The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Civic duty

ImpactAlpha · April 18, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

  • Roundup: Freedom to invest
  • Podcast: Political risk in the US market
  • Spotlight: Efficiency in emerging market food systems
  • Pop Impact: Future of work in
 Severance

🗣 Freedom to invest. “My message to you is this, let’s not give in to these baseless attacks,” Surdna Foundation’s Don Chen declared, winding up his talk at the Global Impact Investing Network’s gathering in San Francisco this week. Just as Harvard and some other universities are standing up to the Trump administration’s threats, Chen is rallying foundations and other impact investors to resist escalating attempts to undermine their own independence (hear Chen’s call to action on this week’s podcast). As an American private family foundation, he said, Surdna has the freedom to make decisions about its investments and grants, to manage systemic risks, and to foster racial justice and sustainable communities. “These are fundamental rights that we cherish, and we should be all prepared to defend them,” he said. “That’s worth fighting for.”

Climate United’s Beth Bafford would surely have preferred to avoid such a fight with the US Environmental Protection Agency. “We want to get back to work,” Bafford has said repeatedly in the nine weeks since the EPA shut down access to some $20 billion that was appropriated by Congress and duly awarded to finance green upgrades in low-income communities. For a brief moment this week, there was a chance that a federal judge’s preliminary injunction would unfreeze at least $625 million for already approved loans and operating expenses. In a strongly worded opinion, Judge Tanya Chutkan determined the balance of equities and the public interest weighed in favor of Climate United and other awardees of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds, as Amy Cortese reported. But the window closed before it even opened when an appeals court stayed the injunction at least through next week. That left Bafford seeking philanthropic support “to avoid irreparable harm” and keep projects afloat.

As the columnist David Brooks advises, the “comprehensive national civic uprising” that is needed requires not only short-term tactics to foil illegal and unconstitutional power grabs, but a long-term, positive vision of a better and fairer society. Agents of Impact are building bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for expanding employee ownership of businesses, as Roodgally Senatus reported (in accompanying posts, Kevin Sims, a worker at Web Industries in Massachusetts, recounts his own journey from worker to owner, and Social Capital Partners’ Matthew Mendelsohn advocates for employee ownership to ensure Canadian businesses stay Canadian). 

In India, catalytic investors are looking to the world’s most populous country and third-largest carbon emitter for outsized climate impact, as Jessica Pothering reported. In Africa, Lucy Ngige detailed Heifer International’s use of grants and loans to show African agriculture is investable. From Colombia to Turkiye, policy is drawing private capital for public good, says GSG Impact’s Sebastian Welisiejko. The higher a portfolio’s “impact materiality,” after all, the higher the financial returns, according to Schroders, the trillion-dollar investment manager. “This is not the time to step back, to not have the courage, to not have the conviction,” Jordan Park Group’s Lauren Booker Allen told the GIIN gathering. “It’s called impact investing. If we forget about the impact, why are we here?” – David Bank 

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: A call to action. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: A call to action from impact investors in response to growing political risk in the US. Plus, how employee ownership is bringing lawmakers together across the aisle. And the strategies and structures LPs are using to get their money back in a volatile market environment.

đŸ—ș The Activest Podcast: Shaping the future. In this “watercooler episode,” Micah Gilmer and John Killeen, and panelists Homero Radway and Ellen Ward, who work together at public finance research firm Activest, reflect on strategies for making it through troubled times, what’s inspiring them, and what’s grabbing their attention in public finance and the bond markets.

Weekend Watching: Pop Impact 

The future of work. Unless the job is exciting – think special agent, cop, doctor – workers are rarely glamorized in modern TV or cinema. More often than not, a day job is portrayed as something to avoid or even actively overcome. With work-from-home and AI, the stereotype boring office of “The Office” may soon be unrecognizable to most audiences. In this week’s “future of work” edition of Pop Impact, Dmitriy Ioselevich reviews the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and the latest film from Bong Joon Ho, “Mickey 17”. While the former occurs somewhere on Earth and the latter is based somewhere in space, the two productions share some unsettling similarities – from novel “productivity” technologies to out-of-touch managers. Dmitriy awarded both productions 11 points out of a possible 15 for the shows’ accuracy, entertainment and impact. 

  • Severance (2025): Work-life imbalance. The hit series from Apple TV+ is a dystopian show that blends elements of “Office Space” and “The Truman Show”. Dmitriy describes it as “more dark and absurdist in every possible way.” The show’s premise: a mysterious global corporation employs divisions of people who have volunteered to have a chip surgically implanted into their brains to sever their work self, or innie, from their home self, or outie. “Innies are completely unburdened by external pressures, and their outies have no knowledge of what they do all day,” says Dmitriy, making the show an allegory for work-life balance as well as a scathing critique of capitalism. The audience is forced to contend with a system that “discourages the fullness of humanity and how it encourages people to diminish themselves.” Score: 11 (Accuracy – 3.5; Entertainment – 4; Impact – 3.5). Read the full review.
  • Mickey17 (2025): Expendable workers. The latest film from Bong Joon Ho, the acclaimed director of “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer,” is an adaptation of an Edward Ashton’s novel. Set in 2054, the film follows Mickey Barnes, played by Robert Pattinson, an “expendable” who can be reprinted with his memories intact after death. This is the 17th version of Mickey, who, after a series of gruesome deaths, is on an interstellar mission to a potentially habitable planet. Dmitrity explores the film’s  sustainability themes, including the exploitation of indigenous life and environmental degradation, as well as the “commodification and exploitation of labor.” Mired in debt from his failed macaron business, Mickey is driven to become an expendable, illustrating a future where people’s value “seems to be based on how much they are willing to sacrifice or endure – not their skills or experience,” says Dmitriy. Score: 11 (Accuracy – 3; Entertainment – 4; Impact – 4). Read the full review.

The Week’s Spotlight

Investors find value in making emerging market food systems more efficient. A decade ago, a wave of tech startups started showing up in Kenya, India and other emerging markets tackling the issue of fragmented, under-resourced, under-financed food supply chains. They came into the market with apps, logistics and financial services to reduce waste and recapture value. A number of the early attempts couldn’t make their financials work, especially once the pandemic hit, and scaled back, like Brazil’s Frubana, or shut down, like Peru’s Favo and India’s Doodhwala. Kenya’s Twiga falls somewhere in between (see, “Trouble at Twiga
 and Copia… and Sendy”).

Venture capital investors seem to recognize that solving supply chain inefficiency in emerging markets remains a potentially lucrative opportunity. Tech-enabled “marketplaces” that connect food supply chains from farmer to consumer, and deliver critical goods and services throughout the chain, were the top funding category for venture capital firms focused on agriculture and food startups last year, according to AgFunder’s “Developing markets agrifoodtech investment” report, out this week.

  • Top deals. Of the $3.7 billion VC firms committed to emerging market food and ag startups, $561 million went to marketplaces and agriculture-focused fintech ventures. Indian rural lender SarvaGram raised a $67 million Series D equity round. Arya, also in India, secured $29 million to provide warehouse space and post-harvest credit to smallholder farmers. Brazil’s Agrolend, an agribusiness credit provider, raised a $53 million Series C round. This year, Vietnam-based Techcoop closed a $70 million Series A equity and debt round to connect agribusinesses and farmer collectives to markets, supplies and financing.
  • Domestic vs. export. Founders and investors are bracing for turbulence from the Trump administration’s chaotic tariff policies. “Tariffs imposed by the US will disrupt established supply chains leading to increased costs for imported agricultural inputs and equipment,” said Avaana Capital’s Shruti Srivastava. There will be knock-on effects on agri-commodity prices, consumer food prices, and marketplace startups’ margins. Startups may find that focusing on local and regional markets, made up mostly of micro and small businesses, is a surer bet. That could force investors to change their approach as well, said Sherief Kesseba of Cairo-based Climate Resilient Africa Fund. “Evolution of the agrifood venture capital space will induce a shift toward a [small business] fund structure rather than the Silicon Valley VC model.”
  • Keep reading and check out all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

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. 

And the winner is
 ImpactAlpha’s “Equity & ownership: Napoleon Wallace and the Reconstruction of Black wealth,” took home a “Best Documentary” award at the Boston International Film Festival this week. Special thanks to director Yuri Vaysgant, editor Tyler Schwartz, producer David Bank and the whole team – and, of course, Napoleon Wallace.

Asset Funders Network added Elaine Mule of Charles Schwab and JPMorganChase’s Mercedeh Mortazavi to its board of directors
 IMPACT Community Capital promoted Alex Asaturian to senior associate of investments
 BlueHub Capital welcomed Hana Migliorato, previously with MassHousing, as director of strategic initiatives
 Blue Earth Capital named Philipp MĂŒller, previously with BlueOrchard Finance, as CEO. 

Next Street announced Charisse Conanan Johnson as CEO. Her co-CEO, Michael Roth, is stepping down
 Go ESOP’s Daniel Goldstein joined the advisory board of the Workforce and Organizational Research Center
 Social Finance welcomed Elena Curtin, previously with Bridgespan Group, as an impact advisory associate
 George McCarthy will step down as CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy at the end of this year. 

Camila Thorndike, previously with Rewiring America, joined The Lemelson Foundation as a climate action program officer
 Fair Trade USA appointed Felipe Arango as CEO
 Roc USA added Alejandro Salcido, previously with housing nonprofit Abode, as senior director of portfolio and asset management
 Prosperity Strategies’ Randall Kempner launched the Climate Philanthropy Catalyst Coalition, made up of philanthropic foundations and advisory firms, in a bid to triple the amount of US climate philanthropy by 2028.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– April 18, 2025