The Brief

The Brief: Interdisciplinary

ImpactAlpha · August 8, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

  • Interdisciplinary studies in impact 
  • New podcasts from Community Capital Lives, Criterion Institute and ImpactAlpha
  • PluggedIn: Climate tech innovation in Birmingham, Alabama.
  • Creative financing for Africa’s creative economy 

The Week in Impact Investing: Interdisciplinary

🗣 Hybrid vigor. David Sand of Community Capital Management was a history major at Princeton and a policy wonk at Harvard’s Kennedy School. David Lynn of Mission Driven Finance spent two decades trying to blend finance and philanthropy. The Davids combined their unconventional perspectives in a joint venture to create a capital call line of credit that works both for impact fund managers and for investors looking for impact in a staid corner of portfolio management, as Roodgally Senatus and I wrote this week. Their pitch for Bold Line Capital: Come to help emerging impact fund managers succeed; stay for the semi-liquid, low-risk, decent-yield alternative for your cash-equivalents.

A study from Harvard Business School’s Project on Impact Investments suggests that such interdisciplinary skills are key to career success in impact investing. Nearly a third of impact professionals had prior careers in finance, but the majority come from nonprofits, government, tech and beyond, write Harvard’s Shawn Cole, Jonah Zahnd and Marcus Sander. Pacific Community Ventures’ Bulbul Gupta is bridging her experience empowering entrepreneurs with earlier work in tech for economic potential to lay out a vision of an inclusive AI-powered economic future in a series for ImpactAlpha. Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Stephen Heintz told ImpactAlpha’s Erik Stein that being nimble and adaptable has been essential as the heirs to Standard Oil divested their fossil fuel holdings and still beat their financial benchmarks over the past decade. Flexibility is important as well for the growing menu of employee-ownership models, each with its pros and cons, as Roodgally and I wrote, and for the healthy debate over how much wealth – and governance – is actually shared with workers.

Hybrid vigor is apparent all across the impact space. Hopelab Ventures is identifying founders with lived experience to design effective responses to mental health challenges affecting young people, as Nina Sabarre, Erin Sietstra and Arianna Taboada write. Renewable energy investors in Nepal are taking advantage of the country’s ample hydroelectric resources to spur economic growth and EV adoption, even as climate change shrinks Himalayan glaciers, Shefali Anand reports. Aircapture’s Matt Atwood went from growing algae for biofuel to selling carbon captured from the air, driving down the costs of a technology that could be crucial to stemming catastrophic climate change, I found in my visit to the company. 

The lesson for impact job seekers: “Don’t look for impact in the title,” Stockbridge Advisors Mark Newberg advises. “Focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, figure out whether the job is positioned to allow it, and then integrate impact into your every day.” In energy, education, agriculture or health, “once you find the ways to align impact with the organization’s goals, you’ll have an impact job,” he says. “Whether your title says so or not.” – David Bank

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: How Aircapture aims to capture the market for carbon by cost-effectively removing it from the air. How Bold Line Capital is meeting short-term liquidity needs for impact and emerging fund managers. And, who actually lands a job in impact investing? Researchers at Harvard Business School’s Project on Impact Investments crunch the numbers.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Employee ownership and community wealth building. Hosts Joel Skene of The Mindful Marketplace Show and Jen Risley of AMIBA are joined by David Kenney of Project Equity’s Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund. Kenney shares how his background leading VertueLab – a nonprofit that uses philanthropic capital to fund early-stage climate tech – informs his work providing debt financing for employee ownership transitions. 

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Power, performance and the politics of procedure. Host Joy Anderson explores the promise and perils of using checklists for gender lens and systems change investing. On one hand, checking boxes can limit deep understanding and meaningful action; on the other, checklists can serve as useful tools for compliance and control. Listen in.

The Week’s Call

PluggedIn: What makes Birmingham an unconventional hub for climate innovation (video). Many people might not think of Birmingham, Ala., as a capital for climate technology. The Techstars Energy Accelerator is proving them wrong. Leveraging its unique community and strategic partnerships, the accelerator is nurturing a new generation of climate and energy startups and challenging the notion that innovation can only happen in “sexier” cities. “Our superpower is we’ve really over-indexed on community,” Techstars’ Rae’Mah Henderson told host Sherrell Dorsey on the latest episode of PluggedIn.

  • Community-first. Leaning into community means giving climate startups in the program quick feedback from local partners such as Alabama Power, a Southern Company subsidiary. “Would you use this product? And if not, why? Honest feedback normally would take a long time in other ecosystems,” Henderson said. 

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Wakiuru Njuguna, HEVA Fund: Creative financing for the creative economy in Africa (video). Africa’s creative economy, from fashion to filmmaking to music to theater, generates nearly $60 billion in revenues and thousands of jobs each year. Creative businesses rarely fit the bill for traditional capital providers. That market gap represents an opportunity for Nairobi-based HEVA Fund, which invests in creative entrepreneurs to drive employment for young people who have turned to platforms like TikTok to capitalize on digital opportunities. “The ripple effect of investing in creative businesses is massive in terms of the multiplier effect from a job opportunity perspective,” HEVA’s Wakiuru Njuguna explained in a video interview in ImpactAlpha’s series, Pathways to Growth, produced with the Collaborative for Frontier Finance. “If you put in $10,000 in a film production, you get around five jobs.”

  • Creative capital. Njuguna worked in the creative industry under NEST, a collective of multidisciplinary artists in Nairobi, and saw first hand the limits of the industry’s inconsistent grant funding. Development finance institutions are starting to appreciate the job-creation potential of creative industries and have begun committing capital. Last month, the International Finance Corp. and France’s Proparco invested $50 million in equity in Helios Investment Partners to boost job creation in Africa’s sports and entertainment sectors. The African Export-Import Bank launched a $1 billion fund in May to develop Africa’s film industry. This week, the IFC and Sony Innovation Fund Africa backed Lagos-based Filmmakers Mart, one of Africa’s first integrated digital production platforms.
  • Film fund. With HEVA, Njuguna is working to de-risk African film projects with a $40 million blended finance fund. HEVA launched the fund last year with entertainment production company Next Narrative Africa. It is seeking $30 million in equity and $10 million in grants. The film fund’s equity component will invest up to 30% in investment-ready projects to attract other commercial and philanthropic funders. “We know that creators are actually driving businesses,” Njuguna said. “They are driving how we spend, how we consume. They’re even driving wellness, and how we look at the news that we are going to consume. Everything right now is driven around the creator economy.”
  • Keep reading, “Creative financing for the creative economy in Africa (video),” by Lucy Ngige.

The Week’s Impact Voices

  • Amazon just cut plastic packaging by 28%. Now comes the hard part. In response to pressure from shareholders, Amazon reports major reductions in its use of single-use plastics. As You Sow’s Conrad MacKerron says Amazon must go further to address hard-to-recycle plastics in its private-label and Whole Foods products, and by setting company-wide plastic reduction targets. Check it out.
  • Financing a just transition means rewriting the rules: Here’s the toolkit. With grants and interest-free loans, the Just Transition Integrated Capital Fund is centering justice, democratic decision-making, and borrower dignity over profits. Lora Smith shares how the fund’s Tool Lending Library equips others to adopt non-extractive, trust-based financing. See how.
  • Microfinance and mangroves: Connecting capital and conservation. Coastal communities are often left out of billions of dollars in commitments to sustainable ocean finance. Magnitude Global Finance’s Maxwell McGrath-Horn and Spencer Parsons argue that mangrove-focused microfinance could support livelihoods, natural ecosystems and sustainable development. Read more.
  • Philanthropy loves innovation. So why is it killing it? To truly address systemic challenges like poverty, climate change and racial inequity, philanthropy must shift from risk-averse grantmaking to bold, long-term investments that empower visionary leaders, writes NXTHVN’s Jason Price. Hear him out.

The Week’s Talent and Jobs

💼 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. And catch up on all of ImpactAlpha’s dealflow reporting this week.

Ellen Brooks, who previously led innovative finance for the International Rescue Committee, is joining Village Capital as its new CEO (read her guest post on ImpactAlpha, “USAID crisis forces a reckoning – and remaking – of international development”). Brooks succeeds Allie Burns, who is stepping down after more than six years … Patricia McCall became Winrock International’s chief strategy and growth officer… Elizabeth Peterson joined Sonen Capital as a research associate.

Yehia Houry stepped up to the role of CEO for Flat6Labs… ImpactAssets promoted Dana Cotter as chief growth and impact officer… Jack Warning, previously with Cerity Partners Ventures, joined Supply Change Capital as senior associate… Social Finance added Shane Mulligan, previously with Abt Global, as director of impact investments… Julie Greco, previously with Energy Capital Ventures, joined Climate Adaptive Infrastructure as a senior associate… Cayden Hercules, a graduate student in architecture at Morgan State University, joined Parity as a real estate development fellow.

Erika Karp, who founded Cornerstone Capital Group before its merger with Pathstone, was named president and partner at Green Alpha Investments… Sergio Gusmão Suchodolski, previously with Banco de Desenvolvimento de Minas Gerais, was appointed CEO of Fama Re:capital… Robert Rush, previously with Correlation One, joined Rebalance Capital as an investment associate… LeapFrog Investments promoted Simba Manyumwa to associate director in the Africa financial services team, and welcomed Anna Robertson as manager on its strategy team and Priyanka Behari as an associate on its people team.

Eleni Kyrou joined Green Climate Fund as head of sustainability and inclusion… Rebecca Gardy of Campbell Soup Company joined the board of directors of New Jersey Community Capital… Kirk Kellogg, William Bender, James Andrus, Maria Mahl and Oscar Onyema joined the board of Green Impact Exchange… Frances Pollock, previously with Yale Ventures, was named director of the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University… Adriana Peña Johansson joined Media Development Investment Fund as revenue expert-in-residence.

Locus appointed Pravina Raghavan, former director of the US Treasury Department’s CDFI Fund, as CEO… Federico Brusa was promoted to lead specialist of climate change at the Inter-American Development Bank… Joe Neri will step down as CEO of Illinois Facilities Fund at the end of this year. He will be replaced by Kirby Burkholder, the CDFI’s current president of core business solutions… Borja Garcia Fernandez, former head of structuring and LATAM at Citi Social Finance, joined the IFC as inclusive capital lead.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Aug. 8, 2025