Student team named finalists in Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge
Fletcher students are constantly exploring new ways to infuse business and positive social impact. This semester, teams from across Fletcher competed in two impact investing competitions, offering students a chance to apply academic concepts to complex, real-world situations outside the classroom.
Student teams from The Fletcher School participated in the Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge and the Turner MIINT competition. Both competitions focused on investing money with the goal of creating a positive change.
The Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge invites teams of graduate students from around the world to develop and pitch innovative financial solutions to address social and environmental issues. The Fletcher team was named one of the 12 finalists out of 168 teams from 107 schools.
The Turner MIINT competition is a six-month program that allows students to role-play as venture capital investors. Recently, the Fletcher team, with the guidance of Professor Patrick Schena, attended the global semi-finals at the Wharton School, where they presented their analysis to a committee of industry professionals.
A Network to Engage Founders
The Turner MIINT competition allowed us to role-play as an early-stage VC and analyze impact investments. The Fletcher community, the alumni network, and our coursework all played a crucial role in helping us to engage with founders, analyze their businesses, and recommend them for investment.
The stakes were very real. In the end, we recommended not investing in the company. We got to experience what a real venture capitalist experiences when they find a business they like that turns out not to be as promising as they originally thought.
– Agasthya Thalakala, F27 (MIINT)
Returns on Impact Investments
The Turner MIINT Competition is an experiential learning program in which teams from the world's top business schools source an impact-focused start-up to analyze for investment.
Our team was looking for a climate technology company committed to reducing or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. With the help of the Tufts network, we sourced companies through incubators like Greentown Labs and Third Derivative. The Fletcher alumni network also helped us to source and strategize research.
Through this experience, I learned that impact investments can deliver financial returns comparable to traditional investing, though business planning and modeling are just as essential.
– Jack Adgate, F27 (MIINT)
An Impact Thesis on Emissions Reduction
In the MIINT Competition, our project focused on evaluating an early-stage company working on cement decarbonization — an industry that’s extremely carbon-intensive yet critical to global infrastructure. We assessed the company’s technology, scalability, unit economics, and competitive landscape, while also building an impact thesis around emissions reduction and industry adoption.
My experience at Fletcher helped me think across finance, policy, and sustainability. That interdisciplinary perspective allowed us not only to evaluate the business but also to understand how regulation, carbon markets, and capital flows would affect its success. With impact investing, it’s not just about returns — you’re constantly balancing financial viability with real, measurable impact.
This was also one of my first experiences thinking like an investor in a real setting: making decisions under uncertainty, questioning assumptions, and defending an investment thesis. That shift from theory to practice was incredibly valuable.
– Shaurya Kumar, 2027 (MIINT)
A Challenge to Bridge Theory and Practice
The Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge was an opportunity to take a real, large-scale development challenge and translate it into an investable solution. What drew me to participate was the chance to bridge theory and practice. At Fletcher, we spend a lot of time understanding systemic challenges. This was an opportunity to build something tangible in response. It also pushed me to think like an investor and an operator simultaneously, which was particularly exciting.
Fletcher’s interdisciplinary approach was key. It helped us connect development challenges with financial structuring and design a solution that is both practical and scalable.
One of my biggest takeaways was that many development challenges are not due to a lack of capital or demand but due to gaps in how systems are designed. The competition reinforced the importance of solutions that align incentives across stakeholders, borrowers, lenders, and intermediaries. It also highlighted how small structural changes, such as shifting where risk is assessed, can unlock large-scale impact.
– Mannat Dutt, F27 (Kellogg)
Studying Finance, Practicing Pitching
Our proposal was a blended private credit fund that would use India’s Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) to provide collateral-free working capital to women-owned textile micro-enterprises, shifting credit risk from sellers to institutional buyers. From this competition, I learned how to combine hard skills, such as finance, with soft skills, such as pitching an idea to a jury.
– Lara-Luisa Buntz, F26 (Kellogg)
Read more about experiential learning at Fletcher.