Greetings Agents of Impact!
☎️ Next week’s Call: How emerging managers turn community capital into functioning funds. You’ve got an investment thesis, a deal pipeline and some aligned investors. How do you get an impact fund off the ground? From New Markets Tax Credits to subordinated debt to treasury management to impact reporting, Broadstreet Impact Services helps impact fund managers launch and scale. Join Broadstreet’s Mariel Kennedy and Steve Petsos, along with Groundbreak Coalition’s Eric White and Fibers Fund’s Sarah Kelley, in conversation with ImpactAlpha’s David Bank on the next Agents of Impact Call, Wednesday, April 15, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.
In today’s Brief:
- Bridging the gaps in community green lending
- Spotting wildfires with satellites
- Flexible capital for solar and storage
- Lukas Walton: For the environmental movement, it’s time to build
Featured: Deploy!
With small steps and grand plans, community lenders expand access to financing for green infrastructure. It’s a far cry from the $20 billion that green lenders expected to be deploying by now. But a smattering of small investments and grants for green energy retrofits, EV charging and community solar projects are demonstrating that such lending makes economic sense even in the face of a hostile US administration. Indeed, the payback time for many investments has become even shorter with rising prices for oil and natural gas. “We still believe fundamentally that the network of community lenders is the best approach to scaling energy lending at a local level,” Amir Kirkwood of the Justice Climate Fund tells ImpactAlpha. JCF, as it is known, had been awarded $940 million under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to provide technical assistance to local banks and community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, to help them master green lending. That was part of the $20 billion in federal funding for green lending frozen by the Trump administration more than a year ago. Community lenders have scrambled to raise alternative funding from family offices, pension funds and other investors. They have mostly come up short.
- Plan B. Kirkwood is not giving up. Since the beginning of this year, JCF has attracted $5 million to support Native lending and a $720,000 grant from Michigan’s Department of Environment to work with CDFIs to finance energy retrofits paid back through cost savings. JCF received a $2.5 million working capital grant from the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice to help Hive Fund build capacity to make direct loans for green projects in the southeastern US. Government and philanthropy are still crucial, says Kirkwood, but “we’ve got to figure out how to expand the pool of capital providers.” In January, the nonprofit launched a resource hub with the US Green Bank 50, a network of state, local and regional green banks, to share templates, legal documents and other resources. JCF is also working with its network of community lenders, including the African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs, Native lender Oweesta, and the Community Development Bankers Association to form a deal syndicate.
- Bridging gaps. To appeal to hesitant institutional investors, JCF and the climate advocacy group Ceres have mapped investment strategies that address scale, liquidity and risk management to bridge the gap between institutional investment profiles and community-scale opportunities. “Many large investors only look at big deals,” says Steven Rothstein. “They don’t have the staff to look at $1 million or $2 million deals, so part of this project is to help bridge that gap.” Conservative investors looking for stable returns, for example, can consider insured deposits, promissory notes or direct loans. Innovative structures such as loan pooling and securitization can draw in a broader range of investors. Collaborations of corporations, philanthropies and social enterprises extend beyond community lending. In 2019, Kresge Foundation anchored Inclusiv’s $45 million Southern Equity Fund to provide secondary capital to community development credit unions in 17 southern states.
- Keep reading, “With small steps and grand plans, community lenders expand access to financing for green infrastructure,” by Amy Cortese.
Dealflow: Climate Adaptation
Satellites on Fire lands $2.7 million to bring early wildfire detection tech to the US. Wildfires no longer have a season; fires are burning longer, spreading faster and costing more. Fires in remote areas can rage for hours before anyone calls for help. Franco Rodriguez dropped out of college in Buenos Aires to build a solution. He claims his startup Satellites on Fire can detect wildfires up to 35 minutes before NASA. The company closed a $2.7 million seed round backed by Mexico-based Dalus Capital and Draper Associates, the fund of venture capital heavyweight Tim Draper. VitaminC and Draper Cygnus VC also participated. Satellites on Fire tracks wildfires using satellites and ground cameras, updating every five minutes, and sends alerts to responders on WhatsApp or SMS. Last year it covered 21 countries and helped manage more than 600 fires. “Fire departments, timber companies, national parks – they find out about wildfires because people call 911. In remote areas where there are no people, no one gets to know. That’s why they get catastrophic,” Rodriguez told ImpactAlpha. The raise will support three pilot programs with US agencies.
- Climate adaptation. US wildfires cost an estimated $424 billion annually, sharpening demand from insurers and asset owners exposed to fire risk. Insurance giant AON is using Satellites on Fire to assess wildfire risk across its Latin American forestry portfolio and is working with the company to develop a parametric wildfire insurance product. Satellites on Fire also serves forestry operators, agricultural producers, utilities and government agencies.
- More.
Liberty Mutual Investments leads institutional backing in CenterNode’s $750 million raise. The investment group, which oversees $124 billion on behalf of Liberty Mutual Insurance, is among the institutional investors that have committed capital to CenterNode Group, a new energy transition investment firm launched by The Forest Company. CenterNode is looking to deploy flexible capital to small and mid-sized solar and storage developers to bridge the widening gap in financing for US energy infrastructure. “The US energy transition is entering its most capital-intensive phase at precisely the moment when traditional lenders have stepped back,” said CenterNode’s Seth Zeleznik.
- Co-investor. CenterNode is targeting projects ranging from $5 million to $50 million. The firm plans to eventually expand into other energy infrastructure sectors. Liberty Mutual’s Charley Poole said the investment in CenterNode is part of Liberty Mutual’s growing infrastructure strategy. Liberty Mutual has also backed Ara Partners, a Houston-based firm that invests in mid-sized companies decarbonizing industrial sectors.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- FlexGen Power Systems, a Durham, NC-based battery energy storage services provider, acquired Clean Energy Services to boost energy storage deployment. (FlexGen)
- Energy Capital Partners agreed to purchase Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions, which provides transportation, processing and recycling for nuclear energy facilities. (EnergySolutions)
- Biodiversity-focused impact fund Superorganism backed Supercool Earth, a biotech startup developing a microbe-based method for seeding clouds. (Superorganism)
Impact Voices: Green Transition
The environmental movement needs to embrace and accelerate innovation. What role should the environmental movement play in bringing about a clean, renewable economy? It has largely focused on building opposition to industrial polluters in the courts of public opinion and law. In a guest post, Builders Vision’s Lukas Walton applauds environmentalists’ past successes, but calls for their movement to “pivot from its previous punitive approaches, to building business coalitions that incentivize sustainable innovations.” Though paths and timelines may differ, most environmental stakeholders are aligned on the need to build a renewable and responsible economy. “The tools that were right for one era are not always the right tools for the current one,” Walton argues. “The economy of tomorrow doesn’t need to be fought into existence. It needs to be built – faster.”
- Beyond roadblocks. Walton highlights persistent bottlenecks: capital structures that don’t support early deployment, slow permitting timelines, and the gap between promising technologies and commercial scale. An adversarial stance, he warns, imposes a high opportunity cost, slowing down the very companies and industries capable of driving large-scale transformation. Walton, a grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, calls for an environmental movement that convenes unlikely partners – automakers, grid operators, farmers and local governments – to tackle deployment barriers, de-risk projects and reward incremental progress. That “will do more for electrification over the next decade than any number of courtroom victories,” he writes.
- Keep reading, “The environmental movement needs to embrace and accelerate innovation,” by Lukas Walton of Builders Vision.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Greysteel brings on Drew McWilliams, previously with Ariel Property Advisors, as director of national affordable housing… The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation welcomes Eric Stinehart, formerly at Hopelab, as a strategy analyst… UBS is hiring an ESG analyst… The Nature Conservancy is recruiting an investment analyst… Wells Fargo has an opening for a renewable energy and environmental finance associate in San Francisco.
Blue Forest seeks a conservation innovation manager… IDB Invest is looking for an investment management analyst in Mexico City… Santander Alternative Investments seeks a climate tech and deep tech venture capital director in Madrid… Also in Madrid, Blue Earth Capital is on the hunt for an investment analyst for private equity partnerships… Triple Jump has an opening for an investor relations manager in Amsterdam.
The Rutgers New York-New Jersey Center for Employee Ownership, in partnership with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, will host a business exit planning conference, Friday, May 15… Kapor Foundation is looking for journalists focused on responsible AI and tech ethics for its research fellowship.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– April 7, 2026
