ImpactAlpha Open | November 14, 2023

ImpactAlpha Open: Private equity’s appetite for impact funds + assessing meat risk

Dennis Price

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ImpactAlpha Editor

Dennis Price

Hi there, Agents of Impact! 

Welcome to the latest ImpactAlpha Open, our free weekly roundup of must-reads and exciting opportunities across impact investing and sustainable finance. Get ImpactAlpha daily: Subscribe with a special intro offer.

📞 Join tomorrow’s Agents of Impact Call: Women as agents of change for climate resilience. Join Camilla Nestor of MCE Social Capital, Shally Shanker of AiiM Partners, Noramay Cadena of Supply Change Capital, and Samantha Anderson and Rose Maizner from Heading for Change, Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today (this subscriber benefit is available to non-subscribers thanks to Heading for Change).

In this week’s Open:

  • Private equity’s appetite for impact funds
  • Climate + gender opportunity
  • Wave of ocean strategies
  • Mitigating inequality risk

Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • The resilience of impact products. As interest rates have risen, investors have fled traditional banks seeking higher-yielding opportunities. Not so at impact-oriented financial institutions, reports Andrea Riquier. Go deeper.
  • Private equity’s appetite for impact funds. TPG, KKR, Brookfield and other private equity firms are seeing robust demand for impact and climate funds, reports Amy Cortese. Understand why.
  • Wave of ocean funds. ImpactAlpha is seeing an increasing number of pure-play impact funds actively raising capital, including a growing set of ocean-focused strategies, as Roodgally Senatus reports. Jump in.
  • Climate + gender opportunity. In revealing its first portfolio investments, the team from Heading for Change, the legacy project of Suzanne Biegel, touts “the power of women’s insights and innovations in developing and scaling climate solutions” (disclosure: Heading for Change sponsors ImpactAlpha’s Climate + Gender coverage). Take a peek – and tune into tomorrow’s call on climate + gender. 
  • Innovative finance for digital health solutions. Investors in the Global South are zeroing in on “impact funding” mechanisms such as volume guarantees and social impact bonds to lower costs and boost demand for digital health solutions, as Ritika Ramasuri, Daniel Rostrup and Granthika Chatterjee of the Sattva Knowledge Institute. Catch up quickly.

Sponsored by BlueMark

🔎 Impact management for asset allocators (report now available)

Over the past year, BlueMark and CASE at Duke University interviewed more than 50 limited and general partners worldwide. The goal? To drive more rigor and consistency in how asset allocators evaluate and manage private market funds investing for positive impact. “A field guide: Impact due diligence and management for asset allocators” showcases how leading asset allocators and asset managers are measuring and managing impact throughout an investment’s life cycle.

Download the report

Agents of Impact

🏃🏾‍♀️ People on the move

  • Blue Earth Capital named Daniel Perroud, ex- of BlueOrchard Finance, managing director and head of fundraising and investor relations.
  • Participant Media named Baratunde Thurston of PBS and Chi-hui Yang of the Ford Foundation to its impact advisory council.
  • Benedict Partners’ Billy Gridley joined The Investment Integration Project as a senior advisor.

Impact Briefing

🎧 On the podcast

The Wilmington coup of 1898 is not as well known as the Tulsa massacre of 1921. Exactly 125 years ago today, an organized white supremacist militia attacked the North Carolina city’s Black leaders and residents and forcefully removed their elected officials before gunning down citizens in the streets. It was the end of the city’s brief period of multiracial democracy and multiracial prosperity.

Wilmington local Cedric Harrison has been recovering that lost history in children’s books, videos and a compelling tour of the sites of the violent takeover. In Harrison’s hometown, David Bank joined him for a conversation about the lessons and the legacy of the coup. Host Brian Walsh has the headlines. 

Short Signals: What We’re Reading

👷🏾‍♀️ Inequality risk: Enterprise vs. portfolio value. Inequality is a systemic risk. It’s less of a risk to individual enterprises. The interests of pension funds and other diversified owners in ensuring a stable labor force will often diverge from those of individual companies, which may choose to increase future cash flows by underpaying their workers. (Shareholder Commons)

🔎 Lessons from a decade of impact investing. Encouraged by its decade-long, $250 million experiment with program-related investments, the California Endowment says it will begin making mission-related investments across private equity and venture capital. (California Endowment)

💲 Reparation rewards. The city of Evanston’s reparations program, which committed the first $10 million of its cannabis retailers’ tax to address historical injustices in housing and other areas, has garnered widespread approval across every ethnic and racial demographic group, a new study finds. (Northwestern Now)

⚡ Red states, green future. Whether President Biden’s landmark climate law succeeds will be determined in part by places like Blythewood, SC, where Volkswagen is building its first US electric vehicle factory. “They’ve convinced me that electric vehicles are the way to the future,” says Jeff Ruble, head of the county’s economic development agency. (Financial Times)

🌺 Hawaii’s hot bed of legal climate activism. While other US courts quibble over jurisdiction and technical legal barriers in climate lawsuits, Hawaii’s have moved decisively. Recent cases show how the state has become fertile ground for environmental legal action, fueled by a long tradition of decolonization advocacy. (Bloomberg Law)

🥩 Assessing meat risk. Emissions of top animal protein companies rose almost 3% last year, according to the investor network FAIRR, which labeled nearly half of the 60 producers it analyzed as “high risk.” Seafood producers Mowi, Leroy Seafood Group and Greig Seafood scored the highest, putting them in the “low risk” category. (AFN)

 Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • Visa Economic Empowerment Institute is on the hunt for an executive director in Washington DC.
  • Spring Lane Capital is looking for a vice president and senior associate in Boston.
  • BlackRock Investment Stewardship is looking for healthcare and energy analysts in New York.

NEW! Visit ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub for more impact investing jobs. Contact us for job postings.

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