Greetings!
Welcome to the latest ImpactAlpha Open, our free weekly newsletter for Agents of Impact.
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In this week’s Open:
- Women-led impact funds
- Racial equity in municipal bonds
- Climate-resilient development
- Drivers of impact alpha
Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price
Must-reads on ImpactAlpha
- Climate-resilient development. A pause on debt repayments for nations hit by natural disasters. A $2.7 billion Just Energy Transition partnership for Senegal. And a global shipping tax to fund climate-resilience. Yet the biggest achievement of last week’s Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris may have been a zeitgeist shift in efforts to make global finance more fair and responsive to vulnerable countries, report Amy Cortese and Jessica Pothering.
- Barbados’s Prime Minister Mia Motley is nudging the World Bank and development finance institutions to be more catalytic in their financing for climate-resilient development.
- Racial equity in municipal bonds. In the $4 trillion muni bond market, the supply of impactful strategies is failing to meet institutional demand, as J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s Preeti Bhattacharji made clear on last week’s Agents of Impact call.
- Returns on inclusion. With her third fund, Impact America’s Kesha Cash is seeking to validate the thesis that there’s impact alpha to be found in tech-driven companies that uplift Black and Brown workers, families and small businesses.
- Alternative track-records. Managers like Selma Ribica from First Circle Capital, Hema Vallabh of Five35 Ventures, and Lisa Thomas from Samata Capital are redefining the meaning of “track record” to raise first-time funds and unlock small business capital in Africa.
- Inclusive economy. In Tuba City, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation, Change Labs’ Heather Fleming opened an entrepreneurship hub to support Navajo- and Hopi-owned businesses.
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Agents of Impact
🏃🏿♀️ On the move
- Lissa Glasgo, ex- of the Global Impact Investing Network, joins Turner Impact Capital as vice president and head of impact.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York appoints Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Aisha Benson to its community advisory group.
- Calvert Impact names Grace Eddy, director of Generation Investment Management’s philanthropic arm, to its board of directors.
Impact Briefing
🎧 On the podcast
ImpactAlpha’s David Bank caught up with the city of Vienna’s Michaela Kauer at last week’s “Connecting Capital to Communities” gathering at the Salzburg Global Seminar to talk about Vienna’s model of social, affordable housing. Host Brian Walsh has the headlines.
- Listen to the latest episode, and follow all of ImpactAlpha’s podcasts on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Charting the energy transition
📈 An American EV supply chain takes shape
The flood of funding and tax incentives championed by the Biden administration is remaking American manufacturing. The latest signal: the Department of Energy’s $9.2 billion conditional loan to Ford for the construction of three battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. The plants are among the 50 projects, representing $56 billion in investments across the electric vehicle supply chain, announced since the IRA was passed last August, according to Charged’s EV Supply Chain Tracker.
Deal Spotlight
💸 Women-led venture capital funds
The venture capital industry, with over $2 trillion in assets under management, is still heavily male-dominated. Women-led funds manage a little under 2% of venture capital. The disparity is even more stark for women of color. Last week, Black women-owned Impact America Fund closed $112 million for its third venture fund. Separately, women-led Avaana Capital in India reached a first close of $70 million for a climate and sustainability fund.
- Read the full deal spotlight, by Roodgally Senatus.
Six Signals
🇯🇵 Japan’s impact investing market. Japan’s impact assets under management total 5.8 trillion yen, or $40.7 billion, representing a more than 4x increase over last year. Existing impact investors increased their commitments and new firms entered the market. (Global Steering Group for Impact Investment)
🇨🇴 Impact portfolios of Latin American families. Fifty-two of 65 high-net-worth families in Latin America surveyed have impact investments in their portfolios, though the investments ($1.2 billion in total) represent a small portion of their total assets. Nearly half of families struggle to identify adequate impact investment opportunities. (The ImPact)
✅ Drivers of impact alpha. Harvard researchers dived deep into exits from Impact Capital Managers’ members to identify drivers of realized value at exit. Top of the list: being an impact-driven capital provider expands the opportunity set for investment and creates strong alignment with management. (Harvard Law)
🗺️ Blueprint for inclusive wealth. The Aspen Institute lays out a plan to increase by 10x the wealth of households of color and the bottom half of the wealth-holders in the US by 2050. On the agenda: seeding investment accounts at birth, increasing payment assistance for first time homebuyers, and scaling shared ownership strategies in business and real estate. (Aspen Institute)
🏛️ Stakeholder capitalism for conservatives. A national development bank, workers’ right to organize, and guaranteed demand for domestic production are among policy prescriptions in “Rebuilding American capitalism: A handbook for conservative policymakers.” (American Compass)
🍗 ‘No kill’ meat approved for sale. Upside Food and Good Meat received the go-ahead from the US Department of Agriculture to sell lab-grown chicken. (NPR)
Get in the Game
💼 Step up
- Global Impact Investing Network seeks a director of impact measurement and management engagement in New York.
- Impact America Fund is hiring a senior manager of finance and operations in Los Angeles.
- In Nairobi, Oikocredit has an opening for an investment officer, and 60 Decibels is hiring an agriculture manager.
Don’t miss dozens of more impact jobs curated this week on ImpactAlpha.com.
🤝 Meet up
Don’t miss these upcoming impact investing events:
- 26 July: The Bloomberg Sustainable Summit (Singapore)
- 27-30 August: Latimpacto Conference (Rio de Janeiro)
- 17-24 September: ClimateWeek NYC (New York)
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