ImpactAlpha Open

Attack-proofing impact funds + fighting back with system stewardship

Dennis Price · April 1, 2025

Hi there, Agent of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a preview of top news and views from last week on ImpactAlpha.

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📞 Get PluggedIn, today. Symphonic Capital’s Sydney Thomas and Shruti Shah will join host Sherrell Dorsey to discuss why LP’s still see an opportunity in equitable climate tech. Join the call, today, April 1, at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Subscribe to RSVP.

In this week’s Open:

  • Chintan Panchal’s practical tips for raising an impact fund in a post-DEI world
  • From São Paulo, Gilberto Lima spots Brazil’s impact opportunities
  • Shareholder Commons’ Rick Alexander makes the case for systems stewardship

Let’s dig in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • An impact lawyer’s practical advice for raising a fund in a post-DEI world. As the White House continues to target diversity efforts, Chintan Panchal of impact-focused law firm RPCK Rastegar Panchal LLP shares advice for impact fund managers seeking to navigate the new terrain. Check it out.
    • Tools for moving capital with a racial-equity lens. In a separate post Erika Seth Davies, Jade Huynh and Bert Feuss offer terms and tools for asset owners and managers seeking to deploy capital to advance racial equity. See how.
  • In Brazil, local impact opportunities emerge from global uncertainty. The recent Impacta Mais gathering of more than 1,200 impact delegates surfaced challenges, both global and local, to Brazil’s growing impact economy, as well as creative ideas and opportunities for unlocking private capital, reports ImpactAlpha contributor Gilberto Lima. Learn more.
  • Shareholders can fight back with system stewardship. In a deregulatory world, investors have an increased responsibility to engage in “system stewardship” and oppose company practices that cause portfolio-wide damage and threaten overall investment returns, writes The Shareholders Commons’ Frederick Alexander. Read on.

Agents of Impact

👨‍👩‍👦 Martin Eakes, Self Help: Helping working families survive and thrive (video)

The way Martin Eakes tells it, the first $77 came from a bake sale in New Bern, NC. Churches and other groups soon rushed to make deposits. Eakes and his wife started Self Help to expand civil rights into economic gains for working families. The original credit union now has more than $2 billion in assets; a second unit in California and other states, Self Help Federal Credit Union, has another $2 billion or so. Together, they’ve delivered more than $11 billion in financing to more than 168,000 families. “If anyone had ever told me we would become a finance organization, I would have laughed at them,” Eakes tells ImpactAlpha. “We were a civil rights group. That was our calling.”

🏃🏽‍♀️ On the move

  • David Macdonald joins Allivate Impact Capital from Woodforest National Bank as a managing director for the firm’s employee ownership finance strategy.
  • TruFund Financial Services names OC Isaac, formerly of Locus Bank, as its chief lending officer. It also names Deirdra Cox of Community Sustainability Enterprise and Hilda Abbott of RudHil Companies to its board. 
  • Accion Venture Lab adds Akhil Gupta, a former Dell Foundation program manager, as a South Asia-focused investment officer.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: Proxy Preview

Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: How “system stewardship” is shaping the debate over shareholder resolutions this proxy season; sharing the wealth, via employee ownership, is attracting surprisingly strong support; and a look at ImpactAlpha’s spring “Re:Construction” tour to assemble a playbook for shared prosperity. 

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Local investing cooperatives

ImpactAlpha is delighted to introduce the latest addition to the ImpactAlpha Podcast Network, Community Capital Live. Every two weeks, host Joel Skene and a rotating cast of panelists interview people across the US that are running innovative local impact investing funds. In the two most recent episodes, Joel dove into the mechanics of cooperative real estate funds operating in Minnesota and Vermont.

The Week’s Call

🎥 Employee ownership rides a wave of economic populism – and pragmatism (video)

Momentum for strategies that enable workers to share in the value they help create continues to build, despite a divisive political climate. “Ownership isn’t just about assets. It’s about agency, equity and opportunity,” said Lindsay Zizumbo of Sorenson Impact Foundation, on ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact Call last week. Zizumbo was joined by Lafayette Square Institute’s Jack Moriarty, Essential Workers Fund’s Malini Ramanarayanan Moraghan and other employee ownership practitioners for the discussion.

  • Read the full recap (and watch the video replay).

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • Galvanize Climate Solutions is looking for an investment associate in New York.
  • World Wildlife Foundation is hiring an aquaculture impact investing specialist in Washington DC.
  • MassMutual Catalyst Funds has an opening for an impact investment principal in Boston.

Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

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