The Week in impact investing: Impermanence

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

• Roundup: An invitation to act
• Podcast: BII’s Leslie Maasdorp and ImpactAlpha’s David Bank and Amy Cortese
• Agent of Impact: Edgar Montenegro of Amanpuri
• Pop Impact: Investigative journalism at Climate Week

🗣 Invitation to act. A hot cup of coffee cools. Autumn leaves change color. A chalk drawing on the sidewalk washes away. “All compounded things are subject to vanish,” exhorted the Buddha in one of his final teachings. Such impermanence, the idea that all things are in a constant state of change, was the backdrop of the Assemble100 confab in Denver this week. To meet the moment, Gary Community Ventures convened foundations and family offices to wrestle with the idea of spending down their endowments rather than preserving them – a provocative departure from philanthropy’s preservationist tradition. Constant change can be cause for despair. In Denver, it was an invitation to act. “You’re willing to reimagine what philanthropy could be instead of defending what it’s always been,” Gary Community’s Santhosh Ramdoss told those gathered. “You’re the outliers, and outliers are the ones who change systems.”

Impermanence reinforces agency. At Neighborhood Economics in Chicago, Agents of Impact demonstrated that American cities are training grounds for shared prosperity, not military occupation. In Baltimore, the nonprofit Innovation Works is proving its model for localized, bottom-up economic development using patient, flexible capital for the city’s social entrepreneurs, as Roodgally Senatus reported. In Providence, RI, Atlanta and Washington, DC, New Majority Capital is expanding “entrepreneurship through acquisition” as an inclusive wealth creation strategy, as Roodgally highlighted. He also reported how LPs like Liberty Mutual Investments are following GPs like Enable Ventures in finding untapped talent and a growing market in disability tech, in DC, New York and other cities.

For Agents of Impact, impermanence is a mindset, and a practice. The Biden administration’s climate incentives proved short-lived, but climate investors are moving forward without them, as Amy Cortese and Erik Stein reported from Climate Week NYC. Trellis Climate and GreenieRe are putting a twist on a commonly used insurance product to free up liquidity for climate startups looking to scale, as Amy detailed. In a guest post, Working Capital Fund’s Evan Okun shows how some startups are deploying AI, not for short-form video slop, but to embed labor rights and resilience into supply chains. British International Investment’s Leslie Maasdorp is pushing the development finance institution to go where DFIs sometimes fear to tread in order to make climate investing in emerging markets safe for institutional LPs, he told David Bank on ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast. Faced with impermanence, “strive with earnestness,” the Buddha concluded his teaching. This too shall pass. – Dennis Price

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editors David Bank and Amy Cortese. Up this week: At Neighborhood Economics in Chicago, entrepreneurship through acquisition and other promising ideas are filling out our “Playbook for shared prosperity.” ExxonMobil’s new proxy voting program for retail investors aims to change the balance of power in corporate governance. And, how reinsurer GreenieRe is reinventing surety bonds to help climate startups scale.

• Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Leslie Maasdorp and BII are making climate investing in emerging markets safe for institutional LPs. Leslie Maasdorp, who took over as CEO of British International Investment last year, is pushing the UK development finance institution to mobilize institutional LPs around climate and development finance in emerging markets. There’s been a lot of introspection by the development finance system,” he tells David Bank on the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast. “We want to see to what extent we can be more catalytic.” Read on and listen in.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Edgar Montenegro, Amapuri: Building livelihoods in sustainable agroforestry in Colombia. Edgar Montenegro started Bogotá-based açaí company Amapuri so that rural Colombian families wouldn’t face the income insecurity and fear his family experienced when he was a child. When Montenegro was 12, his father, a timber worker in Colombia’s Putumayo rainforest, could no longer make ends meet harvesting trees. The family had to borrow money to meet their needs between harvests, but they didn’t earn enough each season to cover their costs. “There was nothing left. We were back to zero,” Montenegro tells ImpactAlpha. His parents, like thousands of other families, resorted to working in the coca industry. With Amapuri, Montenegro is demonstrating that farming families in Putumayo have other lucrative options to earn a living. 

Açaí, native to Putumayo, is in high demand as a global superfood. To encourage farmers into açaí production, Amapuri offers something they rarely get from other crop varieties: long-term income security. The company provides seeds and technical assistance to get them started, and signs a 15-year purchase contact with each farmer. The company works with more than 2,000 farmer families who cultivate a total of 3,200 acres of acaí trees, most of which will hit peak production over the next three years. Amapuri recently raised $500,000 from Fondo de Reciprocidad and Beneficial Returns to expand its farmer network. Building a scalable social enterprise in food and agriculture is always a challenge, and even more so in a conflict zone. Montenegro is hopeful. “From a region that once produced drug kingpins, we are now producing entrepreneurs,” he says. “Peace is built with opportunities.”

• Keep reading, “Edgar Montenegro, Amapuri: Building livelihoods in sustainable agroforestry in Colombia,” by Erik Stein.

Weekend Watching: Pop Impact

Investigative journalism at the Climate Film Festival. Politicians, investors, CEOs, scientists and activists are mainstays at Climate Week NYC. This year, storytellers were also out in force. Creatives could be found at the third annual Climate Film Festival. ImpactAlpha contributor Dmitriy Ioselevich made the scene and shared his take on two documentaries that showcase the power of investigative journalism. He scores the films on a scale of one to five for entertainment and impact. 

• Trade Secret: Extinction as a business opportunity. This documentary from director Abraham Joffe and executive producer Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”) goes behind the scenes to investigate the thriving trade in polar bear fur – despite the animals’ precarious existence in a warming world. The film’s protagonists, journalist Adam Cruise, conservationist Iris Ho, and photographer Ole J Liodden, are determined to get to the bottom of how a market still exists for polar bear furs. The unlikely culprit: World Wildlife Fund, which they say has supported the hunting of polar bears even as it raised billions of dollars from businesses and individuals looking to protect threatened species. The film, which won an audience choice award, “will undoubtedly lead to a firestorm of publicity that will force WWF, its corporate partners, and member countries of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, to respond,” writes Dmitriy. “The film also offers an ode to the importance of investigative journalism and holding the powerful to account.” Entertainment: 4, Impact: 5. Read the whole review. 

• Black Snow: The real costs of cheap energy. Kiselyovsk, located about 310 miles north of Russia’s southern border, is nicknamed the “town with black snow,” due to the nine open-pit coal mines that surround it. Director Alina Simone trains her lens on Natalia Zubkova, affectionately dubbed the “Erin Brockovich of Russia” for her efforts to call attention to the health problems caused by the pits for the town’s 90,000 residents and hold the government accountable. The film hit close to home for Dmitriy, who was born about 250 miles from the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “I was one of the lucky ones, emigrating to the United States a few years later with my family,” he writes. Many people affected by such disasters, including the people of Kiselyovsk, aren’t so lucky, he says. The film, which won the festival’s best documentary feature award, “asks hard questions about the real cost of ‘cheap energy’ and the dire sacrifices made by mining communities for its sake,” says Simone. Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: TBD. Check out the review. 

The Week’s 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.Catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

LeapFrog Investments added Prudential Financial’s Charles Lowrey to its global leadership council… Social Finance welcomed Yiping Li, former fellow at the US Department of Justice, as a data analytics senior associate… Acre Impact Capital added Sue Barrett, formerly with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to its advisory board… Alicia DeLia of DeLia Impact Advisors joined Impact Charitable’s board of directors.

Apollo Global Management named Jaycee Pribulsky, former chief sustainability officer at Nike, as partner and chief sustainability officer… ROC USA added Jennifer Day, previously with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, as director of operations and grant administration. Amanda Bennet, previously with Grounded Solutions Network, joined as director of organizational planning… LISC Fund Management added Brian Maddox, previously with KeyBank, as vice president of fund development.

Katie Naeve, previously with Tetra Tech, became director of the Impact-Linked Finance Collaborative… Claire Wathen stepped down as managing director of global alliances at the Skoll Foundation… Sérgio Pimenta, formerly with the International Finance Corp., joined Africa50 to lead its Infrastructure Acceleration Fund… Lindsey White joined Prime Coalition as assistant director of partnerships. Hannah Rome joins as senior manager of people and culture… Align Impact welcomed Robert Cain, previously with Girls on the Run NYC, as a client services associate.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Oct. 3, 2025