Greetings, Agents of Impact! Many thanks to the hundreds of you who tuned into The Call yesterday on building a career in impact investing. Look out for the recap and replay in Friday’s brief.
In today’s Brief:
- Catalytic capital for local news publishers
- Climate-first banking in Florida
- Indigenous housing in British Columbia
- Archipelago Ventures’ approach to circular materials
Featured: Catalytic Capital
Local news publishers seek impact financing for ‘civic infrastructure.’ If the darkest hour is just before dawn, publishers of local online news sites are looking forward to sunrise. This month, the Minnesota Star Tribune, seen as one of the few survivors amid the decimation of local newspapers, announced it would cut about 15% of its staff. The for-profit Strib, as it’s known, is exploring an ownership transition to a non-profit foundation to attract philanthropic funding. “The business model and organizational footprint that has sustained local news for generations is undergoing its biggest disruption ever,” publisher Steve Grove said in a memo to employees. Publishers in some states are pressing for public funding as well. But many nonprofit newsrooms are eager to move beyond grant funding and get ready for loans, revenue-based financing and even equity-type investments to grow their readership and their revenues. Such catalytic capital has helped expand financing options for affordable housing, community development finance, financial inclusion, clean energy, and arts and culture organizations. “Local news shares many of the same characteristics of those sectors before their financing markets matured,” Public Media Co.’s Caroline Ross writes in “Catalytic capital for local news,” a new report from the philanthropic collaborative Press Forward. “The public need is clear, the social value is high, business models are evolving, markets are fragmented, and growth often requires patient capital, technical assistance and risk tolerance.”
- Flexible financing. Revenue from subscriptions or memberships cover only about a quarter of the budgets of digital-first nonprofit news organizations, according to an April report from the Wyncote Foundation. The foundation found that nearly 400 of such newsrooms generated $650 million to $700 million in revenues in 2024 – about 1% of the combined advertising and circulation revenue earned by the newspaper industry 20 years earlier. “Local news organizations resemble mission-driven small businesses operating in markets that traditional finance systems do not fully understand,” the report found. “Many outlets lack the margins, collateral, scale or repayment history conventional lenders expect.” What is missing, the report continues, “is a middle layer of capital: catalytic capital – flexible, patient, mission-driven financing that fits between grants and commercial capital.”
- Underwriting news. Many new, lean, digital-native publishers covering underserved local markets are already profitable and ready for growth, Google’s News Sustainability Project found last year. American Public Media Group’s Glen Nelson Center has a $10 million Horizon Fund to make equity investments in tech companies that benefit the media sector. In Colorado, the Gates Family Foundation has used loan guarantees and other forms of blended financing to support a digital startup, The Colorado Sun, as well as a shared printing facility launched by the National Trust for Local News. Invest Appalachia is applying its community development lending expertise to local news with a Rural News Fund that provides one-year grants and technical assistance to small news organizations to build their capacity for debt. URL Media’s Media Resilience Fund provides working-capital loans of up to $100,000 to local news organizations.
- Keep reading, “Local news publishers seek impact financing for ‘civic infrastructure’,” by David Bank.
Dealflow: Personal Finance
Climate First raises $67 million to combine impact retail banking and solar lending. One look at the big ugly bar charts illustrating banks’ addiction to financing fossil fuels would make anyone rethink who they bank with. Climate First Bancorp launched its green banking products in 2021 to give US bank account holders an alternative. “Ultimately it’s our individual deposits that are financing a lot of the problems in the world, whether it’s climate-related and oil and gas infrastructure, whether it’s weapons manufacturing, whether it’s private prisons,” said Climate First’s Chris Castro. The company’s mission is to be an institution “where individuals and businesses can have their deposits in a place where they’re leveraged for good.” The Florida-based company operates Climate First Bank, a FDIC-insured bank, and OneEthos, a regulated fintech company supporting solar lending for both lending institutions and installers. Wellington Management and Alliance Bernstein are backing the company with $67 million to grow its base of green banking customers and its support for solar installations, which stands at more than 9,000 projects.
- Retail impact investing. Climate First Bank began accepting checking, money market and personal and business loan customers in 2021. Five years later, it has more than $1.8 billion in assets by offering high-yield impact checking and savings accounts; accounts that donate accrued interest to regeneration or LGBTQ+ organizations; commercial and personal solar loans; employee-ownership lending; home mortgages; and impact-focused money market accounts. The bank’s growth is primarily driven by the quarter of its portfolio that is in renewable energy. That’s despite the Trump administration’s efforts to kill momentum on climate and renewable energy investments. “The demand is still there for people looking at the economics,” said Climate First’s Ken LaRoe.
- Check it out.
Seven Generations Capital launches Indigenous housing fund. The Vancouver-based firm closed the first C$75 million (US$54 million) for a planned C$300 million fund to finance housing and commercial development on Indigenous lands in Canada. The Seven Generations Growth Fund fund is backed by Royal Bank of Canada and the Victoria Foundation, a British Columbia-based community foundation, along with other foundations, pensions funds and family offices. Seven Generations, founded by brothers Michael and Andrew Hungerford of Gwich’in ancestry, will finance housing, mixed-use and light industrial projects on Indigenous and adjacent lands in Canadian cities. Federal loan guarantee programs typically used by Indigenous developers don’t kick in until late in a project’s life; Seven Generations will provide equity capital during the earliest stages of development. Development and asset management will be provided by Hungerford Properties, the brothers’ real estate firm.
- Returns on inclusion. Providing adequate housing to members of Canada’s First Nations requires more than 55,000 new units and improvements to more than 80,000 ones, at an estimated cost of C$44 billion, according to the Assembly of First Nations. The Hungerford brothers have publicly shared that they built Hungerford Properties more than two decades before publicly embracing their Gwich’in heritage because of bias in the industry. The fund’s first project is an eco-friendly townhome development with Westbank First Nation’s Ntityix Development Corporation in Kelowna. Seven Generations expects to back 10 to 15 projects with the goal of supporting thousands of new housing units.
- More.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Stockholm-based Vaja raised €3.1 million ($3.4 million) in seed funding led by The Footprint Firm to commercialize solar technology for northern climates. (Vaja)
- The Fibers Fund made a low-interest loan to Cindy Castro New York, a women’s clothing brand founded by Ecuadorian designer Cindy Castro. (Fibers Fund)
- SLM Partners made the last investment from its €30 million ($35 million) fund for regenerative agriculture in Spain and Portugal, backing an olive orchard in Spain’s Aragon region. (SLM Partners)
Podcast: Circular Economy
Archipelago Ventures brings a collective approach to investing in circular materials (podcast). Plastics are so 1950s. “Everyone’s coming to the idea that we need to rethink the traditional polymer and plastic economy, which developed in the 1950s and has remained fairly static up until now,” says Archipelago Ventures’ Lucy Mortimer. “The number of patents being filed for this sector – let’s call it broadly circular economy – is seeing exponential growth.” Mortimer, who has an environmental finance background, and Justin Guest, a chemist, launched Archipelago Ventures in 2020 to invest in materials innovation, from new chemistries that can replace fossil fuel inputs, to enzymes that deconstruct composite textiles, to AI-powered sorting systems that can distinguis between various cheap forms of nylon. “What we look for are technologies that can take a waste stream that is undervalued and give it more value,” Mortimer tells ImpactAlpha on the latest Agents of Impact podcast.
- Emerging managers. The first-time manager launched into a difficult fundraising environment, shaped by geopolitical turmoil and investor caution. Rather than waiting for a traditional capital to materialize, Archipelago created the Circular Plastics Accelerator, a single-investor vehicle supported by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, or WRAP, a UK-based climate nonprofit. “We challenged ourselves to find a new model that would enable us to bring those LP commitments into investments in a different way,” says Mortimer. The accelerator helped establish a track record and seeded investments that later informed the launch of Archipelago’s UK venture fund. Builders Vision, the family office founded by Walmart heir Lukas Walton, provided anchor capital (see, “G is for growth after $1 billion raise for Lukas Walton-backed S2G Investments”).
- Collective diligence. Archipelago is experimenting with another unconventional idea: collective diligence. The approach brings prospective limited partners together in a common process, led by anchor investors Builders Vision and WRAP. Archipelago itself steps out of the room, allowing LPs to ask questions and coordinate due diligence amongst themselves. “One of the things that inhibits allocators from making commitments to funds like us is a lack of transparency around timelines,” says Mortimer. She hopes the collective diligence process will do more than help Archipelago close its round. “If other funds can take something from this in terms of how they approach transparency and fundraising, that would be a really great impact for us to have generated too.”
- Keep reading and tune in. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Ángel Cabrera of the Georgia Institute of Technology will join the Aspen Institute as president and CEO this November, succeeding Dan Porterfield… Allyson Tucker of the Washington State Investment Board, and Scott Chan of CalSTRS join the Ownership Works board of directors… IDB Invest’s Aldo Malpartida will become head of infrastructure and energy for the Caribbean Region at the development lender.
iAlumbra seeks a manager for its regenerative tourism and retail operation in Baja California, Mexico… Lendable is hiring an Asia lead and investment director in Singapore… FMO has an opening for an Africa-focused agribusiness associate, based in The Hague… Amazonia Impact Ventures seeks a financial management specialist for Brazil nut value chain cooperatives.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– June 16, 2026
