by Suzanne until her passing in September 2023.
