The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Purpose

ImpactAlpha · August 22, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

  • Roundup: Capital’s purpose
  • New podcasts from ImpactAlpha, The Rebooting, Criterion Institute and Community Capital Live
  • Pop Impact: Documenting climate change at the Woods Hole Film Fest
  • Spotlight: ROC USA’s community-owned real estate fund

🗣 Raison d’ĂȘtre. AI is upending jobs and livelihoods. Climate change is disrupting weather patterns and natural systems. And leadership changes are scrambling the political world order. How to navigate this tricky terrain? “Purpose provides a clear decision-making framework during uncertainty,” writes Vivian Wu of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s venture portfolio. Capital, too, has a purpose. “Capital builds ownership. It expands options. It protects dreams from dying in debt, deferred maintenance, or denial from a lender who never saw the vision,” Wilson Lester of Partners in Equity writes on LinkedIn. “It’s the difference between surviving and scaling.” Grupo Gaia is adapting a staid financing tool from Brazil’s industrial agriculture sector to support financially underserved smallholder farmers, as Gilberto Lima reported this week. Also in Brazil, Eduardo Mufarej of Just Climate is pursuing an intentional dual mandate of investing in natural climate solutions with a strategy designed for Latin America, home to the Amazon and 40% of the planet’s biodiversity, Erik Stein and I wrote. With more institutional money pouring into managed timberlands, stewards like BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group are leveraging old ways to protect forests from new wildfire risks (tldr: controlled burns). 

Wealthy donors are also directing money purposefully, making catalytic advance purchases from innovative companies working on ways to lock carbon away for centuries or more. It’s a strategy more often used by Big Tech firms looking to offset their burgeoning emissions, as I reported. Retirement plan provider Carbon Collective remains a believer in renewable energy throughout the shifting political winds; the firm’s Zach Stein and James Regulinski explained how market forces may prove them right. Roodgally Senatus reported on how Impact Capital Managers Institute is doubling down on efforts to support next-gen impact investors by taking up a production role in the Turner MIINT MBA training program. Big private equity firms are pursuing secondary market sales and continuation vehicles to placate restive investors. Lucy Ngige reported how, in emerging markets, impact investors are seeding a secondary market to free up scarce investment capital so it can serve its true purpose. As Lester says, “When capital flows with intention, it becomes more than fuel. It becomes freedom.” – Amy Cortese

Other must-reads on ImpactAlpha this week:

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up the week’s top stories with ImpactAlpha’s editors and reporters. Up this week: Amy Cortese discusses the “billionaire buyers club” of wealthy donors buying up tons of carbon just to lock it away. Roodgally Senatus dishes on the big changes underway at Turner MIINT. And Jessica Pothering runs down the impact deals and fundraises catching her eye this week.

🔄 David Bank joins The Rebooting podcast. In a zone flooded by engineered media, publications that rise organically from proximity to engaged communities stand out, says media critic Brian Morrissey, host of The Rebooting podcast. That’s the story of ImpactAlpha, which began as a journalistic itch for David Bank. He went from reporting on the growing movement of impact investing to building a publication to serve it. “I assigned myself to cover this idea that private capital could be redirected to the common good,” he told Morrissey on the latest episode of The Rebooting, which takes listeners inside the reinvention of media in a time of great change.

  • Building a business. In the episode, David shares where ImpactAlpha’s been and where it’s going, from bootstrapping early growth to raising capital from mission-aligned investors. “If you are covering something that people want to know about, and you are the best beat reporter covering that beat, there is a business.” Listen to the episode.

đŸ˜ïž Community Capital Live: Benny Overton on the New Economy of Tennessee Fund. Host Michael Shuman speaks with the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development’s Overton about the work of the New Economy of Tennessee Fund, which it helped launch. The fund provides capital and resources to local cooperatives creating jobs, building collective economic power, and generating wealth for immigrants, people of color, formerly incarcerated individuals, and others who must overcome barriers to participate in the economy.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Transforming conferences into conversations. Host Joy Anderson discusses the often-overlooked potential of conference panels and networking. She reflects on how panels can be transformed from mundane presentations into engaging dialogues that prioritize audience interaction. Listen in.

Weekend Watching: Pop Impact

Feeling the emotional impacts of climate change at the Woods Hole Film Festival. In his latest set of Pop Impact reviews, Dmitriy Ioselevich shares more highlights from the Woods Hole Film Festival, which last month showcased over 50 films, many with sustainability themes. This week, Dmitriy looks at two documentaries that used powerful visual storytelling to show how climate change is not an abstract future threat but a present reality erasing landscapes, cultures and ways of life. Dmitriy scores each documentary on a scale of one to 10, with five possible points each for entertainment and impact.

  • Chasing Time (2025): Visualizing Earth’s vanishing glaciers. The documentary from directors Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Sarah Keo revisits James Balog’s 15-year Extreme Ice Survey, which used time-lapse photography to capture over 1.5 million images of glaciers melting across the globe. A follow-up to the acclaimed “Chasing Ice,” the short film uses striking imagery to convey the reality of climate change, showing glaciers as living, shifting entities whose rapid collapse signals both environmental and human peril. The film underscores the importance of storytelling across generations, framing climate action as a “relay race” in which today’s choices will be judged by the future. Chasing Time reminds viewers that glaciers are disappearing before our eyes – and that humanity’s response will be etched into history. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: 4. Check out the review.
  • Oceania: Journey to the center (2024). Director Natalie Zimmerman brings us a decade-long portrait of life in Kiribati, where rising seas threaten to make much of the island nation uninhabitable within 10 to 15 years. The film follows Tekinati and her son Charles, capturing the humanity, traditions and resilience of a people grappling with the looming reality of becoming climate refugees. By foregrounding songs, dances, fishing and storytelling, Zimmerman highlights that what’s at stake is not just land, but culture and identity. As Charles explains, “you know how to survive in your place,” underscoring the irreplaceable loss that relocation would mean. The film’s message: climate change is already eroding communities, and if Kiribati disappears, we risk losing entire ways of life. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3, Impact: 3. Read the review.

The Week’s Deal Spotlight

Financing resident-owned mobile home communities to preserve affordability. The more than eight million manufactured homes in the US that sit on leased land face rent increases and displacement pressures from owners looking to sell to private equity buyers. ROC USA has been working with residents in low-income communities to level the playing field, forming resident-owned cooperatives, or ROCs, to acquire and take control of the land beneath their mobile homes and preserve their long-term affordability (see, “Unlocking and preserving broad-based ownership to make housing more affordable”). “The whole commitment is about helping residents organize collectively, purchase and then run their manufactured housing communities as resident-owned cooperatives,” says ROC USA’s Emily Thaden.

  • Capital injection. ROC USA has raised $47 million for a National Acquisition Loan Pool from investors including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, Ceniarth and ImpactAssets. With the funding, the firm will acquire nearly a dozen manufactured-home communities. ROC USA will then provide low-cost, fixed-rate mortgage financing to the ROCs, while holding ownership of the land on behalf of residents for a membership fee of $100 to $1,000. “We’re going to enable hundreds of residents to run their communities as cooperatives and finally have the housing stability they have been wanting for so long,” Thaden tells ImpactAlpha. “Once we can show the level of demand and impact we can have with this fund, our hope is to be able to raise more capital.”
  • Infrastructure financing. Since 2008, ROC USA has deployed more than $450 million in mortgage financing to 347 ROCs, covering 24,000 manufactured homes in 21 states. By working with local community and regional banks, the nonprofit has helped the ROCs access over $1 billion in financing to build infrastructure and acquire land. In most manufactured housing communities, some of which are in flood zones, tax-paying residents are often excluded from access to stormwater management and other public infrastructure services. “We do a full assessment of property conditions and infrastructure needs,” says Thaden. ROC USA’s financing helps with improving drainage systems to prevent floods, repairing roads and parking areas and other infrastructure upgrades.
  • Keep reading, “Financing resident-owned mobile home communities to preserve affordability,” by Roodgally Senatus. Catch up on all of ImpactAlpha’s dealflow reporting this week.

The Week’s Talent and Jobs

đŸ’Œ 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.

Evan Kaufman, previously with KKR, joined TPG Rise Climate as a principal
 Nora Gilhooly, former director of investment banking at B. Riley Securities, joined SES ESOP Strategies as a managing director
 Lightrock welcomed Manoj Kohli, previously with Bharti Airtel, as senior advisor; Gaurav Malhotra, previously with British International Investment, as partner; and Aayush Parwal, previously with Eversource Capital, and Himanshu Kashyap, previously with Apollo, as principals. 

Lucy Carmody, former global director of investor partnerships at Climate Impact Partners, joined the Principles for Responsible Investment as a senior specialist of sustainable initiatives
 Energy Impact Partners added intern Mudit Agrawal as an investment analyst
 The Clean Energy Fund of Texas welcomed Steve Anglin, previously with Uptopio, as project finance director
 Jennifer Jaffe, previously with Blackstone, joined Energy Impact Partners as an investment associate.

Trimtab Impact added Tamar Honig, a former investment manager at Align Impact, as manager of investments
 The Global Development Incubator welcomed Hayling Price, previously with Mobility Alliance Incubation Hub, as managing director of economic and social inclusion
 Julie Pulda, former senior impact investment manager at Ballentine Partners, joined The Artemis Fund as a principal. 

ESG Global Advisors added Zachary de Jong, previously the climate strategy manager at Sun Life, as a director
 Mary Chen, a 2025 Mosaic Fellow at Lime Rock New Energy, will join the firm full-time when she graduates from Harvard Business School
 Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter of IMPAQTO Capital was selected as a 2025 Yale World Fellow
 Align Impact welcomed Rodrigo Zozaya, previously with Princeville Capital, as an investment associate.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Aug. 22, 2025