The Brief

The Brief: Exercising shareholder power to check the rise of ‘management primacy’

ImpactAlpha · December 8, 2025

Credit: Tamoa

Greetings Agents of Impact!

☎️ Agents of Impact Call: Tackling advisor roadblocks. Clients want to do more with their money. Advisors want to do more with their clients. Financial advisors who engage with clients about their values and offer credible impact strategies can deepen their relationships and prepare for the Great Wealth Transfer. Join CapShift’s Liz Sessler, ImpactPHL’s Cory Donovan, Westfuller’s Randall Strickland and Glenmede’s Julia Fish, in conversation with ImpactAlpha’s David Bank, Thursday Dec. 11, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.

Deep dive. Catch up on Sessler’s latest, “Solve three common year-end giving challenges for your clients,” as well as all the “Getting Started” columns on ImpactAlpha’s Advisors’ Corner, produced in partnership with CapShift.

In today’s Brief:

‘Management primacy’ elbows out stakeholders, including shareholders
Finance for Indigenous agriculture in Latin America
Helping childcare operators secure their facilities
A stock market entry point for ‘emerging multicultural wealth builders’

Featured: Policy Corner

Corporations’ new era of ‘management primacy’ undermines shareholders and other stakeholders. Oh, for the good old days of Milton Friedman. The University of Chicago economist is considered the intellectual godfather of the doctrine “shareholder primacy,” which for more than 50 years held that a corporation’s sole social responsibility is to maximize profits for its owners, or shareholders. That drew justified criticism for the pursuit of profits at the demonstrable expense of customers, workers and communities, as well as long-term financial value creation. In response, investors, workers and community leaders not long ago envisioned a shift toward “stakeholder capitalism,” recognizing that a company’s success is inseparable from the health of the social, economic and environmental systems in which it operates. “The current movement toward corporate management primacy goes decidedly in the other direction,” Fran Seegull of the US Impact Investing Alliance argues in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “Instead of stakeholder value, we are seeing C-suites rapidly consolidating and monopolizing power, with waning accountability to shareholders and other stakeholders.”

Governance without guardrails. In the Friedman doctrine, corporate executives at least are agents for the interests of shareholders. In an age of management primacy, executives often work at cross-purposes to workers, communities and the environment, and to shareholders themselves, Seegull says. Examples of the trend include exorbitant CEO pay packages decoupled from genuine, sustainable performance, (looking at you, Elon). Dual-class share structures grant disproportionate voting power to founders and insiders, effectively disenfranchising other investors holding the majority of economic risk. Corporations are attempting to make it harder to file shareholder resolutions at annual meetings and easier to dismiss them. “Most brazenly, we are witnessing the direct punishment of shareholders for exercising their basic rights,” Seegull says, citing ExxonMobil’s suit against its own investors over routine climate-related proposals as “the starkest possible example of a management team claiming absolute, unquestionable authority over shareholders.”
Systemic stewardship. “This moment demands bold investor action,” Seegull says. “It demands that investors use all the tools at their disposal to ensure a healthy, efficient and resilient market.” That means engaging with portfolio companies and policymakers and collaborating on guardrails against systemic risks, including the climate crisis, income inequality, biodiversity loss and antimicrobial resistance “that investors cannot afford to ignore, lest their entire portfolios suffer” (for background see, “Chasing alpha is fine, but long-term returns for universal owners require beta stewardship”). “The choice is between a system built on accountability, transparency and long-term stability, and one that is built on unchecked corporate power and greed at the expense of communities, the environment and indeed the economic system itself,” Seegull writes. “Now is our chance to stem this tide. We must do so before investor freedoms, and indeed free markets, are further eroded.”
Keep reading, “Corporations’ new era of ‘management primacy’ undermines shareholders and other stakeholders,” by Fran Seegull on ImpactAlpha. Keep up with policy issues in Washington and around the US at Policy Corner, sponsored by the US Impact Investing Alliance.

Dealflow: Returns on Inclusion

Beneficial Returns makes three sustainable forestry and agriculture investments in Latin America. The impact lender disbursed a total of $129,000 to social enterprises in Guatemala, Colombia and Mexico through its Indigenous-focused Reciprocity Fund, which provides flexible, low-cost working capital. CICAP in Guatemala received $40,000 to support Indigenous spice farmers in the remote, northern part of the country. The cooperative sources pepper, musk, chili, pumpkin seeds and cardamom from more than 3,500 farmer-members. The loan will give the company upfront cash to fulfill demand for spice processing, including drying and roasting, for its regional buyers. “The Reciprocity Fund intentionally seeks to make loans in places like this where borrowing options are limited and where modest loans can have outsized impact,” shared Beneficial Returns’ Ted Levinson. In Colombia, a $54,000 loan to Emprocaucho will support more than 360 smallholder rubber farmers with affordable credit and working capital. In Mexico, a $35,000 loan will enable heirloom corn buyer Tamoa to source from about 100 smallholder farmers across 11 states.

Indigenous finance. Beneficial Returns’ Reciprocity Fund is an impact-first investment vehicle. “This work is inherently high risk and low return,” Levinson told ImpactAlpha. “We guarantee that our Reciprocity Fund investors will lose money.” The fund supports agriculture and agroforestry cooperatives, providing unsecured capital at an 8% annual interest rate. Investments are approved by a five-member volunteer credit committee of Indigenous community leaders. “We’ve been exploiting Indigenous people and their lands for too long. It’s time to flip the dynamic and let the rest of the world lose a few bucks as a first and tiny step to correcting 500-plus years of abuse,” said Levinson. “If you want to reverse more than 500 years of Indigenous exploitation and earn a market-rate return, good luck with that, and we’re not interested in hearing from you.”
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Mission Driven Finance adds a $4.5 million line of credit to secure child care facilities. The entrepreneurs who provide quality child care services face ongoing barriers to financing, licensing and property ownership. “The lack of affordable, accessible, quality child care is just a huge gap in the country for families, communities and the workforce,” said David Lynn of Mission Driven Finance, which launched Care Access Real Estate, or CARE, two years ago to acquire, renovate and lease residential and commercial properties to child care providers. “We see a lot of very good providers that can’t expand because of access to real estate.” The fund has deployed $13 million to acquire 23 homes in Nevada, Colorado and California, leasing them to child care business owners, most led by women of color. A $4.5 million line of credit from family office Ceniarth and Social Finance will give CARE access to short-term debt to acquire more properties. MDF has lined up a traditional bank to refinance the loans into long-term, permanent capital once the properties are stabilized.

Childcare slots. CARE has about $10 million in equity capital. The new financing adds to a $5 million line of credit the fund secured from RSF earlier this year. Mission Driven Finance is looking to raise $20 million of equity capital for the strategy next year, with a goal to acquire up to $50 million worth of properties, primarily in low-to-moderate income areas. MDF believes CARE can acquire enough residential and commercial properties to create 1,000 child care spots. “There are not a plethora of investable opportunities in early child care,” said Social Finance’s Kirstin Hill. “The angle of real estate as one of the biggest barriers to affordability for child care business owners, and therefore for the provision of child care, we think is a really smart approach.”
Keep reading.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

ZincFive raised $30 million in Series F financing from Helios Climate Ventures, Climate Investment, Japan Energy Fund, General Ventures and other backers to develop nickel-zinc batteries. (ZincFive)

Canada’s pH7 Technologies secured $26.5 million in a Series B round, backed by BHP, TDK, Rhapsody and Fine Structure Ventures, to extract critical metals from mining and recycled feedstocks. (pH7)

The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund made an investment in Five35 Ventures, an early stage venture fund in South Africa that focuses on women-led startups. (Africa Private Equity News)

Podcast: Ownership Economy

Stackwell seeks to help young investors compound their wealth early (podcast). Trevor Rozier-Byrd cites two life experiences that set him on the path to create Stackwell Capital, a “financial wellness and wealth app” to set young, diverse investors on a path to compounding wealth in the stock market. The first was back in 2005, when he purchased a few shares of Apple stock as a 22-year-old just out of college. The gains on that single purchase later paid for a full year of law school. The second was as an investment banker for the initial public offering for a company led by Bob Johnson, co-founder of BET and founder of The RLJ Companies. “That was the first time I had ever seen an all-Black management team in my career. It’s also the only time I’ve ever seen that,” Rozier-Byrd says on the latest episode of the Agents of Impact podcast. “In that moment, I believed that I could do what they were doing.”

Untapped market. Stackwell’s offerings, a range of low-fee portfolios with different profiles of risks and returns, are not unique. “It’s about the context,” Rozier-Byrd says. That includes partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and community organizations reaching low- to moderate-income customers. Stackwell has partnerships with several NBA and WNBA teams. The stories and educational material on the site depict what Rozier-Byrd calls “multicultural emerging wealth builders.” Alexis Smith, for example, became a Stackwell ambassador as a student and later got her brother Blake to start investing when he went off to college. “I think the most profound thing that happened was that their grandmother started to invest,” Rozier-Byrd said. “This is really about creating an entry point or unlocking access to a market that is highly untapped by both emergent and incumbent financial services firms,” he says.
Wealth builders. Financial assets are often considered the third leg of the ownership stool, along with homeownership and business ownership. Of the three, publicly listed stocks require the least capital to get into the market and show the quickest return. “We know that over the last 100-plus years, the financial markets have been the most powerful wealth building tool that we have seen in our country,” Rozier-Byrd says. He tells young investors just getting into the stock market not to worry too much about the current high prices of stocks, driven by an AI investment boom that may turn out to be a bubble. “Get in, allow the markets to do what they do, and understand that there will be moments of extreme highs and extreme lows,” he says. “We have sufficient data to suggest that this is a really sustainable way, over the long term, to truly build wealth.”
Read on and listen in.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

The Inter-American Development Bank Group appoints Graham Macmillan, former head of the Visa Foundation, as general manager of IDB Lab, effective Jan. 5… Natalie Shriber is supporting Sea Forward Fund as a senior investment consultant… Citi promotes Randy Alcala to social finance head for Latin America and the Caribbean… Dalus Capital’s Laetitia Marcadé becomes a board member of La French Tech Mexico.

Upwardly Global appoints Gregory Haile, previously with Strategos Group, as CEO, starting Jan. 5… Denkyem Co-op is looking for a director of lending… ILX Management has an opening for a sustainability officer… Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth seeks a senior analyst for operations and stakeholder engagement and a director of editorial and stakeholder engagement… BFA Global is on the hunt for a senior director of global advisory and partnerships.