Welcome to Cause & Capital.

My goal: Inform your corporate enterprise or personal giving strategies.

Every month in Cause & Capital, I break down a brand’s corporate giving campaign or one of the world’s leading philanthropists, uncovering what worked, why it worked, and how you can apply those insights to your own cause investments, whether you’re giving as a brand or an individual.

Let’s get into it.

Most people who build billion-dollar investment firms pick names that sound institutional. Something with “capital” or “partners” or a geographic feature that implies stability.

Sherrese Clarke Soares named hers after a community in Kingston, Jamaica, built one year after independence, where her father and his seven siblings grew up listening to ska records and watching the horizon from the edge of Kingston Harbour.

That choice tells you something about how she thinks about the relationship between wealth and where it comes from.

Clarke Soares grew up in Rosedale, Queens, the daughter of Jamaican parents who came to the United States in the early 1970s. Her mother was a resident administrator at St. John’s Hospital. Her father, Desmond Clarke, drove a taxi while attending community college, then built a real estate brokerage and invested in property.

Clarke Soares is a classically trained pianist and was a child actor. She said she learned to structure deals at the kitchen table while her father walked families through buying their first homes. One line she uses about him: he knew how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

On Sundays, the family played Bob Marley, Gregory Isaacs, and Machel Montano at full volume in the house. She spent summers and holidays at her grandmother’s home in Harbour View, Kingston. Her grandmother had come to the United States and scrubbed floors to sponsor her children’s passage. Her grandfather pushed an ice cart in Jamaica to send his daughter to college in Europe and Canada.

That background shows up in the way she allocates capital today. The firm, the foundation, and the board seats are all connected to a single family story. That kind of coherence is rare among people managing assets at this scale.

Clarke Soares is building one of the largest privately held portfolios of entertainment and media intellectual property in the world, and she is running a parallel philanthropic operation that maps directly onto the culture she invests in.

The investment thesis, as HarbourView describes it: music and entertainment IP generates durable, recurring royalty income the firm considers largely uncorrelated to equity markets.

When a song gets streamed, placed in a film trailer, or sampled in a new recording, the catalog owner collects. HarbourView set out to own as many of those catalogs as possible, managed through a data analytics and audience intelligence platform.

The philanthropic thesis tracks the investment thesis.

The HarbourView Foundation, a 501(c)(3) she established in honor of the Kingston neighborhood where the Clarke siblings came of age, supports the performing arts, women’s rights, and issues facing immigrant, Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities. The firm invests in culture. The foundation invests in the communities that produce it.

Clarke Soares earned a B.S. in Finance from Georgetown University, then joined Morgan Stanley as an analyst in equity capital markets. She left to attend Harvard Business School for her MBA in the mid-2000s, then returned to Morgan Stanley, where she spent close to 15 years in several roles.

During that time, she managed the origination and execution of over $85 billion in loan commitments and served as Deputy Chair of the Capital Commitment Committee. She eventually led the Entertainment, Media, and Sports Structured Solutions Platform, where she built a cross-asset strategy focused on capital solutions for intellectual property. One of the products she developed at Morgan Stanley became the seed for her first company.

In 2019, she founded Tempo Music, a platform for acquiring premium music rights, backed by Providence Equity Partners with a strategic partnership with Warner Music Group. She delivered an above-average IRR for the investment class, but she did not own a controlling interest in Tempo, so after roughly a year and a half, she resigned.

In October 2021, she launched HarbourView Equity Partners with $1 billion in backing from Apollo Global Management. That level of institutional backing for a first-time fund manager was unusual, and it drew attention at the time as one of the largest such commitments made to a Black woman-led firm in private equity.

As of mid-2026, HarbourView has amassed approximately $3.88 billion in regulatory assets under management.

The portfolio includes more than 70 music catalogs encompassing over 41,000 songs across master recordings and publishing income streams. Artists represented include Quincy Jones, T-Pain, Kelly Clarkson, Christine McVie (Fleetwood Mac), Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo, Wiz Khalifa, Nelly, Brad Paisley, Lady A, Luis Fonsi, Kane Brown, George Benson, James Fauntleroy, and Noel Zancanella.

In March 2026, HarbourView acquired select music and non-music assets from the Estate of Quincy Jones, including his recorded music and publishing rights, his stakes in Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad, his composition “Soul Bossa Nova,” and his participation in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Quincy Jones III said the family chose HarbourView because of Clarke Soares’s vision, cultural pride, and mission alignment.

Beyond music, HarbourView has expanded into film and TV production, backing companies including MACRO, Mucho Mas Media, and Lion Forge Entertainment. It's also financing slates with Fifth Season and Will Smith's Westbrook Studios, including an upcoming Queen Latifah biopic.

In June 2025, HarbourView closed on $500 million in additional debt financing from KKR through a private securitization backed by its music portfolio. A previous $500 million KKR facility had closed in March 2024.

The HarbourView Foundation supports the performing arts, women’s rights, and communities she comes from.

The firm’s website describes the foundation’s mission through the family story directly: the Clarke siblings, including Desmond, came of age in Harbour View during the 1950s and 60s as ska and reggae music began its journey around the world. The foundation is formed in their honor.

Clarke Soares served as a board member and Treasurer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she also chaired the Finance Committee. She has been a trustee at Carnegie Hall since 2020, where she and her husband Roger Soares have donated $100,000 or more. She spent 11 years on the board of the Council of Urban Professionals. She has also served on the board of Evoqua Water Technologies (NYSE: AQUA) and on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

The classical pianist who grew up in Queens now sits on the board of the hall she would have studied to perform in. That is a personal philanthropy arc you could not manufacture.

HarbourView’s philanthropic work through the foundation is still developing relative to the scale of the investment platform. With nearly $4 billion in AUM, the foundation’s public giving profile is modest by comparison. That gap may narrow as the firm matures, but right now the philanthropy is primarily expressed through board service, the foundation’s grantmaking, and the cultural framing of the firm itself rather than through large public commitments.

Cheers,

​Christine​

PS: Most donors write a check and let the story end there. Clarke Soares built a firm that competes on stewardship, then named the giving after the family that made it possible. If you're thinking about what your own giving is a debt to, not just a gift toward, I'd like to talk. I'm the Chief Development Officer at the American Academy of Pediatrics, reaching 67,000 pediatric clinicians who shape child health nationwide. Reply if a conversation would help your planning.