TGIF, Agents of Impact! We’re taking a Brief break to observe Memorial Day in the US on Monday. We’ll be back in your in-boxes on Tuesday, May 27.
- Lifting up strategies for shared prosperity
- A factory-killing, jobs-destroying tax bill
- Podcasts from Impact(ed), Activest, Criterion – and ImpactAlpha
🗣 Rigged. It seems that Republicans in the US Congress didn’t get the memo about shared prosperity: Helping poorer people get richer is good for countries as well as companies. The tax bill passed in Thursday’s early morning hours would do the opposite, shifting even larger amounts of wealth up the income scale. As if they need it, the 1.2 million people in the US making more than $1 million a year would get a collective tax break bigger than the 127 million people with incomes below $100,000. Medicaid and food stamps, both on the chopping block, generate far more than their costs in shared economic gains. The massive flood of investments in recent years into manufacturing and deployment of clean energy projects already was lowering prices and creating jobs; the demise of investment and production tax credits and other confounding policy choices is reversing that flow, killing jobs along with hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment, as Amy Cortese and Clint Wilder detail below.
We’ll be on the lookout for possible bright spots, including the extension of Opportunity Zones, (temporary) tax breaks on tips and overtime and $1,000 “Trump accounts” (which may be less advantageous than other savings options). We’re even more interested in people-powered, place-based, bottom-up strategies like those featured by Roodgally Senatus and Erik Stein in their dispatch from this month’s Total Impact Summit in Philadelphia. And the kind of initiatives spotted by Lucy Ngige at the Gender-Inclusive Financing Innovation Expo in Kampala, Uganda, that are unlocking financing for women, refugees and other vulnerable communities long overlooked by the continent’s biggest lenders. Jessica Pothering profiled Carsten Stendevad, who jumped from Bridgewater to Acumen to bend finance toward impact. CGAP’s Estelle Lahaye and Charley Clarke offered a blueprint for ensuring that efforts to promote “financial inclusion” actually deliver positive, lasting changes in people’s lives.
Agents of Impact not only got the memo, they are writing a playbook for shared prosperity. In a guest post, Gary Community Ventures’ Santhosh Ramdoss dares to think about how the decision by the Gates Foundation to spend down its entire endowment over 20 years could augur a monumental change in “how we think about collective wealth in the age of significant technological change.” Next50’s Peter Kaldes told me in our podcast conversation how the foundation is adapting its $265 million endowment to the age wave crashing into the US, and much of the rest of the world. “We would be missing out on a profound investment and impact opportunity if we don’t build this framework,” he says. At their Catalyst gathering in Sacramento, I was struck by the confidence of CalPERS and CalSTRS, the No. 1 and No. 2 largest pension funds in the US, that the path to outperformance runs through emerging and diverse asset managers able to execute on opportunities that others may miss. Whether such uplifts can withstand the downdrafts remains to be seen. The dollar volume of emerging-markets blended finance transactions fell 20% last year from 2023 – even before the evisceration of USAID. “It is beyond clear that we are on a precipice,” said Convergence’s Joan Larrea. “How far we fall is up to us.” – David Bank
The Week’s Spotlight
Trump turns the promise of new investments in manufacturing on its head, wrecking projects and killing jobs. RIP IRA. That’s the message that House Republicans sent with a tax bill that would all but eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark Biden-era clean energy law. Hardliners made even more drastic cuts than an earlier version released by the House Ways and Means Committee. The changes “will pull the rug out from a host of projects in active development and effectively end use” of the popular investment tax credit and production tax credit, according to the industry group Advanced Energy United. The bill now goes to the Senate, where clean energy advocates hope senators will protect the best interests of their home states – most of the IRA’s investments have flowed to Republican-led states. Without significant changes, the bill could kill hundreds of manufacturing plants, pilot projects and demonstration plants.
- Climate casualties. Trump administration policies, including clean energy funding freezes and tariffs, have already caused many companies to rethink investment plans. Nearly $8 billion in previously announced climate tech projects were cancelled, downsized, or closed in the first quarter of this year, according to the business advocacy group E2. More than 60% of the $823 billion in private investments announced since the IRA have not yet been spent, says Clean Investment Monitor. With tax credits and incentives facing the budget axe, much of that unspent $523 billion will likely stay in corporate coffers or move elsewhere around the globe. “What House Republicans just produced is a perfect plan to strangle economic growth, kill American jobs, shut down new factories and cancel new sources of made-in-America energy, just as they’re getting started,” says E2’s Bob Keefe.
- Moving on. Many of the cancelled plants have been at companies whose loans or guarantees from the Energy Department’s Loans Program Office have been frozen. Kore Power, an energy storage startup, abandoned plans to build a $1.2 billion battery plant in Buckeye, Arizona, that would have employed up to 3,000 people. Kore had an LPO loan commitment of up to $850 million to cover 80% of construction costs. In February, Aspen Aerogels, gave up on its $670 million conditional loan for a Georgia factory to make thermal barriers for EV batteries; instead, it will expand production capacity at facilities in China, Mexico, and Rhode Island. “We are on track to again cede our manufacturing industry to China,” said Jigar Shah, who headed the Loans Program Office until January. “Based on the early actions of this administration, we can expect to see more and more American factories cancelled or closed, leaving our communities with more broken promises.”
- Keep reading, “Trump turns the promise of new investments in manufacturing on its head, wrecking projects and killing jobs,” by Clint Wilder and Amy Cortese on ImpactAlpha.
The Week’s Podcasts
🎧 This Week in Impact: The impermanence pledge. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Unsolicited advice for the Gates Foundation for how to make the most of its decision to spend down its endowment by 2045; how California’s massive public pension funds find alpha in diverse and emerging fund managers; and, glimmers of hope for blended finance in the face of a global foreign aid pullback.
- Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
🦸Agents of Impact: Next50 goes all in on valuing aging. We’re not getting any younger. There are nearly as many people in the US over 65 years old as there are under 18. The age wave crashing into the US, and much of the rest of the world, presents a huge investment opportunity, explains Next50’s Peter Kaldes on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. The Denver-based foundation this year selected JPMorgan Chase & Co. to construct an age-friendly portfolio for the foundation’s $265 million in assets and for other investors as well. Read more and listen.
🧑🏽🎓 Impact(ed): Investing in Youth: Erin Sietstra on mental health, equity and venture capital. In the latest episode of Impact(ed), Hopelab’s Erin Sietstra offers an inside look at how the social innovation lab is using its unique structure – an operating foundation with a venture arm, research team, and policy experts – to address the youth mental health crisis (disclosure: Hopelab supports ImpactAlpha’s Healthy Youth coverage). Tune in.
🗺️ The Activest Podcast: The Impact of Credit Downgrades on Communities. In this episode, Homero, Ellen and John discuss the implications of recent downgrades of credit ratings for Washington D.C., Maryland, and the United States by Moody’s – and structural issues surrounding debt and social equity. Check it out.
The Criterion Institute Podcast: Why gender isn’t expensive, but resistance is. Host Joy Anderson explores the perceived costs of integrating gender into investment decisionmaking. Gender integration can be at least cost-neutral in the long run, she says; the real costs are in resistance and bias. Listen in.
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.
Jennifer Kilpela will become interim chief investment officer of The Nature Conservancy following the departure of Bola Olusanya, who joined MacArthur Foundation as CIO last week… Bethany Wylie, previously with Camber Collective, joined Ballmer Group as a portfolio manager on its national impact team… Impact Capital Managers deployed 27 Mosaic Fellows to impact fund managers, including Claudia Chistine Ortiz to Altura Capital, Jasmine Wahelsan Ali to Impact America Fund, and Xaviera Ho to Quona Capital… Brian Komar stepped down from the role of vice president of global sustainability solutions at Salesforce.
Maggie Cutts, previously with Prime Coalition, joined Vibrant Data Labs as vice president of partnerships… WES’s Smitha Das, Spring Point Partners’ Margot Kane, and Priya Parrish of Impact Engine are among Ownership Capital Lab’s new advisors… Seb Soltysik, previously with Deutsche Bank, joined Aligned Climate Fund as a senior analyst… New York Community Trust welcomed Nupur Chaudhury, a former program officer with the New York State Health Foundation, as program director, and Mike Nuno, previously with the Princeton Area Community Foundation, as vice president for development.
That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend.
– May 23, 2025
