ImpactAlpha Open | April 11, 2023

ImpactAlpha Open: VC alternatives + next-gen impact investors

Dennis Price

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ImpactAlpha Editor

Dennis Price

TGIT, Agents of Impact! Welcome to the latest ImpactAlpha Open, your weekly helping of news, trends, careers, opportunities and people in impact investing.

In this week’s newsletter:

  • VC alternatives for diverse-led businesses
  • Next-gen impact investors
  • Catalyzing female fund managers
  • Tesla’s master plan, Part 3

Let’s get to it. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Inclusive VC alternatives. Impact lenders for diverse-led businesses, such as Founders First Capital Partners, Apis & Heritage and New Majority Capital, are stepping forward to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank, Tracy Fuga of Founders First writes in a guest post.

  • Faith-based investing. A portion of the £100 million ($125 million) the Church of England has allocated to address its own involvement in the slave trade will flow to impact funds targeting communities affected by the legacy of slavery, as I report in ImpactAlpha. 
  • Muni impact. The municipal bond market has barely begun to grapple with the risks posed by climate change, Andrea Riquier reports for ImpactAlpha. Exhibit A: Trading in bonds from the seven states that rely on the shrinking Colorado River shows no evidence that investors are pricing their water risk.
  • ESG Backlash. Attacks on environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investing, are expanding to “S” issues. Among the targets: workers. In a guest post, Fran Seegull of the US Impact Investing Alliance helps impact investors get ready to counter three lines of attack.
  • Climate accountability. Tim Buckley is not a household name like Larry Fink. That may change, as shareholder activists take their climate action campaigns to Vanguard, the second largest asset manager after Fink’s BlackRock, reports ImpactAlpha’s Amy Cortese.

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Agents of Impact

📚 Cathy Clark, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business: Influencing a generation of impact investors

Cathy Clark, faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Fuqua, estimates she has influenced the careers of more than 100,000 learners. Clark and CASE’s Impact Investing Initiative, or i3, have been key field builders, pushing out hundreds of partnerships, fellows, case studies and reports.

🏃🏿‍♀️ On the move

  • Zineb Bennani, Mirova’s global head of business development, will become CEO of Mirova U.S. next month.
  • Rachel Curley, a former democracy advocate at Public Citizen, joins US SIF as director of policy and programs.
  • Boston Common Asset Management’s Steven Heim wins the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility’s 2023 Legacy Award.

Impact Briefing

🎧 On the podcast

Turner Miint’s Adwoa Asare joins co-hosts Monique Aiken and Brian Walsh to talk about training the next generation of impact investors – and the winners of this year’s MBA Impact Investing Network and Training competition. Plus the headlines.

Deal Spotlight

💸 For female fund managers, catalytic grants are about more than money

The many varieties of catalytic capital share a common purpose: to spur investments in people, places and things that legacy investors otherwise deem too novel, too longterm or just too risky. For first-time fund managers – particularly women – the catalyzing goes beyond the capital. “Those types of investments and support make it a lot easier on movement-builders to dream and do,” says Jaime Gloshay of Native Women Lead, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit that seeks to empower and elevate Native women in business. Native Women Lead got some catalytic capital of it its, in the form of a $650,000 grant from Comcast.

Six Signals

🌎 The SDG second half. Reframing media coverage. Elevating the role of the private sector. Better risk taking. Brookings Institutions scholars share ideas for doing things differently in the global sprint to 2030. (Brookings Institution)

☀️ Tesla’s master plan, Part 3. The EV giant estimates that building the manufacturing infrastructure for the sustainable energy economy will cost $10 trillion over a 20-year horizon, as compared to the $14 trillion projected 20-year spend on fossil fuels. (Tesla)

🌱 Mitigating climate-tech moonshot risk. Among strategies for mitigating potential negative impacts of climate-related technologies: Bring more people from front-line communities into the workforces, C-suites and boardrooms of climate tech companies. (Inside Philanthropy)

🤖 Where climate tech meets AI. Sewer.ai. Floodbase. Weavegrid. Climate tech VC Climatic overlapped general artificial intelligence capabilities such as workflow, monitoring and robotics with major climate tech verticals to see which startups are addressing each intersection. (Climatic)

📜 Preserving Virginia’s ‘Green Book’ businesses. A new state law will designate as historic the hotels, restaurants and other establishments that accepted Black patrons in the racially segregated South. (Bloomberg)

👩🏽‍🦱🧑🏼‍🦱👨🏾‍🦲👩🏻‍ Unlocking mission-related investments. Most existing racial equity mission-related investments from foundations tend to focus on investing in fund managers of color. Federal policy could incentivize community-level outcomes and engagement in decision-making. (Urban Institute)

Get in the Game 

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Check out the full list of the week’s impact jobs on ImpactAlpha.com.

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‘Til next Tuesday!