TGIF, Agents of Impact!
- Roundup: LP = Leadership potential
- On the podcast: The urgency of adaptation
- Spotlight: Local capital for growth firms in Africa
- PluggedIn: Building a youth-centered economy
🗣 LP = Leadership Potential. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. Fans of Benjamin Franklin (or was it Shakespeare?) know that small lapses can lead to profound consequences. ImpactAlpha’s Amy Cortese wrote this week about the investments that were not made in an emergency warning system in Kerr County, Texas, in the years before last Friday’s deadly flood, and asked, “What other investments in prevention and resilience should we be making now, rather than wishing we had been prepared only after the inevitable surprises do indeed catch up with us?” The flip side, of course, is that multiple positive interventions can also compound into positive outcomes. Investing in better approaches to mental health, for example, goes beyond the new crop of AI-enabled startups. “It brings up insurance. It brings up policy. There’s research that needs to be done,” Blue Haven Initiative’s Liesel Pritzker Simmons told me in our wide-ranging Q&A. Between grants, catalytic capital, market-rate investments and, yes, civic engagement, she said, “We can have a really interesting thread through the mental health space with the kind of capital that we have.”
Policy reversals and funding cutbacks are giving wealthy families ample opportunities to thread their “polycapital” through many other spaces as well (cf. Walmart heir Christy Walton and the Vaccine Integrity Project). The polycapital approach, promoted by Marina Feffer Oelsner and Generation Pledge, musters such heirs’ social and political capital, as well as financial capital of all flavors. “Family offices are emerging as one of the most critical sources of impact capital,” Naava Mashiah and Tenke Zoltani wrote in their guest post launching The GlassBox, which helps founders and fund managers navigate the tricky terrain. In our latest LP Scan, compiled by Erik Stein, ImpactAlpha identified more than a dozen family offices investing in impact.
Polycapital also describes the multiple other kinds of capital that can be mobilized for impact. Pension funds and other institutional investors in Africa are increasingly investing in the job-creation potential of the continent’s small-business growth firms, as Lucy Ngige reports in this week’s Spotlight, below. ImpactAlpha’s Emelia Essumanba-Josiah highlighted insurance innovations from Pula, ACRE Africa, Apollo Agriculture and others that are helping farmers scale climate resilient agriculture. In a guest post, Clarion Call Capital’s Eric Glass called out Chicago’s use of that oldest of impact financing tools, the general obligation municipal bond, to ‘get the lead out’ of the city’s water pipes. Across Indian Country, Native-led community development financial institutions continue to blend finance, underwrite loans and negotiate tribal benefit agreements in the face of cutbacks and clawbacks of federal support for CDFIs, Erik Stein reports. Erik also rounded up more than two dozen LPs backing impact funds focused on Indigenous communities.
The continued commitment of such Agents of Impact in these perilous times suggests that the meaning of LP has expanded from “limited partner” to “leadership potential.” The single most effective source of impact capital, for example, is a global wealth tax, Pritzker Simmons told me. “‘Liesel, settle down,’” she says her billionaire peers are apt to tell her when she raises the topic. “I would love a little bit more noise from the impact investing family office space around this one.” – David Bank
Also on ImpactAlpha this week:
- “Focus on the fundamentals: A roadmap to real impact in Africa,” by Adenia Partners’ Mokgadi Maunatlala
- “Reframing climate finance after Bonn: Mobilizing private capital for SME solutions,” by Resilience Capital Ventures’ Gillian Marcelle
- “Beyond the buzzword: Measuring real impact in impact investing,” by Advantage Capital’s Sandra Moore
The Week’s Podcast
🎧 This Week in Impact: The urgency of adaptation. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: New urgency around investments in climate adaptation and resilience in the wake of the tragic flooding in Texas. How community development financial institutions in Indian country are stepping up – with or without promised federal funding. And, highlights from David’s conversation with Blue Haven Initiative’s Liesel Pritzker Simmons about family offices impact investing in perilous times.
- Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
The Week’s Spotlight
Tapping local asset owners to finance growing businesses in Africa (video). Mirepa Investment Advisors in Ghana had to do a lot of groundwork to raise its maiden impact fund. The fund backs enterprises that are too large for grants but too early for commercial investors or mainstream private equity and venture capital investors. “We had to get the regulator to understand what we do. We had to get the pension funds involved,” Mirepa’s Samuel Yeboah explains in a video interview for ImpactAlpha’s series, “Pathways to Growth, produced with the Collaborative for Frontier Finance. Mirepa worked through bodies like the Ghana Venture Capital and Private Equity Association and Impact Investing Ghana to advocate for government policies and institutional allocations. Yeboah mitigated currency risk by targeting export-oriented companies or those that already earn foreign exchange as suppliers to multinationals. The firm has invested in Wami Agro, which provides inputs, credit and global market access to farmers, and True Moringa, a global supplier of moringa-based natural skincare and wellness products.
- Local capital. The silver lining to the government’s debt crisis and subsequent default in 2022 is that it encouraged pensions to turn to alternative asset classes instead of relying on government bonds. Growing small businesses create jobs; that means new savers for the pension funds themselves (see, “Ugandan pension fund is creating new savers with investments in small business and agriculture (video).” Some 90% of Mirepa’s financing came from local capital providers and pension funds in Ghana. “No foreign investor. No external investor,” Yeboah boasts. “For us, that’s pretty significant. It demonstrates that we actually can mobilize capital locally.”
- Keep reading, “Tapping local asset owners to finance growing businesses in Africa (video),” by Lucy Ngige on ImpactAlpha, and catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.
The Week’s Call
PluggedIn: Building a youth-centered economy (video). What does it mean to build an inclusive economy? Melissa Pegus, who leads the Future Economy Fund, went to young people to seek some answers. “Young people are our biggest emerging group of consumers. They are going to be the holders of capital,” Pegus told ImpactAlpha’s Sherrell Dorsey on PluggedIn Live. “It behooves us to really get ahead of that demand and build with, instead of building for.” The $75 million youth-centered investment fund, an initiative from SecondMuse Capital, is partnering with Grantmakers for Girls of Color to showcase deep community engagement and innovative fund structures that foster a future that young people can actively champion. The fund will support transformative solutions across health, commerce, technology and climate sectors.
- Youth-shaped thesis. Pegus engaged youth through interactive labs, probing their hopes, dreams and concerns for the future. Often missing from conventional approaches, she says, “is the input from the individuals who are the beneficiaries of the future we’re building.” What she heard was a need for investments in ecosystems, skill development and pipelines for feedback. Instead of a typical 10-year venture fund, as initially conceived, the Future Economy Fund is an evergreen donor-advised fund, or DAF, with flexibility to make market-rate investments in housing and climate resilience, for example, as well as grantmaking for, say, skills training. “If we are building this fund in community,” says Pegus, “we have to be really honest around what we’re investing in and what we’re testing.”
- Keep reading, “Building a youth-centered economy,” and watch the replay.
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.
Jones Thomas, ex- of Capricorn Investment Group, stood up GreenScale Capital to partner with climate companies to design bankable projects. “While others retreat from cleantech investing, I believe the most significant opportunities emerge when capital becomes selective,” Thomas wrote on LinkedIn.
2X Global appointed Kshama Fernandes of Northern Arc Investment Managers as the new chair of its board of directors, replacing Sukhvir Basran… National Cooperative Bank welcomed Mark Tyler as a special asset manager and Elliot Cline as a fraud analyst associate… Mallory Webb, previously with Selux Diagnostics, joined BlueHub Capital as human resources director.
Sharyanne McSwain became president of Echoing Green to co-lead the organization alongside CEO Cheryl Dorsey… British International Investment added Harsha Sanyukta of Sattva Consulting as a development impact intern… Community Vision appointed Matias Bernal as vice president of development and Leslie Payne as vice president of program strategy… Mihir Mehan was promoted to investments associate director at Veris Wealth Partners.
Charlotte Badenoch, previously with KOIS, joined GSG Impact as senior manager of investible vehicles… Sean Chiasson was promoted to director of finance and operations at Toniic… Marlise Hunter, previously with the Simpson Centre, joined Federal Crown Corp. as ecosystem partnerships director… Zenith Wealth Partners added Jesse Wideman Jr., previously with Facet, as a financial planner.
Sydney Schnitzer, previously with CapShift, returned to Cambridge Associates as an associate investment director… The Sobrato Organization tapped Adam Briones, former CEO of California Community Builders, as director of housing security… MCE Social Capital welcomed Brown Advisory’s Eliza Erikson, Juan Guardado of Natural Extracts Industries, Jason Kyrwood of Davis Polk & Wardell and Stealth Mode Startup’s Chid Liberty as board directors.
Onur Goker, former managing director of Anthelion Capital, joined Ara Partners as managing director. Sonali Aggarwal, previously with HIG Capital, joins the decarbonization-focused investment firm as a private equity principal… Nadia Nikolova, previously with Allianz Global Investors, will replace Rochus Mommartz as CEO of responsAbility Investments in September… Nina Hamilton was promoted to global co-leader of Korn Ferry’s Impact Investing Center of Expertise.
That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend.
– July 11, 2025
