The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Value creation

ImpactAlpha · October 10, 2025
Credit: Global Impact Investing Network

TGIF, Agents of Impact! We’re taking a Brief break on Monday for the US holiday. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday, Oct. 14. 

  • Roundup: Beyond risk-adjusted market rates of return
  • Podcasts: Agents of Impact, Community Capital Live, Criterion Institute and This Week in Impact
  • PluggedIn: Include Ventures’ Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson
  • Agent of Impact: Corinne Lebrun on building Ecuador’s impact ecosystem and a first-time fund.

🗣 High bar. The term “market-rate” – even with the modifier “risk-adjusted” – has always rankled (not surprisingly) at a publication that includes “alpha” in its name. Shouldn’t positive impact not just match the market but generate out performance in financial returns or social and environmental benefits, or both? According to a remarkable chart buried on p. 36 of the Global Impact Investing Network’s “State of the Market” report, the bulk of impact investors agree. Across all asset classes, the more than 300 investors surveyed set higher target financial return expectations for their impact investments than they did for their legacy portfolios. Investors are “holding their impact investing strategies to a higher bar,” the GIIN’s Dean Hand said in a briefing at the GIIN Impact Forum in Berlin this week. The prospect of alpha helps explain the influx of institutional capital from pension funds, insurers and banks, which now account for more than half of new impact capital, as Erik Stein reported. “If we get all these fiduciary investors who are making impact investments, and are able to continue to do so, they are clearly getting solid financial returns,” declared the GIIN’s Amit Bouri.

That long-sought institutional seal of approval shouldn’t eclipse the catalytic role many Agents of Impact have long played in crowding in commercial capital. “In our current climate of diminished foreign aid and increased opportunity to direct private investment to developing markets, there’s no greater time for impact investors to embrace taking risks,” Convergence’s Leah Pederson wrote, urging impact investing to rediscover its catalytic edge. Tideline’s Ben Thornley likewise called for a reset around the guides stars of clarity, pragmatism and ambition, and suggested investors spend less time on what to call “impact” and more on “real results, the very real financial value creation benefits of impact acumen and intelligence, and the real efficacy of business-driven impact solutions.” Pragmatism could be the watchword for the US International Development Finance Corp., which not only escaped the wood chipper, as Kristin Kelly Jangraw reported, but could be due for a four-fold increase in its investment mandate – once the government shutdown ends.

Proximity is one well-proven source of impact alpha. New growth funds in Africa are relying on their local market knowledge for a solid investment pipeline and to fundraise from local pension funds, insurers and family offices, as Lucy Ngige and I reported. Funding from local investors “provides a domestic solution to domestic capital challenges,” the Collaborative for Frontier Finance’s Drew von Glahn told us. From Mumbai, the Raintree Family Office of Leena Dandekar and her children is charting a path to impact investing for India’s wealthy families. Proximity means authentic engagement of youth “co-creators” in the growing market for solutions to youth mental health challenges, as Youth Power Project’s Saanvi Aurora shared on This Week in Impact. Proximity also well describes the geography and the people of Israel and Gaza, and we share the relief – tentative, fragile, hopeful – of so many that the killing can stop, the hostages can go home and the healing can begin. – David Bank and Dennis Price

Also up on ImpactAlpha:

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Ambitious plans for the US International Development Finance Corp. are on hold pending congressional authorization; how debt and equity “growth funds” in Africa are tapping local pension funds and family offices; and why youth co-creators are the key to effectiveness for new AI-driven approaches to youth mental health.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Broadening the impact tent with Lucas Turner-Owens and Eric Horvath. The co-hosts of Impact(ed), Lucas Turner-Owens and Eric Horvath, join David Bank to discuss the swinging pendulum between values-driven impact investing and the business case, reflected in the diverse voices shaping season two of their podcast. Listen in.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Investing with values and building Just Futures with Alex Saingchin. Just Futures’ Alex Saingchin joins host Joel Skene to share how the organization supports a just transition to a regenerative economy. “All of my work in movements and philanthropy kept bringing me closer and closer to money, and our relationship to money,” says Saingchin. Watch the conversation, and RSVP for the next Community Capital Live, Wednesday, Oct. 22.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Reimagining finance for feminist movements. Host Joy Anderson examines the dramatic decline in philanthropic funding for feminist and justice-focused nonprofits, and makes the case for a feminist financial imagination. Finance is a system of power to be reshaped, she says, not just a source of grants. Check out the latest episode.

The Week’s Call

VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson on onboarding managers for impact. “I always talk about the 100x impact,” VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson told ImpactAlpha contributor Sherrell Dorsey on the latest PluggedIn. “We’ve launched first-time firms that have gone on to raise over $1 billion collectively. That’s the kind of multiplier effect the industry needs right now.” Between VC Include and Include Ventures, Robinson has created a full-cycle platform to support fund managers from incubation to institutional readiness. “I wanted to build an onboarding system for impact,” she said.

  • Getting creative. Federal funding delays have slowed some US projects, but Robinson sees resilience and innovation in global markets. “Private capital hasn’t slowed down. We’re seeing family offices and large investors quietly moving under the radar to support social and environmental strategies,” she said. Robinson challenged investors to get creative. “Create carve-outs. Pilot new mandates. Try strategic partnerships,” she urged. “Maybe we don’t call it ‘climate’ – maybe it’s a ‘strategic pool of capital’ – but ensure that climate impact is embedded in what you’re underwriting.”  Include’s “blended finance flywheel” has supported emerging managers including Kaya Ventures, High Street Equity Partners, Good Scout Capital, Cross Impact Capital and Ruthless for Good Fund. 
  • Keep reading and catch the replay. 

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Corinne Lebrun, Impacta VC: Building Ecuador’s impact ecosystem and a first-time fund. Corinne Lebrun had no finance experience, no VC connections, and little encouragement when she began thinking about leaving her corporate job to start a venture capital fund in Ecuador. She quit anyway. Her role at a French cement company had put her in contact with Indigenous communities bearing the environmental costs of cement production but receiving little benefit. After a crash course through Stanford’s VC Unlocked program, Lebrun launched CREAS to support startups tackling social and environmental challenges in Ecuador. She met her first LP at IMPAQTO’s CLIIQ summit in 2018 and closed a first fund in 2023. CREAS has backed nearly a dozen companies and made two exits. “Everyone told me it was impossible,” she says. “But my reflection was: if I don’t do it, no one is going to do it.”

CREAS has become part of a bigger impact movement taking shape in Ecuador. IMPAQTO has built out its entrepreneurship support offerings and has launched its own impact fund. BuenTrip Ventures has built an early-stage venture investing pipeline, focusing on diverse founders. And Buena Vista Capital and Endeavor Ecuador are connecting promising entrepreneurs with capital and networks. The five organizations anchored Ecuador’s early venture ecosystem. The group pooled resources to form ECUACAP, a venture capital association to convene market players, publish annual VC reports, and connect Ecuador’s VC ecosystem to its regional peers. 

Since closing CREAS’s fund, Lebrun has joined Chile-based Impacta VC to make investments across Latin America, including Ecuador, and has teamed up with Mexico-based impact organization Promotora Social to work on prospects for cross-regional funds. She’s also a board member of B Corp Ecuador and an investment committee member at IMPAQTO Capital. As she looks ahead to future funds, she says Ecuador is “a country of entrepreneurs because we have to be. There are not many formal jobs, so you have to find your own way.”

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. Catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting. 

Stacy Swann was appointed managing director and chief of blended finance of IDB Invest… Julia Wang, previously with Upwage, joined New Majority Capital as chief of staff… Jenelle Harris was promoted to head of social impact programs at Visa… The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta added Erika Ellison, former education consultant, as chief operating officer… The Joseph Rowntree Foundation welcomed Shan Nicholas as interim group CEO.

Costas Papamantellos, former chairman and CEO of REW Renewables Hellas, joined Nuveen as head of energy transition investments… Marie Giandomenico returned to Social Finance as a director on its impact advisory team… Kamal Prawiranegara, co-founder of the Global Landscapes Forum, took the helm as director. GLF’s other co-founder, John Colmey, stepped down from the role but remains engaged as a senior strategic advisor… Chi Ebodili, previously with BlackRock’s global Infrastructure Partners, joined LeapFrog Investments as an investor relations officer.

Acumen America welcomed Yichen Feng, former head of impact of Lumos Capital Group, as investment director… Boston Ujima Project promoted James Vamboi to deputy director… Natalia Leon, previously with Tent Partnerships for Refugees, replaces Carolina Puerta Ocampo as CEO of the Latin American Impact Investing Forum, or FLII… Perigon Wealth Management added Jeff Gitterman and Eli Rauch of Gitterman Wealth Management as partners.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Oct. 10, 2025