TGIF, Agents of Impact!
In today’s Brief:
- Roundup: Returns on impact
- Podcasts: George Suttles, Rini Banerjee, Fernanda Camargo
- Pride Spotlight: An enduring question from Colorful Capital
🗣 Returns on impact. The best impact investments often look risky until they look inevitable. This week offered a reminder. As traders fretted over SpaceX’s post-IPO swings, early impact investors were preparing to harvest gains from bets made years ago, when universal internet access, electric vehicles and other solutions to societal challenges were dismissed as idealistic experiments rather than trillion-dollar businesses, as Amy Cortese reported. Anthropic’s expected IPO may tell the same story. Impact investors that saw early the value of AI safety could top a 50x return on investments made only two years ago. The “impact alpha” comes in more than one form. Off-grid solar provider d.light’s $50 million publicly-listed bond this week shows how patient impact capital can create businesses mature enough to attract mainstream investors, while expanding affordable financing for customers excluded from traditional credit.
Agents of Impact are seeding the next generation of outsized returns. While AI investors race to fund chips and data centers, Connect Humanity’s Brian Vo is betting that community broadband is just as essential to the AI economy. Innovative investors are designing structures to unlock capital for sustainable agriculture and forestry, ecosystem restoration and conservation, and other nature-based categories still mispriced by markets, as Erik Stein reported. Investors and policymakers in Zambia are backing small businesses, rather than big mines, as engines of inclusive growth, as Lucy Ngige reported. Managers like TLG Capital and CrossBoundary, who see outsized opportunity in Africa, are finding new ways to price and manage currency risk, write Stanford graduate students Caroline Chinhuru, Sithara Rasheed and Katherine Tang. And Builders Vision’s Danielle Reed argues that better impact investment performance starts with better governance, including external voices on investment committees. If recent history is any guide, today’s unconventional bets are tomorrow’s obvious winners. – Dennis Price
More must-reads on ImpactAlpha:
- “The climate case has become an affordability case,” by Jonathan Siegel, Brian Altenburg, Garvin Jabusch and Erika Karp.
- “What impact funders should know about opportunities in reproductive health,” by Rhia Ventures’ Erika Seth Davies
- “Nigeria’s diaspora needs impact measurement systems,” by Paper and Quill Consulting’s Nzube Ifediba.
This Week’s Podcasts
🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor Jessica Pothering. Up this week: How a new playbook for shared prosperity is being written in Zambia; what SpaceX and other IPOs mean for Impact LPs and the field of impact investing; and this week’s deal spotlight focuses on investors designing nature-based investments aligned with natural cycles.
- 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): How investment committees really work. Foundations devote enormous attention to the 5% of assets they grant away, but often far less to how the rest of their endowments are invested. On the latest Impact(ed) podcast, investment committee veterans George Suttles and Rini Banerjee join hosts Rodney Foxworth and Eric Horvath to make the case that ICs, as they’re called, are one of the most powerful – and overlooked – levers for advancing foundation missions. ICs benefit from a broader range of voices at the table, Suttles and Banerjee say. Relationship-building, community perspectives and mission alignment, they add, are just as necessary as technical finance knowledge for stewarding impact capital.
Women Changing Finance: Why Brazil’s next chapter in impact investing starts with local capital. Brazil’s impact investing market has come a long way since the first funds emerged more than a decade ago. On the latest Women Changing Finance, Wright Capital Wealth Management’s Fernanda Camargo joins host Krisztina Tora to reflect on the growth of Brazil’s impact ecosystem. She argues that lasting change in the country will depend on keeping more local capital invested locally.
The Week’s Spotlight
What the market taught us about LGBTQIA+ equity. This weekend, Pride month celebrations will hit a fever pitch around the globe. Queer acceptance and visibility has been one of the great inclusion stories of the 21st century (in some countries), despite recent backsliding. Even so, LGBTQIA+ people still face discrimination in housing, healthcare and finance. In 2022, such founders received less than 0.5% of venture funding. That same year, The Investment Integration Project’s William Burckart and Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management’s Megan Kashner launched Colorful Capital to test their thesis that LGBTQIA+ inequity is a market failure that creates systemic economic risk. Two years later they announced they would stop trying to raise that first fund. In a guest post on ImpactAlpha, Burckart and Kashner write for the first time publicly about the fund’s short life.
- Unanswered question. The co-founders say that a tightening fundraising environment and growing political backlash against DEI in 2024 were the main culprits in their decision to wind down the fund. “The capital market infrastructure for LGBTQIA+ investing – the data, the LP familiarity, the field-level support, the track record that breeds confidence – didn’t exist in sufficient depth to withstand the headwinds,” Burckart and Kashner write. Their inability to close is not a rebuke of the underlying thesis, they say. “The odds turned against Colorful Capital, but the question we were asking – What happens when you look at LGBTQIA+ inequity through the lens of capital markets? – remains the right question,” they conclude. “It’s a question that still demands an answer.”
- Keep reading, “What the market taught us about LGBTQIA+ equity,” by William Burckart and Megan Kashner.
The Week’s Dealflow, 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 this week’s dealflow reporting.
Ira Goldstein stepped down as Reinvestment Fund’s senior advisor of policy solutions to launch IJG Urban Advisors, an impact consulting firm… Angeles Toledo-van den Bogaard, formerly with Achmea Investment Management, joined Columbia Threadneedle Investments as responsible investments director… ResponsAbility brought on Iain Macdonald, previously with M&G Investments, as chief risk officer.
The Ford Foundation elected Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox Corporation, as board chair – the first Black woman to hold the position in the foundation’s 90-year history. She succeeds Francisco Cigarroa… Boston Ujima Project welcomed Renee Hatcher of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law as a solidarity economy law fellow… OwnersEdge, an employee-owned ESOP holding company, named Robert Dillon as CEO, following the retirement of co-CEO Christine Adee.
Adam Kybird, formerly of Triodos Investment Management, joined Pymwymic as associate partner… Marie Heydenreich joined Triodos Investment Management as fund manager of Hivos-Triodos Fonds… Global Social Impact Investments named Theany Bazet investment director of the firm’s Africa impact investing arm… Akinwumi Adesina will chair Botswana’s Diamonds for Development Fund… Overture Ventures promoted Emma MacDonagh to partner and chief operating officer.
That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend.
– June 26, 2026
