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Andrew Crosson, Invest Appalachia: Catalytic capital for community impact

February 3, 2023

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The Week’s Impact Briefing

🎧 On this week’s podcast: ImpactAlpha’s David Bank joins host Monique Aiken to share takeaways from this week’s Agents of Impact Call on how investors are working to advance racial justice through the municipal bond market. Plus, the headlines. 

The Week’s Call

Watch the video replay. 

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Andrew Crosson, Invest Appalachia: Catalytic capital for community impact. Andrew Crosson was a decade deep community economic development work in central Appalachia when he got the call three years ago to lead Invest Appalachia, a nonprofit community impact fund, as founding CEO. He understood nonprofits and philanthropy and Appalachia’s challenges. “What I brought was a vision and an understanding of the ways this fund needed to function if it was going to benefit the region,” says Crosson. “I didn’t know a lot about finance.” Invest Appalachia is taking a catalytic and community-based approach to advance economic inclusion, health equity, climate resilience, and place-based impact in a region that has suffered decades of disinvestment and extraction. The fund closed $19 million of a targeted $40 million raise, and has built an additional $2.7 million catalytic capital pool for provide loan-guarantees, technical assistance and grants to crowd in investors. 

The Week’s Dealflow

Deal spotlight: Protecting individuals and businesses from data and identity theft. Cell phones and digitization have helped billions of individuals, micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses improve their livelihoods. They’ve also introduced new risks, particularly around personal data and privacy. Omidyar Network’s India group this week backed PrivaSapien, a Bangalore-based maker of software that helps companies conduct privacy risk assessments, anonymize user data, flag concerns, and stay on top of regulatory requirements. “These solutions make it easier for organizations to adopt privacy-preserving techniques and eventually help the end-customer build greater trust in online data-sharing systems,” Omidyar Network India wrote in a post about the deal

The Week’s Talent

Noel Kinder, chief sustainability officer at Nike; Stacy Kauk, head of sustainability at Shopify; Emma Stewart, chief sustainability officer at Netflix; Vanessa Miler-Fels, vice president of climate at Schneider Electric; and Nate Gorence, chief of staff at Impossible Foods, will join Collaborative’s sustainability board. 

The Week’s Jobs

New York and Washington

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