Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, at 6:30pm Eastern Time, I’ll be participating in the third in a series of Acumen Debates hosted by EY. The Debates are a fun format that create a livelier conversation than your typical panel. And the good news is that we’re livestreaming the event, so even if you can make it you can tune in on Facebook.

The debate topic is: Do impact investors need to compromise between financial and social returns?

I’ll be arguing, along with Debra Schwartz from the MacArthur Foundation, that there are many cases where compromises can and should be made. We will be debating against Greg Shell from Bain Double Impact and Hilary Irby from Morgan Stanley’s Investing with Impact Initiative, in a conversation moderated by EY’s Jon Shepard.

Here’s the link to watch on Facebook Live.

While I won’t tip my hand and share the points I plan to make tomorrow night, I do have one hope for the conversation, and for our sector as a whole. I hope we can all agree that, irrespective of the financial returns they can generate, if someone is going to be a truly great impact investor, they have to be passionate about impact.

This may sound like a truism, so let me explain by way of example. I read Fred Wilson’s blog every day, and the posts that make me smile the most are the ones in which he geeks out about technology: when he switches from iOS back to Android, or talks about the various wireless speakers he’s fidgeting with at home, or wades into conversations about Bitcoin and the blockchain. It’s apparent to anyone reading that Fred loves technology. It fascinates him. It’s what he’s passionate about. And I’m sure he can’t help but learn about the latest gadgets, all the time.

In the same vein, to be an “impact” investor (and putting aside if anyone still likes that term, which no one seems to these days), I would hope we’d be passionate about impact. And by “impact” I mean actual, tangible changes in people’s lives or in the environment. This passion would manifest, like Fred’s, in a deep, insatiable curiosity about what makes people’s lives better, and what leverage points might exist to make large-scale, lasting change. It would come across as profound attention being paid to improvements that happen in the real world, with all other indicators – including financial returns, which very well could be high – simply seen as means to an end.

These days, when I take part in and listen to conversations in our sector, I hear the most passion about funds, about returns, about fund structures, and about capital flows. It’s striking how comfortable we are talking about money. I’m looking forward to more days in which the passion we express, the deep curiosity we manifest, the conversations we can’t stop having, start and end with people, with communities, with what constrains and enables their lives.