The Brief

The Brief: Robert Raben picks his fights to advance diversity

ImpactAlpha · January 6, 2026

Greetings Agents of Impact!

In today’s Brief:

  • Agents of Impact podcast with Robert Raben
  • Bank loans to green Chile’s copper production
  • Helping Arab youth build career skills
  • Impact Voices: Operating system for a just economy

Robert Raben: The arc of business and finance bends toward diversity (podcast). The death of diversity has been greatly exaggerated. In popular culture, in consumer behavior and in workplaces and organizations, people in the US and elsewhere see the value of vibrant communities and diverse experiences. Indeed, public opinion polling suggests that support for “diversity, equity and inclusion” went up in 2025 – aided, ironically, by the ferocious backlash against DEI unleashed by the Trump administration. Robert Raben, a longtime advocate and strategy consultant, has the numbers to prove it. “Support for DEI has gone up 40% because it’s now branded, and the people who supported it all along now know what they’re supporting,” Raben says on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. As for the opponents, he says, “You have to ask, Why do they fight so hard? And they fight so hard because it’s working.”

  • Messaging points. Raben, a lawyer who has served on Capitol Hill as a staffer and at the Justice Department, formed the Raben Group in 2001. With allies, Raben stood up NxtLevel to share polling data, research and messaging points “for your organizations, for leaders, about how people hear diversity, how people want to talk about it, how you pivot when people attack you for being a DEI person, and move on to what people want to hear.” Raben contrasts the approaches of two major retailers, Costco and Target. Costco last year affirmed its support for diversity among its employees and suppliers and reported 8% gains in both sales and profits for the year ended Aug. 31. Target, which retreated from some of its public diversity commitments soon after Donald Trump took office, reported a sales decline. Target CEO Brian Cornell last year acknowledged in a call with analysts that the backlash to the retrenchment, including a boycott, hurt sales. “That was the first piece of data we had in the modern era of a corporate leader conceding that curtailing diversity hurt the bottom line,” Raben says. “With Target, we were able to say, ‘Okay, folks, you’re now seeing what you know – that diversity positively affects the bottom line.’”
  • Picking fights. Raben has zeroed in on the financial asset-management industry, and in particular the selection of fund managers by major asset allocators. Raben founded the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative to increase the slice of assets managed by diverse-owned firms, which has been stubbornly stuck at about 1.3% for years. Raben is taking aim at both allocators and managers that are all-male or all-white. “We’re going to push in the courts what it means to seemingly have a government that says it’s okay to curate by whiteness, but not by Blackness,” he says. First, DAMI is trying to get the numbers. The initiative has pressed public pension funds and universities to report statistics on the diversity of the fund management firms they select. The states of New York, Illinois and many California funds, along with cities like Dallas, have provided detailed reports. Raben is “picking fights” with New Mexico, Nevada and the District of Columbia – hardly bastions of conservatism – which he says have resisted requests to provide the information. “If you’re not working with the vast number of women or people of color in asset management,” he says, “you’re missing out on performance, you’re missing out on strategies, you’re missing out on investments.”

Dealflow: Green Finance

Chile’s copper giant scores $600 million in loans to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Copper is a key ingredient to the clean energy transition, and no country produces more of it than Chile, which provides nearly one-quarter of the global supply. To make copper production greener, Codelco, Chile’s state-owned copper mining company, has committed to become fully renewably-powered by 2030. A new $600 million debt package from HSBC and Banco Santander will allow Codelco to renegotiate power purchase agreements and to award new contracts to renewable energy providers. The debt is guaranteed by the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, or MIGA, which derisks development and green investments in emerging markets. This is Codelco’s second round of green financing with a MIGA guarantee, and follows a $532 million loan from Crédit Agricole CIB in 2024. The new financing should enable Codelco to get to 85% of its renewables goal by the end of the year.

  • Climate leadership. Codelco consumes about 9% of Chile’s electricity supply. The country is ahead of the curve on climate action. Since 2020, it has increased its renewably-generated electricity mix from 46% to 70%. Chile plans to phase-out all coal plants, which today account for about 14% of its electricity mix, by 2040. MIGA gave the Codelco debt deal a low risk rating, based on its review of relevant environmental and social risks and Codelco’s labor and working conditions. A half-dozen other performance standards were deemed by MIGA not applicable to the investment, including community health, safety and security, and Indigenous peoples. Last year, a legal dispute with Indigenous communities tied up Codelco’s lithium mining deal in the northern part of the country. The collapse of one of its biggest mines last August killed six miners.

Business For Teens secures seed funding to build Arab youth’s career skills. Young people in North Africa and elsewhere in the Arab world are having a tough time finding good economic opportunities. High youth unemployment, which was cited as a major contributor to the Arab Spring popular uprisings more than 15 years ago, has only increased. More than 30% of young people are not enrolled in any form of education, employment or training; most end up in the informal economy. Cairo-based Business For Teens is tackling the problem by partnering with schools to offer entrepreneurship training and financial literacy skills to kids aged 10 to 16. The company works with 10 schools in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a group of angel investors to support its goal of expanding to 30 schools and training 6,000 students in 2026.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • African fintech giant Flutterwave acquired Nigeria-based Mono, a banking infrastructure provider that, similar to Plaid in the US, facilitates data sharing and interconnectivity across Africa’s fragmented banking sector. (Flutterwave)
  • Google’s parent company Alphabet is acquiring data center developer Intersect for nearly $4.8 billion in cash. Intersect develops data centers with renewable energy and gas installations to power them. The company is already partially owned by Google. (Alphabet)
  • Rwanda-based Kayko raised a $1.2 million seed equity round from Burrow Capital, the Luxembourg Development Agency and other investors for its business software and embedded financing for small businesses. (Disrupt Africa)
  • Sora Technology, based in Japan, secured 400 million yen ($2.5 million) to use drones for infectious disease response and climate issues in Africa. (Sora Technology)

Impact Voices: Situational Awareness

Beyond the myth of impact investing: what comes next. “There is philanthropic investing, and there is commercial investing, and there is nothing in between,” read the tagline of the much-discussed article by Mulago Foundation’s Kevin Starr in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “There is no such thing as impact investing.” ImpactAlpha distilled the discussion in yesterday’s “impact first” lookahead. Starr argued for honesty about what he called a binary reality: philanthropic capital takes risk, commercial capital takes scale. In this framing, philanthropy’s role is to de-risk enterprises until they are ready to “graduate” into commercial markets. “This framing feels pragmatic. It is also deeply limiting,” Aunnie Patton Power of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and the Innovative Finance Initiative, and Delta Fund’s Katie and Brian Boland, write in a guest post. “The problem is not that companies fail to graduate. The problem is the assumption that graduation is desirable.”

  • Fit for purpose. When Starr argues that accepting lower returns in pursuit of impact is simply “philanthropy,” he assumes that the space between donation and venture capital is largely illusory, write the authors. That assumption echoes a much older problem in development finance: the so-called “missing middle” of enterprises that are too large for microfinance, too small or too slow-growing for commercial banks or venture capital. “These are not marginal firms. They are the backbone of local economies,” the authors say. “What’s missing is not demand, talent or value creation. What’s missing is fit-for-purpose capital.”
  • Third path. The middle is not empty. “It is crowded with viable businesses that generate steady cash flows, create dignified jobs, and anchor communities, as well as with financial instruments designed specifically to serve them.” Patient capital can “anchor enterprises in structures that protect mission, distribute power and retain wealth locally,” they write. Revenue-based financing, redeemable equity, capped-return structures, and long-term stewardship models are not concessions, but rather financial mechanisms built for enterprises whose value is real but whose growth does not follow a Silicon Valley power law. “These instruments are not exceptions. They are the operating system of a just economy.” The real question is not whether impact investing exists, Power and the Bolands say. “The question is whether we are willing to imagine and build what comes after it.”

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Marisa Magallanez becomes president and CEO of the Albuquerque Community Foundation and New Mexico Community Trust… Abell Foundation appoints Fagan Harris, former chief of staff to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, as president and CEO. He succeeds Robert Embry Jr., who retired at the end of 2025… Community Ventures taps Troy Hannigan as executive director, who steps in for David La Fontaine, who is retiring after 30 years with the organization.

Harry Davies, previously with the Catalytic Capital Consortium, joins Livelihood Impact Fund as impact investing director… Gary Lee is promoted to project finance manager at Trajectory Energy Partners… The California Coalition for Community Investment taps Rachel Mueller, previously with Public Interest Advocates, as advocacy director… Aligned Climate Capital promotes Mary King and Zach Good to senior vice presidents, Seb Soltysik to associate, and Rachel Powlen to operations associate. 

NatureVest seeks a nature finance managing director in Washington, DC… Cypress Creek Renewables is on the hunt for an associate of corporate partnerships and investments in New York… Also in New York, the GIIN is recruiting a chief partnership officer… Gates Foundation is hiring a senior manager of strategy and implementation management… Blue Forest seeks an events coordinator and an investment associate… Social Capital Foundation is looking for a philanthropy portfolio associate in Amsterdam or Madrid… FMO has an opening for a structured finance officer in The Hague.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– Jan. 6, 2026