This is a fictional roleplay based on the experiences of Daryn Dodson, the managing director of Illumen Capital, an investment firm that aims to leverage its power as an investor to deliver capital combined with evidence-based bias-reduction training and coaching for its portfolio of fund managers. Through Illumen Capital, Dodson worked to train portfolio fund managers to discern and eliminate implicit and explicit biases, thereby helping them to increase their returns by optimizing investment opportunities, hiring, and board selection. His approach included the "Illumen Impact Experience" in which Dodson linked slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration to the asset management industry to help people understand how assets became so imbalanced and created the huge disparities that contribute to suboptimal returns in investment portfolios. Dodson supported these historic linkages with current research, including a study conducted with Stanford SPARQ's Jennifer Eberhardt that revealed, counterintuitively, that the better Black, male fund managers performed, the greater the levels of bias they faced. Dodson is just wrapping up a pitch to the endowment of a university that was long ago saved from financial collapse by the sale of 272 slaves. The university had attempted several things to make amends for this, but Dodson thought they could do a lot more - and one was through management of the endowment. Should he, as a Black asset manager, bring up this history? If he brings it up, what tone should he use? What outcome would he be hoping for? How would bringing it up help, or hinder, his achieving the outcome? This is the elephant in the room. One student plays Dodson and the other plays the university investment officer in this roleplay that broaches on numerous issues related to race, justice, and the possibility of reparation.

During his second year as a high school teacher in South Carolina, Reid Saaris noticed that a highly academically capable student was not registered for advanced classes. The student was African American and Saaris observed that most African-American students at the school were enrolled in lower-level courses. As Saaris walked down the hallway, he could see "on one side a 12th grade English class playing an all-class game of hangman and half of the kids asleep with their teacher saying, 'Who wants to guess the next letter?' And on the other side, kids debating and discussing interesting literature and ideas about citizenship." He and the student went to the school office where Saaris switched the aspiring young man into advanced-level courses. The following year, Saaris was promoted to running the school's advanced programs. Inspired, he led an initiative to "find all the missing students" from the Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, meeting with every 10th grader at the school. The initiative had a stunning impact. Within one year, the school's AP and IB programs had doubled in size, with the number of African-American students in advanced classes tripling. At the same time, the success rate for all students on the AP and IB exams increased by 20 percent. This case recounts the subsequent path that Saaris followed to take his efforts to a national level. He established Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) with the aim of closing the access gap to advanced courses for minority and low-income students. The case details the organization's outreach and application process as well as the successes that EOS achieved and the challenges that it faced. It culminates with the announcement of the Lead Higher Initiative for which EOS would dramatically increase the number of schools with which it partnered over the next three years.

This case assesses Actis' optimal exit route for Umeme, a Ugandan electricity distribution company in their investment portfolio. Actis, a private equity firm that invests exclusively in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, had spent seven years substantially transforming Umeme. In their search for a suitable exit, the partners at Actis weighed their ability to leave Umeme well positioned to continue the operational and financial improvements that Actis had made during their investment period, while also ensuring a robust return for Actis' investors. By exploring the various routes available to Actis, this case demonstrates the factors at play in the creation of social and economic gains through private equity investment.

The case looks at how The Abraaj Group has emerged as a global private equity firm and came to define its focus and strategy in this process. While the local knowledge and relationships is considered to be critical for value creation in the private equity industry, firms often seek to expand geographically as their funds and resources increase. The case explores how a global firm like Abraaj can balance the need to focus on local networks and knowledge with a global stretch. It tries to answer this question by focusing on how Abraaj creates value, how the firm differentiates itself from local and global competitors, and how local-global dynamics manifests itself through the different phases of the firm's business.