The Brief

The Brief: ‘The Reconstruction Will Not Be Televised’ remixes a classic

ImpactAlpha · June 16, 2025

Greetings Agents of Impact!

In today’s Brief:

  • A Re:Construction remix for Juneteenth 
  • Empathetic AI for healthcare
  • Lessons from MasterCard Foundation’s Africa Growth Fund

‘The Reconstruction Will Not Be Televised’ remixes a classic to build the movement for shared prosperity. In time for Juneteenth, a newly released single turns community governance, local loan funds, real estate cooperatives and employee ownership buyouts into spoken-word poetry – with a familiar backbeat. North Carolina entrepreneur Napoleon Wallace has rewritten and remixed Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic to highlight bread-and-butter solutions that could unite rural and urban, red and blue, Black and white around economic uplift and local empowerment. “Gil’s original was prophetic,” says Wallace, a contributing editor at ImpactAlpha. “It was a warning about letting media distract us from the real work of justice. And it still hits. We’re in a similar moment of crisis, a recession of engagement. For that and for Juneteenth, I wanted to pay homage with a remix.”

  • Spoken word. The single is a five-minute play in our “Playbook for Shared Prosperity,” in a half-dozen or so verses. “There will be no reruns, fam,” Wallace narrates in one stanza. “You won’t get another shot at stopping the selloff of sacred land or buying back the corner store that’s now a Chase branch. But you can join the movement to rewrite ownership like the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, where tenants and neighbors are member-owners of homes and storefronts. No extractive profits. No silent evictions. Just permanence and power. The Reconstruction doesn’t get a reboot. It gets built block by block, title by title.” Wallace’s line references how, by removing land and housing from the market before it’s snatched up by speculative developers, EBPREC is aiming to preserve housing affordability in fast-gentrifying neighborhoods of Oakland, Calif.
  • Voice of experience. Wallace is the subject of ImpactAlpha’s award-winning mini-documentary, “Equity and ownership,” which charts his quest to build strategies for shared prosperity while living with the challenges of ALS, including the loss of his ability to speak. For the remix, Wallace uses an AI-generated voice, cloned from podcasts and interviews recorded before his diagnosis, with which he also narrates the documentary. The “Playbook for Shared Prosperity” is ImpactAlpha’s collection of dozens of practical strategies for reducing prices, building wealth, supporting families and restoring communities (add your favorite – or your own). “Yes, the headlines are brutal, heartbreaking and demoralizing,” Wallace says on The Activest Podcast, where he launched the single. “But I also think they are clarifying, revealing which solutions actually hold up across political and economic cycles.”
  • Juneteenth rising. Wallace’s lyrics tie back to this week’s commemoration of the arrival, 160 years ago, of US troops to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the last remaining holdouts of Texas. Wallace’s column is an anchor of ImpactAlpha’s project, Re:Construction, which ties back explicitly to that period’s history while emphasizing the building of shared prosperity going forward. In the song, Wallace name-checks a half-dozen such restorative economic strategies, including Chicago Trend, Boston Ujima Project, Black Farmer Fund, Kataly Foundation, Seed Commons and Apis & Heritage Capital Partners. Wallace is a co-founder of Activest, the “fiscal justice” advocacy organization that surfaced the racially charged practices many cities use to balance their budgets, and fund their police, with extractive fines and fees, as well as its registered impact advisor, Next World Assets. “The organizations I highlight aren’t waiting for the storm to pass. They are the port in the storm, and they’re building through it,” Wallace says. “They need capital that’s patient, partnerships that are principled, and policy that protects their progress.”
  • Keep reading, “‘The Reconstruction Will Not Be Televised’ remixes a classic to build the movement for shared prosperity,” by David Bank. Listen to Napoleon Wallace’s new single on YouTube.

Sponsored: Maycomb Capital

Providing a financial runway for borrowers and real results for communities. Now more than ever, Maycomb Capital is focused on lending to organizations – both nonprofit and for-profit – that support access to economic opportunity for those in need across the US. The firm is seeing real results from its partners, including expanded access to standards-aligned learning curricula, living-wage jobs and improved maternal health outcomes. “We believe the current moment underscores the value of impact private credit,” says Maycomb founder and managing partner Andi Phillips. “When we provide a dependable, financial runway for our borrowers, not only does it support the people participating in those programs, it also preserves the jobs of those who work on the frontlines.” 

Dealflow: Investing in Health

Ellipsis Health raises $45 million for ’emotionally intelligent’ AI healthcare. The San Francisco-based health tech company’s AI voice agent is designed to support patients with complex physical, behavioral and social needs who incur the majority of healthcare costs. The agent, called Sage, was built using data from millions of live clinical patient calls over several years. Ellipsis says Sage’s “vocal biomarker” technology can help it adjust its tone and care approach to a patient’s emotional and mental state. “Care management is not just about collecting information and performing tasks for the patient,” said Ellipsis’s Mainul Mondal, “but also listening to them, being supportive as they move through their care journey and understanding what are the most important priorities to them.” 

  • Human-centered care. A shortage of healthcare workers and an increasingly hard-to-navigate healthcare system creates challenging conditions for both health workers and patients. Healthcare needs “AI that can extend human capabilities while preserving the empathy and clinical judgment that defines great care,” said Amit Khanna of Salesforce, which co-led Ellipsis’s Series A round with Khosla Ventures and CVS Health Ventures. Ellipsis is using Salesforce’s Health Cloud platform, which combines electronic medical records and non-clinical data from, for example, wearable tech devices. The combination is “delivering measurable improvements in healthcare operations and patient outcomes,” said Mondal. 
  • Supplementing humans. Ellipsis intends to help busy healthcare professionals in coordinating and managing patient care between visits. “I’ve seen how hard it is to deliver quality care between visits,” said Khosla’s Hal Paz, a former practicing physician and former head of Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center. “Voice-based care management has become essential, but it’s nearly impossible to scale cost-effectively or without significant loss of quality,” Paz added. “Sage stands apart by training its AI on real clinical conversations, enabling emotionally intelligent, context-aware support, even for the most complex patients.”
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • A fund managed by Climate Fund Managers and the Netherlands’ Invest International will invest up to $20 million in a large-scale green ammonia production facility in South Africa. (Climate Fund Managers)
  • JPMorganChase committed $18 million in debt and grant capital to IFF, a Chicago-based community development financial institution, for lending to affordable housing developers in the Midwest. (JPMorganChase)
  • The Netherlands’ Rabo Investments acquired a minority stake in Area of People to help real estate developers, investors and housing associates integrate social responsibility practices into their operations. (Rabo Investments)
  • Geothermal darling Fervo snagged $206 million from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, Mercuria and X-Caliber Rural Capital for construction of a new geothermal power plant in Utah. (TechCrunch)

Signals: Impact in Africa

Mastercard Foundation knows how stakeholders feel about its Africa Growth Fund. The Mastercard Foundation’s Africa Growth Fund is among the most significant catalytic capital initiatives for African small businesses. Now in its fourth year, the fund has committed nearly $200 million to 16 African fund managers and investment vehicles, with a handful more set to close in the coming months. A new “learning book” from the Canadian foundation, one of the world’s largest, reflects on difficult lessons of trying to shift investment norms and support local economic growth through market experimentation. “The fund has the power to shift priorities in the market by signalling its criteria and aspirations. We did not use this power effectively, and we sent some mixed messages before eventually strengthening our processes and systems,” the organization admits.

  • Lessons learned. The 66-page report represents an acknowledgement of the fund’s missteps and market criticisms on its multi-year journey advocating for systemic change in how private capital in Africa is deployed. “From the beginning, it was built as a learning prototype,” said Femi Balogun of the Mennonite Economic Development Association, or MEDA, the manager of the Africa Growth Fund. Such admissions are rare from a large funder and provide valuable lessons for the foundation and other funders investing in Africa. Market participants say the missteps have caused significant setbacks to some local fund managers working with limited financial resources in a difficult market.
  • Mixed signals. Mastercard Foundation set out with three objectives, explained Balogun on a webinar last week. “First, to invest capital into women-led investment vehicles and small businesses that are African-owned and led. Second, to create dignified and fulfilling work for young women on the continent—that’s actually the North Star of the fund. And third, to influence the ecosystem in ways that shift power.” Balogun’s framing of the fund’s priorities highlights one of the major mis-signals the fund sent to the market. The fund’s portfolio is 100% composed of women-led or co-led funds, including Nigeria-based Aruwa Capital Management, Uganda-based Inua Capital, Kenya and Nigeria-based Chui Ventures, and Côte d’Ivoire-based Janngo Capital. But investing in female managers was not the primary goal. “It was a means to an end of creating jobs for young women,” the report states. “This tension in the market created expectations around which investment leaders should or would receive capital.”
  • Market making. Fund managers have described the fund’s years-long due diligence processes and moving targets for impact and portfolio investments. Limited partners and other ecosystem professionals, most of whom spoke to ImpactAlpha on the condition of anonymity, expressed frustration with requirements that were expensive or onerous for first-time managers. “If their goal is to support systems change, err on the side of getting money out the door to those doing the work on the ground, rather than hiring consultants to build complex strategies and processes that are out of sync with what is really needed,” said impact investing advisor Aunnie Patton Power, founder of the Innovative Finance Initiative. Joy Anderson of Criterion Institute, an Africa Growth Fund partner and author of the report, acknowledged that moving capital and moving markets “were often in juxtaposition or conflict with each other. We recognized the urgency to move capital, but we also need to build capital structures.” One fund manager said the fund was nevertheless a critical source of capital for local fund managers in a difficult funding environment. “Any funding at all, in this phase, is a blessing.”
  • Keep reading, “Mastercard Foundation knows how stakeholders feel about its Africa Growth Fund,” by Jessica Pothering. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Don’t miss these ImpactAlpha partner events this month:

Ownership Works has several openings in New York, including a partnerships principal, a partnerships senior director, a culture and business transformation principal, and a grants and impact manager… JUST is looking for a Houston-based senior community director who is bilingual in English and Spanish… Kingsley seeks a senior private equity analyst to focus on ESG and the blue economy. 

Cygnum Capital is recruiting an asset management director for East Africa… Community Investment Management is hiring a client solutions senior associate… Sorenson Impact Institute seeks an impact measurement manager in Salt Lake City, Utah… The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is on the hunt for a food and agribusiness associate.

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

Thank you for your impact!

– June 16, 2025