Meet Rachel Mavrothalasitis of Reach&Root Partners, LLC

Thank you so much for this opportunity to share. It’s an honor to be included in this series.

As I look back, the idea of being rooted in community- of becoming your highest self through the nourishment of a place and its people- has always made sense to me. Early in my career, my understanding of community was very much focused on the family and friends of your youth. I believed that childhood was the most crucial time in a person’s life. At 22, working for Rady Children’s Hospital at the Polinsky Children’s Center, the Fredrick Douglass quote “it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” was a mantra. As I have aged, I have come to see just how much we continue to grow, heal, and learn through adulthood, and the power community holds in every chapter of our lives.

My time at Polinsky Center, an emergency shelter for children entering foster care, was a pivotal experience. I had studied Psychology and Public Health in undergraduate believing I would focus on child and maternal health issues at the population level. How do we ensure, through programs and policies, that each child has an opportunity to thrive and pursue their calling? Polinsky opened my eyes to the myriad ways familial relationships can falter and how often stressors outside the family dictate how family members, in particular parents, interact with their children. Most of the time, those stressors are economic and layered with racial and social-political historical context, though not always. Within the extensive economic challenges families were facing, the cost of housing was often at the top.

I decided to pursue a Master of Social Work and a Master of Business Administration, moving to LA to do so, because I believed it would allow me to develop supportive housing programs for young parents who had grown up in the foster care system- teenagers and young adults now raising their own children. This was a very narrow reason to pursue two of the broadest graduate degrees out there, but I am grateful that I did. Not only did the course work fill distinct academic curiosities that would not have been fulfilled without both programs, the communities within each school also helped me clarify and refine my world view. This training also exposed me to the world of impact investing, which was completely unknown to me at that time.

At its core, impact investing is the notion that capitalism can be harnessed to affect social good. We are not limited to the tools of the non-profit sector or government. If a business can generate a financial return through the delivery of needed goods and services (or the avoidance of harmful practices), then the amount of money available for those products should increase, meeting more needs along the way. This concept has been around for centuries and can be found all over the world in practices like microlending and values-driven financial decision-making among religious organizations, but the term “impact investing” was officially coined in the late 2000’s. The industry exploded since. 2015 turned out to be the perfect year to take a course called “Investing in Impact Ventures” that once again shifted the direction of my life.

Studying impact investing expanded my thinking on ways to create thriving communities, but at that time I still believed I belonged in the traditional service setting. Upon graduating, I joined a nonprofit organization supporting young people experiencing homelessness. I set out to elevate the unique needs of young adults in a system geared towards older adults and to build housing options for parenting youth. We partnered with a church and on Valentine’s Day of 2018 “Roots to Grow” opened with three young families no longer living in shelters and cars, but co-living in a beautifully appointed Westwood home. I was their 24-hour support person. Those three families had successes and setbacks, and we, I, learned so much about the opportunities and limitations of co-living. But once again my belief that community is the key was reinforced. Safe Place for Youth, my employer, went on to open a second, larger Roots to Grow home and continued expanding their housing programs and services.

That spring I received a call from an impact investing firm based in LA regarding their work on affordable housing preservation nationwide. I had told myself I was ready to begin thinking about a professional move, wanting to shift from crisis response to crisis prevention, and that I would take a year or so to transition. It wasn’t more than a month between admitting to myself a desire for change and when I received that call. The decision to leave Safe Place for Youth was difficult as we had built so much together, so quickly. I knew that roles within impact firms were limited and believed that those focused on housing access were more limited still, and so I made the leap.

The move from non-profit, direct service work to private equity real estate investment was a form of culture shock. Most eye opening was the scale. Now it wasn’t about the three families in one house or even hundreds of young people accessing services. It was about tens of thousands of people across the country renting apartments in buildings we owned and using onsite programs we created. At first my role was to analyze data on each community – where it was located, how it was configured, what residents said via surveys – to shape our program offerings and to evaluate how well those programs worked. Did they positively impact residents’ lives? Did they enhance financial performance by increasing the likelihood that a renter would continue living there, or tell their friends and family to live there too? Over time, I took on environmental data analysis to decrease water and energy use through property modifications and resident education. How these social and environmental outcomes were communicated to investors and the public was a critical component of the role.

I held that role for five years, through a Covid migration back to San Diego in 2020 motivated by mom’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and the birth of my first child in 2022. (Our second just joined us this past October!) And while my work there felt big and important, I found the pull of community calling. I missed being embedded where I lived and seeing my work up close. Living back in San Diego also meant growing my adult community here and that “rooting” here would feed the “soil” that raised me, and my mother as well. “The biggest small town in the country,” San Diego to me represents health, neighborliness, and a general even-keeled approach that I admire and hope to embody.

So, in June of 2023, I launched Reach&Root Partners, a consulting practice focused on social and environmental data tracking and reporting. My goal was to use my time in non-profit services and the for-profit setting to help small organizations establish practices that enabled them to receive capital whether that was grant dollars or private investment. I wanted to support organizations as they built cultures focused on positive impact, both through their community-facing work and for their teams. While I was (and am) open to working with organizations focused on health, education, and financial wellbeing, my hope was that I could continue to specialize in affordable housing recognizing the vast need across the country and the power that having a safe and stable place to live holds. And that specialization is what transpired. It is the desire to build community and support others as they do the same, that infuses all work that I take on today.

Today, there are three primary entities, outside of my family, who get my love and attention. Reach&Root Partners fortuitously and seamlessly led me to the Multifamily Impact Council, a national membership organization of investors, developers, property managers, and service providers focused on delivering impactful affordable housing across the U.S. My role at MIC is to support members and those implementing our framework and to harness the wisdom of the collective to enhance business practices across the industry. This is work at scale; however, it is the process of establishing cohesion through shared standards, reporting expectations, and language that builds closeness among members. The affordable rental housing industry is complicated, fraught with challenges and misconceptions, and so there is real value in professional peers sharing experiences with one another. This includes knowledge about local municipalities, due diligence practices, insurance carriers, program providers, innovative technologies, etc. MIC members tirelessly combat our country’s housing crises. If I do my job well, they can do their jobs better.

The second entity is Rooted Ventures SD, a community of individual impact investors in and around San Diego. This network sprouted from an Invest for Better circle that I led with a friend in the spring of 2024. We wanted to deepen our own understanding of values-driven personal investing and connect with like-minded peers. What we learned is that there is latent investment capacity, deep care for local outcomes, and incredible entrepreneurs seeking support, all here in San Diego. Throughout 2025, Rooted Ventures hosted pitch calls and in-person events, shared investment education, and gathered data on how members in the network were aligning their money with their values. That data found that together this group deployed over $1.5 million towards social and environmental impact in just 18 months, with 40% of that going to groups we had introduced to the network. In 2026, we will host quarterly in-person get togethers and feature more local founders and businesses. We see this work picking up where the San Diego Impact Investors Network left off in 2020 and are exploring the structures that work best for today’s members. Regardless of structure, the objective is to continue supporting folks to develop relationships that inspire action. Anyone interested in learning more can email rootedventures.sd@gmail.com.

Lastly, it brings me immense joy to be on the board of Voices of our City Choir, an arts and healing organization serving people impacted by homelessness. This nontraditional approach to addressing homelessness emphasizes that the confidence and sense of acceptance that comes from performing in a group spills over into other domains, enhancing a person’s ability to tackle the housing barriers they are facing. Shifts in the funding landscape have placed immense burden on small nonprofits and yet Voices has diligently continued. Of the work I have participated in since moving back to San Diego, Voices most exemplifies the power of community and human capacity for change at every point of life. It so reminds me of how we approached services at Safe Place for Youth. I would want every reader in San Diego to experience one of Voices’ mediums, be it a live performance, podcast, original song, or play. It will move you, no doubt.

In our family, the fear of Alzheimer’s disease had always loomed. My grandmother had it, and my sweet, silly, brilliant mom lived with recurring worry that it would come for her too. But Anisha’s sudden death and the complete unpredictability of Covid in conjunction with my mom’s diagnosis, hit me like a ton of bricks. There are the fears that come true and the surprises you didn’t even know to be afraid of. This reality can be paralyzing or it can be motivating, and for me it has shifted how I approach life. It prompted my return to San Diego, the place where I feel most connected, and to become more assertive in shaping my career. It has made me so grateful for each moment I get to spend with my kids and with my parents, recognizing that nothing is promised. We must live life while we have it.

I have often been in the right place at the right time. Truth be told, the fact I was 30 years old when I first personally encountered the true fragility of life is a gift in itself. So many face so much more and earlier on. Now, closer to 40 than 30, and as I continue growing, I hope to remain equal parts open to what life brings, committed to my communities, and grounded in my values of meaningful work, close relationships, and self-realization. I feel incredibly lucky professionally and in life.

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