The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Intelligent design

ImpactAlpha ¡ July 10, 2026
Credit: Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

In today’s Brief:

  • Roundup: On purpose
  • Podcasts: Sana Kapadia, Jed Emerson and This Week in Impact
  • Spotlight: Black farmers in the new documentary, “Harvest”

🗣 On purpose. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the prescient Stewart Brand wrote to introduce The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. That’s never been more true than in the choices being made, right now, around agency, sovereignty and the very purpose of artificial intelligence. The civilizational outcomes of the Cambrian-level AI explosion are being designed in real-time, and largely by market forces rather than public policy. Optimal or not, that gives impact investors a critical role to play. Amid trillion-dollar IPOs, “we need to focus on the places where relatively small amounts of capital can still influence who benefits from technology and who gets to shape its future,” wrote contributing editor Antony Bugg-Levine. The investment thesis of Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management is that “sustainability” – including issues of privacy, sovereignty and governance, along with water and electricity consumption – will be central to the AI buildout, as Amy Cortese discussed with Generation’s Lila Preston. “Agency” may be even more central. “If intelligence becomes abundant, then agency becomes scarce,” Florian Kemmerich and Randall Zindler argued in a guest post. That makes even more valuable, they say, “the uniquely human capacity to create meaning, exercise judgment, adapt continuously, and translate identity into contribution.”

It follows that one purpose of AI is to augment the uniquely human designs of Agents of Impact. With new funds and growing assets, the ecosystem of “alternative ownership” funds is letting more workers, producers and communities share in the ownership of the businesses that influence their lives, wrote Transform Finance’s Julie Menter. In Brazil, Credit Saison documented the efficacy of credit built around agricultural rhythms rather than bank templates. “Designed well, the same dollar can earn a return, lift a family’s income and lower emissions,” wrote Credit Saison’s Andressa Esteves. ALIVE Ventures has found that closing gender gaps in Latin America’s mobile workforce eases skills shortages and boosts portfolio-company performance along with women’s economic opportunities, as Erik Stein reported. More than a dozen collaborations in the region demonstrate designs for blending different forms of capital, financial and otherwise, to tackle climate and biodiversity challenges, shared Latimpacto’s Paula Ramirez. Intelligent design may have been largely debunked as an explanation for the world we inherited. That doesn’t mean we can’t deploy it for the world we are creating. – David Bank 

Next Week’s Call

☎️ Crafting a positive agenda for faith-based impact investors. Can faith-aligned investors become known for what they are for, not just what they’re against? To help such investors move beyond negative screens to a positive agenda, Impact Evaluation Lab’s Terry Keeley and John Coleman of Sovereign’s Capital have developed metrics for “human flourishing” for both fund managers and portfolio companies. Sue Ernster of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, and Jean Baptiste de Franssu, recent president of Vatican Bank, will join Keeley and Coleman on the next Agents of Impact Call, Wednesday, July 15, at 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm London. RSVP today. 

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Generation Investment Management seeks to stamp AI with a mandate for sustainability; how closing the gender gap could ease skill shortages in Latin America’s mobile workforce; and the California pension fund behind Inox Clean Energy’s ambitious rollup of solar manufacturing and generating assets.

Impact(ed): Inside Jed Emerson’s vision for the future of impact investing. Has impact investing lost sight of what it was initially trying to change? On the latest episode of Impact(ed), co-hosts Rodney Foxworth and Lucas Turner-Owens speak with Blended Value Group’s Jed Emerson for a wide-ranging conversation on how value is created.

Women Changing Finance: Sana Kapadia’s blueprint for climate-smart, gender-smart finance. Climate finance and gender investing are too often treated as separate conversations. On the latest Women Changing Finance, Heading for Change’s Sana Kapadia joins host Krisztina Tora to explain how investors can use a mix of catalytic investments, grants and field-building to unlock capital to tackle both together. Says Kapadia, “All finance can be climate smart and gender smart.”

The Week’s Spotlight

Pop Impact: “Harvest” casts a rare spotlight on rural farming at Tribeca Festival premiere. About 150 years ago, nearly half of Americans worked in agriculture. Today, there are just 3.5 million farmers and just 45,000 Black farmers, down from one million in the 1920s. That’s what makes the story of Nelson and Sons Farm so captivating, writes ImpactAlpha contributor Dmitriy Ioselevich in his review of the new documentary “Harvest,” which premiered at last month’s Tribeca Festival (see, “Impact takes center stage at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival”). Led by the four young and ambitious Nelson brothers, these fourth-generation farmers grow corn, soybeans, cotton and other crops across about 4,000 acres of land in northern Louisiana. They dream of providing generational wealth for their descendents and creating economic opportunities for other Black farmers. The documentary, from mother-daughter duo Natalie Baszile and Hyacinth Parker, follows the Nelsons as they grapple with climate change, rising farming costs and securing capital.

  • Character driven. The film grew out of Baszile’s 2021 book, “We Are Each Other’s Harvest,” which traced the stories of Black farmers as they tackled new and old challenges related to food justice, sovereignty and economic reparations. The charismatic Nelsons were a standout. The film drew early funding from the Redford Center and the Ford Foundation. Kat Taylor, the co-founder of Beneficial Bank and TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, and filmmaker Dawn Porter came on as executive producers. The film “is character-driven,” Baszile tells Ioselevich. “It’s like a Trojan horse, where we sneak the message in, but do it in a way that balances joy and inspiration.”
  • Catalytic investors. A subplot involves Potlikker Capital, a charitable loan fund that supports historically underserved agricultural producers and processors in the US (see, “Road to justice for Black farmers leads through flexible finance”). The film highlights how Potlikker offered a $250,000 low-interest loan to help the Nelson brothers make it through tough times, but the deal fell apart over the fund’s demand that they put up their farm equipment as collateral. On its website, Potlikker Capital says its funding is designed to repair past harms such as land dispossession, discriminatory lending practices, and exclusion from mainstream financial systems. Impact investors need to find both the right terms, Ioselovich writes, and ways to build trust with investees who have a lot of experience with transactions that come with strings attached.
  • Keep reading, “’Harvest’ casts a rare spotlight on rural farming at Tribeca Festival premiere,” by Dmitriy Ioselevich. Also: catch up on all of ImpactAlpha’s dealflow reporting this week.

The Week’s Talent and Jobs

Taylor Sekhon stepped down as managing director of employee ownership at BMO… Amy Bennett, formerly with ImpactAssets and the Stakeholder Impact Initiative, joined The Real Mental Health Foundation, where she will lead the creation of a mental health fund… Michelle Hassan and Peter Gross were promoted to co-executive directors of BFA Global. Hassan takes on the role of global portfolio executive director, while Gross will lead partnerships and growth… IDB Invest’s Aldo Malpartida will become head of infrastructure and energy for the Caribbean. 

💼 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.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– July 10, 2026