The Brief

The Week in impact investing: We first

ImpactAlpha · September 19, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

🎥Motor city. ImpactAlpha’s award-winning mini-documentary, “Equity and ownership: Napoleon Wallace and the Reconstruction of Black wealth,” will screen at Detroit’s Better Cities Film Festival, Sunday, Sept. 21, at 5pm ET.  Reserve your tickets.

🌆Climate Week NYC. We have just a few spots left for our curated discussion with Heading for Change and UBS on unlocking inclusive climate capital amid shifting global priorities, Thursday, Sept. 25. Request an invitation.

In today’s Brief: 

  • Roundup: Collective action
  • Overheard at Singapore’s Impact Week
  • Local and replicable solutions at Neighborhood Economics
  • Pop Impact: The Sustainability Emmy Awards

🗣 All together now. “If each of us does our part for the wider community – the ‘we’ – then the individual – the ‘me’ – will thrive and flourish,” Desmond Lee, Singapore’s Minister for Education, said to kick off Singapore’s Impact Week 2025, where ImpactAlpha’s Dennis Price and Jessica Pothering engaged the families and funds powering the region’s growing impact ecosystem. Dennis interviewed the GIIN’s Amit Bouri, who sees impact investors stepping up in “this leadership moment.” Amid Typhoon Tapah, Jessica also made the scene in Hong Kong at AVPN’s global conference, and shared the stories of eight Asian family offices that are shifting their businesses and their investment portfolios to impact. An impact mindset “is now our family’s most valuable asset,” said Gunung Capital’s Kelvin Fu.

That other parts of the world are moving forward as the US slides back was clear from Amy Cortese’s distillation of Generation Investment Management’s annual “Sustainability Trends Report,” a wealth of slides and data that chart the bumpy road to the sustainable future. In Europe especially, limited partners still consider ESG to be material, so early-stage fund managers do too, Oliver Nixon and Johannes Lenhard of Reframe Venture (formerly VentureESG) reported from London, where they convened venture capitalists and their backers around responsible investing. Across Europe, North America and Australia, more than two dozen wealthy families are using “multicapital” strategies – social, cultural and symbolic, as well as financial – to deepen their impact, wrote Kirsten Andersen of the Switzerland-based Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth. 

Agents of Impact are used to working together to overcome market failures and mobilize capital. “Community ownership faces a collective action problem,” acknowledged Grounded Solutions Network’s Devin Culbertson and Integrated Purpose’s Devin Murphy, who offer approaches and examples to usher a new era of community wealth generation. ImpactAlpha’s Erik Stein spoke with Rubicon Carbon’s Tom Montag to dissect problems and possible solutions in the sputtering voluntary carbon markets. And I reported on foundation leaders in the US who organized a collective response to escalating attacks from Trump-administration officials and allies. “We reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech and the freedom to give,” the association Unite in Advance wrote in an open letter that has attracted more than 150 signatories. “Organizations should not be attacked for carrying out their missions or expressing their values in support of the communities they serve.” – David Bank

The Week’s Podcast

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Foundation leaders “unite in advance” of expected attacks in a supercharged political environment; how the carbon credit platform Rubicon Carbon is using diversification and ratings to strengthen the market for voluntary carbon credits; and the bumpy road to the sustainable future as charted by Generation Investment Management’s annual Sustainability Trends Report. Bonus: a preview of next week’s Agents of Impact interview with Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale.

The Week’s Events

Indigenous designers take the spotlight. This week, New York City, the ancestral home of the Lenape people, hosted the city’s first Indigenous New York Fashion Week. The runway shows and after parties, organized by Reciprocal Arts NYC, a Native-owned community and exhibition space, were among the hardest tickets to score at Fashion Week. Read our INYFW fashion week wrap.

Overheard at Impact Week in Singapore. The rallying cry from Impact Week Singapore : less talk, more doing – together. The confab of more than 3,000 people from finance, business, science and academia was assembled in less than six months. It was the brainchild of Singapore maritime and investment magnate Chavalit Frederick Tsao, who is determined to evolve Tsao Pao Chee Group, his family business, into a “well-being” business. Tsao was fed up with the chatter on the Western-centric conference circuit. “Everybody is talking only. There’s no doing,” Tsao told ImpactAlpha in an interview in his bustling Springleaf Tower office. “I said, ‘Okay, since nobody is doing, why not me?’ So let’s do it.”

Coming up at Neighborhood Economics in Chicago. Markets evolve. Innovations that initially seem like rocket science become replicable templates. For those repairing local economies and making them fairer places where people in every neighborhood can thrive, such templates can speed progress and unlock capital. In Chicago from Sept. 29-Oct.1, Neighborhood Economics is again gathering the practitioners driving financial innovations that bring economic power to neighborhoods where people are often dealt the short straw of economic development. (ImpactAlpha is a media partner; use the code IA495 for $200 off, expires Sept. 22.)

  • Think locally. A workbook created by Chicago Trend’s Lyneir Richardson and the Brookings Institution, can help neighbors “buy back the block” to keep commercial real estate in low-asset neighborhoods from being displaced. The model is being implemented in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and other cities. Contributing editor Napoleon Wallace and ImpactAlpha’s David Bank will highlight our “Playbook for shared prosperity” (add your strategy to the playbook with this form). And Neighborhood Economics will launch the Community Finance Academy to spread innovative and locally tailored financial solutions to economically disadvantaged communities.
  • Keep reading, “Local and replicable solutions for shared prosperity and economic justice,” by Neighborhood Economics’ Kevin Jones. 

Weekend Watching: Pop Impact

The Sustainability Emmys. Last Sunday’s Emmy Awards, honoring the best in TV programming and streaming, featured several of our favorite Pop Impact productions. Among the contenders were Severance (27 nominations, 6 wins), Black Mirror (10 nominations) and Paradise (4 nominations). To fill the glaring gap in Emmy awards for impact and sustainability, ImpactAlpha contributor Dmitriy Ioselevich stepped up to name Pop Impact’s own slate of winners in eight categories: And the winners are…

  • Most impactful clip: David Attenborough in “Ocean.” It’s a telling sign when a clip goes viral before the full feature film is even available for streaming. Attenborough’s “Ocean” is a masterpiece of documentary storytelling, but the clip that most people will remember is the never-before-seen footage of bottom-trawling – a net with a metal chain dragging across the ocean floor, destroying everything in its path. “The idea of bulldozing a rainforest causes outrage, yet we do the same underwater every day,” Attenborough narrates. “Surely you would argue it must be illegal.”
  • Biggest climate hero: Ban Ki-Moon in “The Quiet Diplomat.” There is perhaps no more thankless job than Secretary General of the United Nations. Ban Ki-Moon nonetheless oversaw some of the most important developments in the history of multilateralism during his 2007-2016 tenure. He created UN Women, the first UN agency dedicated to women’s rights; championed LGBTQ rights at a time when the subject was taboo for many countries; and spearheaded the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ban’s biggest achievement may be his shepherding of the 2015 Paris Agreement and convincing some of the biggest polluters to ratify the pact.
  • Best Critique of Capitalism: Common Side Effects. There are so many great contenders for this award, from “Severance“ (the struggle of workers against an overbearing employer) and “Silo” (ditto), to “Andor” (the struggle of the poor and disenfranchised against an authoritarian empire) and “Black Mirror” (the perverse ways in which technology can shape our lives). But there can only be one winner: the animated “Common Side Effects“, which has titan of industry Jonas Blackstein explain why actual health is antithetical to the healthcare industry’s business model. “Cure everybody, and you’re out of business,” the Swiss financier says. “Economies will collapse.”
  • Read on for the rest of Dmitriy’s winners and runners up. 

The Week’s Deals, Talent and Jobs

💼See and share more than a dozen new impact jobs posted this week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub and view hundreds of more jobs in impact investing and sustainable finance. Have a job listing to post? Submit it here. Catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield is stepping away from the brand after 47 years, his co-founder Ben Cohen shared in a post on X. Greenfield cited a fallout with Unilever, the ice cream company’s owner, over its social activism… Blueprint Capital Advisors appointed Erica Madrid, former head of DEI and client engagement at Morgan Stanley, to lead the firm’s Power100 initiative… Bracewell added three new partners to the firm’s energy finance and infrastructure division: Jeeseon Ahn, Jared Joyce-Schleimer and Jason Lewis. 

The California Community Foundation welcomed Sax Agency’s Tamara Keller, Malcolm Johnson of Langdon Park Capital and Primestor Development’s Arturo Sneider… Aligned Climate Capital added Erin Grenier, previously with North American Renewables, as construction project manager… Madison Freeman, former senior advisor to John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, joined Heron Power as senior policy and business development manager.

Giant Ventures added Zenetta Burger, previously with Anthos Capital, as partner… Sierra Club appointed Loren Blackford as executive director, replacing Ben Jealous… The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank appointed Andy Nakahata as executive director and CEO. He replaces Scott Wu, who has led IBank since 2019… Congruent Ventures added Divyansh Saksena, previously with Iconiq, as an analyst, and Kate Lee, previously with Galvanize Climate Solutions, as a platform associate… Energy Impact Partners welcomed Kaushal Makadia, previously with Liberty Mutual Insurance, as a portfolio analyst.

Andres Baehr, managing partner of Savia Ventures, was appointed head of climate tech of the Mexican Association of PE & VC Funds… Blume Equity tapped Jenny Keisu, former and CEO of Summa Equity, as an advisor… Joseph Rowntree Foundation welcomed Erinch Sahan, previously with Doughnut Economics Action Lab, as associate director of investments… Align Impact added Efrata Kirose, previously with Working Within, as a client service associate.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Sept. 19, 2025