Minneapolis’s century-old Coliseum office building was nearly destroyed by arson in 2020, as street protests erupted following the police killing of George Floyd. Now, restored under the direction of Black real estate developers, the Coliseum is a revitalized hub for small businesses owned by people of color. Among the renovations were energy efficiency upgrades made possible through the Cut Carbon Note program devised by investment group Calvert Impact, with support from law firm Morgan Lewis. Employing a novel securitization structure, the program uses $50 million in capital assets to finance sustainability upgrades in commercial buildings like the Coliseum to reduce carbon emissions. The Cut Carbon Note is unique among similar products in being available to retail investors.
This pioneering work by legal teams at Calvert Impact and Morgan Lewis earned them the 2024 Grunin Prize for Law and Social Entrepreneurship. Established by NYU Law’s Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship, the award recognizes lawyers who have been instrumental in launching innovative business ventures that advance sustainability, foster human development, and address social needs with measurable impact. Since 2018, the prize has been conferred at the Annual Conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing, organized jointly by the Grunin Center and the Impact Investing Legal Working Group (IILWG), a network of lawyers in the social enterprise field. The winners have garnered regular coverage in Forbes.
“Anything we can do to celebrate the role of lawyers in social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainable development [is worth pursuing],” says Professor of Clinical Law Deborah Burand, who is faculty director of the Grunin Center. “The economist Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market. I sometimes feel like the lawyers working in impact investing and social entrepreneurship are the invisible pen of that invisible hand. It’s like people aren’t even noticing that we’re in the room. Yet there’s a lot of knowledge capital and value that these lawyers are bringing to their transactions. With the Grunin Prize, we are bringing attention to the work of these creative lawyers and celebrating their work.”
The Grunin Prize, the first award of its kind ever bestowed on members of the legal profession, draws applicants from around the world. Past honorees have included the legal team at Social Finance, a national impact finance and advisory nonprofit group, for creating and launching an outcomes-based project that supports unemployed and under-employed veterans seeking work. The Grunin Prize has also recognized the Global Alliance for Vaccines Initiatives, a public-private partnership, for its efforts in ensuring equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Those lawyers stepped up…[They] made sure that when the vaccines went into a country, it wasn’t just the elites that received them,” Burand says.
Both the scope and the depth of the Grunin Prize’s winning entries are in keeping with the vision that Jay Grunin ’67 and his late wife, Linda Kalmanowitz Grunin ’67—who met at NYU School of Law—set out when they first approached NYU Law with the idea and the funding for launching the Center. “I knew [social entrepreneurship] was an area of the law that had great potential. But I did not appreciate how much support there was, and how many lawyers were involved, especially internationally, until we had our first conference [in 2017],” says Grunin, who is the Center’s advisory board chairman. “I’ve been extremely gratified how this Center, still the first of its kind at a law school, has grown over the years.”
“What we were seeing is that in this field, the lawyers are not just drafting documents,” he says. “They’re right there at inception, helping to create and turn an idea into reality.”
Dean Troy McKenzie, an ardent supporter of the Grunin Center, sees the Grunin Prize as a pillar of the NYU community as a whole. “The Grunin Center is vibrant and exceptional,” he said. “It is uniquely positioned to showcase the important role that lawyers can have in helping to promote innovation and social change. That is champions those efforts here at NYU serves as both a clarion call and a beacon of light for us all during these critically important times.”
By administering the Grunin Prize, staff of the Grunin Center gain insights about the evolution of the fields of social entrepreneurship and impact investing as a whole, and the changing role of lawyers in supporting that evolution. “Since we began offering the Grunin Prize, we’re seeing deeper fields of legal talent and a deeper level of legal engagement in projects. The nominated lawyers are acting as much more than scribes,” Burand says. “What we’re seeing more and more of is how multiple teams of lawyers, often from multiple institutions, are coming together to put a transaction or project together.”
As the field has expanded, the Grunin Center has increased its prize offerings. In 2023, the center began awarding a Sustained Commitment Prize to recognize lawyers whose lifelong work has been dedicated to the practice of social entrepreneurship. The first prize honored NYU’s Professor of Law Emerita Helen Scott, former co-director of the Grunin Center, who helped to oversee the launch of the Grunin Center. The most recent honoree was Mary Rose Brusewitz, member in charge of Clark Hill’s New York office and a founding member of ILLWG, who has had a long career advising clients on how to structure and document impact investments on a global scale while also supervising clinical law students at NYU Law as they represent impact investors and social entrepreneurs.
Now the Grunin Center is working on introducing a third prize that will acknowledge the work of legal scholars who are researching and writing about legal issues in social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainable development. This prize, which is expected to launch in 2026, will celebrate field-advancing legal scholarship.
The Center has also streamlined the application process for the Grunin Prize and has expanded the timetable to allow for a two-year window for any submitted project. Those changes, Burand hopes, will further boost the number of prize applicants, including attracting more from the ranks of NYU Law alumni.
Ultimately, the center’s aim for the Grunin Prize is to amplify the unsung efforts of transactional lawyers to advance a social good. “Law has many tools by which it can make a difference. Yet sometimes people think that the only way lawyers can change the world for the better is to bring lawsuits and make use of litigation skills,” says Burand. “But we’re looking at a different kind of lawyer with a very different set of legal skills and areas of legal expertise. We’re looking at the policymakers, the deal lawyers, and the in-house counsel. And we’re saying, ‘How are you using your legal skills to improve the world?’”
That sentiment is shared by Grunin. “Too many people view the legal profession in a negative way. Unfortunately, they see [lawyers] in the press and wonder, ‘What do we need them for?’” he says. “But I think social entrepreneurship, impact investing and sustainability represents the legal profession at its finest. I want lawyers to be looked at as problem solvers—not problem creators, but problem solvers. And I think that the Grunin Prize helps us to achieve that goal.”
Posted January 8, 2025. To apply or make a nomination for the 2025 Grunin Prize, visit the Grunin Center website.