TGIF, Agents of Impact!
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In today’s Brief:
- Roundup: Speaking truth
- Podcasts: Dawn Lippert, Dato’ Sri Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour and David Bank
- Spotlight: Fiduciary future
- Events: Making the scene at SF Climate Week
🗣Speaking truth. When federal agents shot and killed two Minneapolis residents in the midst of this winter’s immigration raids, McKnight Foundation’s Tonya Allen urged foundations and impact investors to call out the excessive use of force, the curtailment of civil liberties, and the undermining of democracy. “What is happening in Minnesota won’t stop here,” she wrote in January. “Other parts of society don’t have the independence or flexibility to act quickly and forcefully, but we do. And that means we have a special responsibility to lead.” Earlier, when foundations faced threats to their ability to fund strategies for racial justice, climate action and other urgent priorities, Allen, again, along with MacArthur Foundation’s John Palfrey and Freedom Together’s Deepak Bhargava, organized “Unite in Advance” to defend philanthropies’ freedom to invest. “Complacency is complicity,” the trio wrote in a letter signed by more than 700 organizations. “Foundations must lead – not just with grants, but with guts.”
ImpactAlpha is pleased to help amplify such investor leadership as the media partner for next week’s Mission Investors Exchange conference in Atlanta. “We may have a winner in the search for a positive agenda with the power to heal divisions and even provide an optimistic vision for the future: the ownership economy,” I wrote in my setup for Tuesday’s conversation with Gary Community Ventures’ Santhosh Ramdoss, Spring Point Partners’ Margot Kane, and Mari Kuraishi of the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund. On Wednesday, Dennis Price will lead a discussion with impact investors seeking to assert human agency over the future of AI. “The communities that members of Mission Investors Exchange invest in are facing mounting attacks,” MIE’s Matt Onek wrote this week. “This is a moment that calls for real leadership.”
Leadership, of course, is doing as well as saying. The family office Ceniarth’s commitment to share its investment pipeline, not just its portfolio, has spurred other LPs to do the same, sending a signal about the kind of impact that at least one corner of the capital markets is looking for. The impact-first holding company Trimtab shared its assessment of the additionality of its portfolio, the sometimes elusive standard for high-impact investments, as Roodgally Senatus reported. From Kampala, Lucy Ngige explained how a pension fund in Uganda is expanding its investment policy to stand up a fund of funds for local fund managers supporting growth-stage small businesses that create jobs and drive economic growth (the risks of such investing are often overestimated, as Jessica Pothering noted in her report on AgDevCo’s “A- issuer credit rating” from S&P Global Ratings). Candide Group’s Aner Ben-Ami urged impact investors to help expand financing for worker buyouts of hundreds of thousands of companies for whom 100% employee ownership is a good fit.
Many of the foundation and family office leaders heading to MIE in Atlanta have been out ahead of their comms and legal teams in terms of “leading in the moment,” the theme of this year’s gathering. In the name of risk management, their advisors have sometimes sought to scrub foundation websites and soften the edges of their leaders’ statements, including in ImpactAlpha. Sorenson Impact Institute’s latest trends report rounded up 18 impact investing leaders, whose contributions “reveal a belief in the need to remain above the political fray.” To be sure, foundations must steer clear of partisan activities. But the lessons of Minneapolis, and perhaps of Unite in Advance as well, is that collective voice and bold action can protect our most cherished values. As McKnight’s Allen says she advises her peers, if your lawyer is telling you to pull back, get a new lawyer. – 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: What’s significant about a Ugandan pension fund’s effort to stand up a locally focused fund of funds; unpacking the employee ownership issues in KKR’s exit from CoolIT; and behind the failure of the impact advisory firm Align Impact (here’s some background on this month’s shutdown).
- 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: Pulling climate tech to commercial scale with energy demand from data centers. The market volatility and policy pullback of the past year has challenged many early-stage climate tech companies. But it’s go-time for growth-stage companies with solutions to energy, storage, grid and critical materials challenges. “This massive build out in AI infrastructure is creating huge demand for clean energy technologies and clean materials in ways that we haven’t seen before,” says Dawn Lippert of Elemental Impact on the latest Agents of Impact podcast.
💬 Impact Investing Musings: Catalyzing Asia’s finance for people and planet. Over the coming weeks, host Vikas Arora is sharing highlights from last fall’s AVPN Global Conference in Hong Kong. In his keynote, Bank Negara Malaysia’s Dato’ Sri Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour reflects on what it will take for the region to build prosperity “without regret.”
The Week’s Spotlight
Fiduciary Future: Investors should be alarmed by the retreat of the Big Three asset managers from corporate stewardship. Not long ago, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street were telling corporate America that workforce diversity drives financial performance, that executive pay had to be tethered to long-term value, and that companies ignoring environmental risk were companies ignoring shareholder risk. Amid a political backlash, the three asset managers, which collectively manage roughly $25 trillion, have dismantled those policies, As You Sow’s Andrew Behar writes in his latest Fiduciary Future column. State Street no longer expects companies to disclose climate transition plans and other climate data. It calls for a “listen-only mode” during any discussion of climate targets by companies, according to an analysis of 2026 proxy voting guidelines compiled by the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. At BlackRock, where Larry Fink once declared that “climate risk is investment risk,” the focus has narrowed from all companies to only those facing “material climate-related risks.”
- Systemic risk. The retreat is equally stark on diversity. BlackRock no longer expects companies to disclose their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. State Street, which famously placed the “Fearless Girl” statue in front of Wall Street’s Charging Bull, no longer expects DEI disclosure and will not discuss diversity targets with companies. Vanguard has excised “personal characteristics” like gender and race from its definition of board diversity. “Corporate boards are watching, and the signal they are receiving is that the largest shareholders in the room have stood down,” writes Behar. Responsible investors should carefully consider that retreat. “Markets cannot price risk they refuse to measure. And stewards of capital who stop asking the questions do not stop bearing the consequences of the answers.”
- Open source. The retreat comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission has clamped down on longstanding proxy voting traditions, limiting who can file resolutions and restricting the use of exempt solicitations, the proxy memos shareholders prepare to explain their proposals (see, “Dear Shareholders: Your votes and your voice are needed more than ever”). To fill the void, As You Sow has launched Proxy Open Exchange, a repository where investors can publicly post proxy memos. The site already hosts more than 50 such memos. “Shareholders have a right to be heard and a right to know the impact of what’s being proposed at their companies before they cast their votes,” Behar says. Proxy Open Exchange “restores transparency, a core tenet of our free markets, to the shareholder proposal process.”
- Keep reading, and catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.
The Week’s Events: SF Climate Week
Pitching on the dock of the Bay. San Francisco’s annual Climate Week drew some 80,000 entrepreneurs, advocates and investors during Earth Week, and Agents of Impact covered the waterfront. On Monday, ImpactAlpha’s Joe Whitwell teamed up with investor Judy Li for an LP/GP matchmaking event (above). More than two-dozen fund managers, from VCs such as Wireframe Ventures and Blue Bear Capital, to blended finance funds like Enduring Planet, to private equity funds such as Builders Fund and KKR, pitched to family offices, foundations and individual investors.
On Tuesday, Honolulu-based Elemental Impact brought the aloha spirit with a hula performance to revive the crowd after a full morning of investor pitches at Elemental Interactive, the impact investor’s annual portfolio showcase (listen to Elemental’s Dawn Lippert on this week’s Agents of Impact podcast). And on Wednesday, ImpactAlpha joined Toniic and Candide Group to host an evening of music in Oakland, Calif., featuring Candide’s Morgan Simon and the Iya Lingua Quartet (and a brief turn on the bongos by our own David Bank). The climate may be hot, but the vibes were cool. – Amy Cortese
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.
Erik Sandersen, former head of financial inclusion at the Ukraine fund at Norfund was promoted to CEO… Anne-Marie Slaughter stepped down as CEO of New America after a decade. New America’s Paul Butler will serve as interim CEO… IDB Invest, the private sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, promoted Ignacio Imas Innella to lead investment officer for infrastructure and energy in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
BuenTrip Ventures welcomed José Tello, managing partner at Martell Capital Partners, to its advisory board… Andrea Vigil DiMatteo, formerly with New Belgium Brewing, joined the National Center for Employee Ownership as ownership culture manager… Allen Fernandez Smith, previously with JPMorgan Chase, became William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s director of racial justice… ECMC Foundation tapped Melissa Rivas, previously with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, as a program officer in its Washington, DC office.
Aruwa Capital Management’s Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, EQT Foundation’s Cilia Indahl, Power Sustainable’s Lili Buffett, and Fervo Energy’s Timothy Latimer are among the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Young Global Leaders… Mana Impact welcomed Josephine Price, formerly with Social Impact Partners and Insitor, as an investment committee member; Cindy Ko, formerly from Goldman Sachs, as head of catalytic investments and partnerships; Anindita “Nindy” Nur Annisa, formerly with World Resources Institute Indonesia, as investment analyst.
That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend.
– April 24, 2026
