The Week in impact investing: Adaptation and resilience

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

• Roundup: Designing capital markets that work for all
• Podcasts from ImpactAlpha, Activest and Impact(ed)
• Agent of Impact: Sara Ziff fights for labor rights in fashion

🗣 Designing finance. Original Agent of Impact Fran Seegull makes the distinction between good faith and bad faith critiques of impact investing. The bad faith critique declares that sustainable finance doesn’t, or perhaps shouldn’t, work, in order to justify a reversion to legacy financial decisionmaking. The good faith critique serves the cause of moving forward, not back. Per Calvert Impact’s Jenn Pryce: “Our work is not delivering results at the speed our local, national and global conditions require.” And from Aunnie Patton Power and Erinch Sahan: “The tools we have developed as a field have largely failed to scale or radically change traditional financial market architecture.” Both guest posts invite Agents of Impact to shape new markets and fund structures so capital flows to the people and places that need it. Just as historical exclusion from wealth was engineered, so too can inclusion be purpose-built, ImpactAlpha contributing editor Napoleon Wallace wrote in his latest column. “The Re:Construction is underway,” he declared. “From scarcity to solidarity. From privatization to participation. From market myth to shared mission.”

Such co-creation goes beyond design thinking to design consciousness, from the methods to a shared awareness that we made this world and thus can remake it (h/t Neil Goldberg). We can transition many more businesses to worker-ownered, for example, while helping business owners ‘exit responsibly,” as Roodgally Senatus put it in his writeup of Apis & Heritage’s employee-led buyout strategy. We can build on the renewable energy leadership of “red” states like Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas and Texas, noted contributor Clint Wilder, rather than raising energy prices, destroying jobs and tanking the planet, as Amy Cortese reported the budget barons in Congress would have it. We can finally bring quality care to India’s rural patients by smartly leveraging tele-health’s cost advantages, contributor Shefali Anand reported from India’s eastern state of Odisha. And with the climate catastrophe already at hand, we can follow the lead of Singapore’s Temasek and invest in the unavoidable opportunities of climate adaptation and resilience, as detailed by Amy and Jessica Pothering. 

We can design as well the models artificial intelligence will use to play a role in this co-creation. That AI will have a big role is evidenced by the ambitious AI strategy of Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and global asset manager Mubadala. But so will smallholder farmers, by restoring  soil and capturing carbon at the same time. After winning $50 million in the XPRIZE carbon removal competition for Mati Carbon’s “enhanced rock weathering” technique, Shantanu Agarwal told Jessica that he’s putting farmers first in the design of the startup’s franchise model. Each local enterprise will be required to share half of its carbon credit proceeds with farmers. “If we want to use impact investing to solve wicked problems, we need radically impactful funding models that flip the script on traditional finance,” Patton Power says. Pryce’s call to action: “Let’s take the next step – together – to build capital markets that truly work for all.” – David Bank

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: Impact investing’s original sins. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Two views on the future of impact investing from Calvert Impact and Innovative Finance Initiative. Plus, Temasek makes the case for the private equity opportunity in climate adaptation and resilience. And, how Mati Carbon is adding debt capital to its $50 million XPRIZE to finance carbon removal and soil restoration in tropical zones.

• Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

🧑🏽‍🎓 Impact(ed): Financing worker ownership transitions. Apis & Heritage’s Todd Leverette joins Lucas and Eric to talk about employee ownership transitions and the role that buyout funds play in promoting worker ownership. Listen in.

• ICYMI: “Apis & Heritage aims to help business owners ‘exit responsibly’ – to their employees”

🗺️ The Activest Podcast: Micah, Ellen, Homero and John dig into bond market trends this year. Such as: the increased presence of higher education institutions, particularly HBCUs, in the muni markets; nonprofit tax changes and tax-optimized municipal bonds; and the need for racial equity analysis in public budgets. Check it out.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Sara Ziff, Model Alliance: Fighting for labor standards for fashion workers. On a recent spring evening, a crowd of fashionistas gathered at a townhouse on New York’s Park Avenue to celebrate the passage of the Fashion Workers Act, a landmark law protecting models that goes into effect in New York next month. The guest of honor was Sara Ziff, founder and executive director of Model Alliance, a labor advocacy group that was instrumental in passing the law. Before you pull out your tiny violin, hear her out. “This work for me is personal,” she says. “Many of the issues that we work to address are issues that I experienced firsthand, whether it’s sexual abuse or financial exploitation, or things as simple as wanting to see your own contracts and agreements and have insight into your own finances.”  

Ziff was “discovered” in the mid-1990s at age 14 by a fashion photographer on her way home from Bronx High School. Soon she was modeling after school, and later, walking international runways for Prada and Chanel and gracing ads for Stella McCartney. “I was one of the lucky ones,” she acknowledges. She also experienced the industry’s dark side, from opaque, one-sided contracts that left many young women in debt, to sexual exploitation. It was not uncommon for modeling agencies to send their young charges, unchaperoned, to dinners and events with businessmen. In 2009, Ziff co-directed a documentary about her and her peers’ experiences, sparking a “me too” moment for fashion more than a decade before Hollywood’s. She founded Model Alliance in 2012 to “inject a labor consciousness and an activist culture into an industry where there really was none,” says Ziff, who wrote her thesis at Harvard’s Kennedy School on the history of labor organizing.

In fashion epicenter of New York, Model Alliance helped pass the Child Model Act in 2013, which extended labor protections to models under age 18, and the 2022 Adult Survivors Act, which enables victims of sexual abuse to seek legal justice beyond the statute of limitations. The Fashion Workers Act will regulate modeling agencies for the first time and require them to look out for the interests of the models they represent. Agencies must provide contracts that clearly spell out payment terms, scope of work and usage rights. And they must get models’ consent before using their AI-generated likeness. The law “will bring a lot more transparency and accountability to modeling agencies,” says Ziff, who is now educating fashion workers about the law. 

The protections Ziff helped win have benefited a wider community, and her vision is more expansive than the organization’s name suggests. “We have a broad vision for labor solidarity across the supply chain,” Ziff explains. Her small nonprofit has stood with garment workers to advocate for the Bangladesh accord, and supported California’s Garment Worker Protection Act and the federal Fabric Act, which aims to improve working conditions for US garment workers. Says Ziff, “I think of the Model Alliance as a bit of a laboratory for experimentation and thinking about creative solutions to winning rights and protections in a really hostile labor environment.”

• Keep reading, “Sara Ziff, Model Alliance: Fighting for labor standards for fashion workers,” by Amy Cortese on ImpactAlpha. ImpactAlpha’s coverage of Sustainable Fashion is sponsored by Cordes Foundation.

The Week’s Deals, 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 check out all of this week’s dealflow reporting. 

Clean Energy Ventures tapped David Meyer, previously with MassChallenge, as community manager… Renovus Capital Partners welcomed Phil Garbarini, an MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as an Impact Capital Managers mosaic fellow… MacArthur Foundation named Bola Olusanya, former chief investment officer of The Nature Conservancy, as vice president and CIO to manage its $9 billion endowment… 

Pegasus Capital Advisors appointed Jean Rogers, former senior managing director at Blackstone and the founder of the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board, as senior operating advisor… Chris Thompson, previously with New York Life Investments, joined the Heron Foundation as a senior director of investments… The Purpose Trust Ownership Network welcomed Elizabeth Corvi, previously with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, as program manager. 

Craig Hunter, previously with Operator Ventures, joined Amplify Capital as partner…Symbiotics appointed Bezant Chongo as CEO of Symbiotics Capacity Building, Symbiotics’ specialized consulting and education group, replacing founding CEO Mariano Larena… Housing Partnership Network tapped Anthony Scott, formerly with Durham Housing Authority, as vice president of its Tulsa Housing Partnership in Oklahoma.

Kevin Fanfoni, previously with Climate United, joined Nautilus Solar Energy as capital markets director… Beneficial State Bank welcomed Shamara van der Voort, previously with West Coast Community Bank, as chief operating officer… Overlay Capital welcomed Seth McClure, previously with Peachtree Group, as a senior analyst… Manasi Parvatikar joined Karya as head of development from Yunus Social Business. 

Invest Appalachia tapped Victoria Hewlett, previously with Appalachian Opportunity Fund, as an investment associate, and Justin Tien, previously with Deutsche Bank, as an investment manager… Stephen Heintz, president and CEO of Rockefeller Brothers Fund, plans to retire next year… Ibrahim Rashid, previously with Marquette Associates, joined Sorenson Impact Institute as a senior associate of impact investing and program-related investments.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– May 16, 2025