Catherine H. Clark is Faculty Director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) and Adjunct Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is globally recognized as a leading architect of the fields of impact investing and social entrepreneurship, with more than three decades of experience shaping how capital, enterprise, and policy can be aligned to drive measurable social and environmental impact at scale.
Clark’s work focuses on building the field-level infrastructure—standards, measurement systems, tools, research, and education platforms—that enable investors, entrepreneurs, and institutions to practice impact with greater rigor and effectiveness. She was a co-creator of the original standards and measurement architecture that underpin B Corporation certification worldwide—helping catalyze the global B Corporation movement—and co-authored early versions of the B Impact Assessment, establishing a foundational approach to assessing corporate social and environmental performance now informing a system used by more than 600,000 companies globally.
At Duke, Clark founded and leads the CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing, named by the World Economic Forum as one of the world’s top three programs in impact investing education. Through CASE and CASE i3, she has led open-access and executive education initiatives that have reached more than 100,000 learners worldwide, including the Impact Measurement & Management for the SDGs Coursera course, commissioned by UNDP, and the Raising Impact Investment Capital Coursera Specialization, supported by the EQT Foundation. She also co-leads the Strengthening Impact Management program in collaboration with Impact Frontiers, supporting investors globally to strengthen impact management practice, and mentors hundreds of MBA students annually through courses, student-run funds, consulting practicums, and fellowships.
Clark is co-author of The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism and Collaborative Capitalism and the Rise of Impact Investing (Wiley). She served as co–principal investigator on the $12.1M USAID-funded Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke and has advised governments, foundations, development finance institutions, and private investors globally on impact management and market development.
Clark is a recipient of the Schwab Foundation’s Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year award and currently serves in advisory and governance roles with organizations including Bain Capital Double Impact, Self-Help Ventures Fund and Self-Help Climate Capital, SJF Institute, Upstart Co-Lab, and Cerity Partners.
Prior to Duke, Clark founded Columbia Business School’s Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship (RISE) and taught Columbia’s first course in social entrepreneurship. Previously she was an investor at Flatiron Partners, a professional philanthropist at the Markle Foundation, and a policy convener at the Aspen Institute. She holds an MBA with honors from Columbia Business School and a BA with highest distinction from the University of Virginia.