The Week in impact investing: Duty of care

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

• Roundup: Duty of care
• Podcasts from ImpactAlpha and The Criterion Institute
• Agents of Impact: Elizabeth Killough and Laura Kind McKenna
• The Call: Policies for shared prosperity 

🗣 Sharing prosperity. In a parting gift to the sustainable business movement he helped found, B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy made a last, passionate plea to the next generation of business leaders: Put care above carelessness. “You’re not just here to do good. You’re here to care – to care for your workers, your community, the planet, the other people you do business with in your supply chain,” Kassoy said in conversation with B Lab co-founders Bart Houlahan and Jay Coen Gilbert. For Kassoy, that meant building the duty of care into the underpinnings of capitalism itself. B Lab’s B Corp certification codifies care into business standards. The “benefit corporation” legal structure ensures for-profit companies can pursue positive impact. With Nine Dean and similar impact holding companies, Kassoy sought to demonstrate that a time horizon longer than a typical 10-year fund was needed to build businesses that generate shared prosperity over the long term.

Kassoy died this week after more than two years with advanced prostate cancer. The courage to care that he inspired continues. A group of more than 70 energy investors led by Builders Fund’s Tripp Baird and SJF Ventures’ Dave Kirkpatrick took out an ad in The Wall Street Journal calling on Congress to “unleash more energy, reduce costs and accelerate innovation” by preserving support for wind, solar and battery projects in President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. On this week’s Call, Agents of Impact spotted opportunities for quick but essential wins such as New Markets Tax Credits and Opportunity Zones to lay the groundwork for shared prosperity (read the call preview and the recap). Market shaping for social and environmental resilience may be the next big thing, argues Antony Bugg-Levine. Calvert Impact, Climate United and Aceli Africa are going upstream of dealmaking to shape the systems that determine where capital flows in the first place.

Evidence of care embedded in capitalism is proliferating. Researchers at Columbia University designed the Climate Finance Vulnerability Index to help investors deploy concessional adaptation finance in the most impactful way, reported ImpactAlpha’s Erik Stein. Fund managers in Brazil, and in Latin America more broadly, are bringing to market funds that center nature and Indigenous communities to drive capital to pressing challenges in the Amazon, as Erik and ImpactAlpha contributor Gilberto Lima reported. Even boring fixed-income investments are a growing source of capital for affordable housing, clean infrastructure and vaccine access – and returns for investors, according to Tideline, BlueMark and Builders Vision. Hopelab’s Margaret Laws and Amy Green are building markets for solutions to youth mental health (see Podcasts, below), while foundations such as SCAN are making the case for aging-lens investing. Kassoy knew that care isn’t soft, it’s structural. He lives on through Agents of Impact making it the standard. – Dennis Price

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: Catalytic climate capital in the Amazonian bio-economy. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor Jessica Pothering. Up this week: Teeing up November’s Global Climate Summit COP30 in Brazil with inclusive nature-based, Indigenous-led and catalytic climate capital. A new tool that helps direct scarce concessional capital for adaptation finance to where it’s most needed. And why more investors are using an aging-lens for their impact investments.

• 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: Hopelab’s upstream investments in youth mental health. A flood of state and federal funding to address the rising rates of anxiety, depression and more serious mental illness among young people has spurred many youth mental health startups. The next challenge for Hopelab, a nonprofit research and investment organization, is to mobilize financing for “upstream” interventions that could improve the mental health of today’s young people. Hopelab’s Margaret Laws and Amy Green join David Bank on the latest episode of the Agents of Impact podcast. Tune in.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Watching The Rehearsal with power in mind. In this episode, host Joy Anderson discusses HBO’s “The Rehearsal” and the parallel power dynamics in finance and aviation. She explores themes of communication, vulnerability, authority, and the importance of diversity in decision-making environments. Check it out.

This Week’s Call

Agents of Impact Call No. 72: Policies for shared prosperity (video). Community investing. Opportunity Zones. Affordable housing tax credits. Amid the political headwinds and pushback, impact investors see opportunities for bipartisan action on common sense solutions that support broad-based prosperity. “Quick wins are not small wins – they’re essential building blocks,” said John Cochrane of the US Impact Investing Alliance, which co-hosted ImpactAlpha’s Call No. 72 “Opportunities for policy action and investing in shared prosperity.” There are plenty of wins to build upon, including in the “Big Beautiful Bill” nearing resolution in Congress. One example: Opportunity Zones, a policy enacted in the first Trump administration that offers private investors tax breaks for investing in real estate or small businesses in economically overlooked areas. Both the House and Senate included OZs in their bills, noted Catherine Lyons of the Economic Innovation Group, which has championed OZs. 

• Big tent. After Trump targeted federal programs supporting community development financial institutions, Republican and Democratic leaders rallied to their defense, citing CDFIs’ role in supporting local businesses, job growth and wealth creation. The foundation was laid by decades of advocacy by CDFIs and their partners. “Community investing continues to be a priority for a lot of lawmakers, and it continues to have bipartisan support,” said Opportunity Finance Network’s Dafina Williams. Some 28 senators, ranging from liberal to deeply conservative, are part of the CDFI caucus. “Access to economic opportunity isn’t partisan,” she added.
  
• Groundwork. Policy leaders also stressed the need to lay the groundwork for transformative progress in the future, and to communicate the kitchen table benefits of their policies, as CDFI and OZ advocates have done. “We need more programs that are like that, that provide tangible benefits to local communities,” said Heather Slavkin Corzo of bipartisan public policy firm Mindset. “The more that we can show that, the more that we can bring the benefits that we care about to the American people.”
  
• Read on and watch the replay. 

The Week’s Agents of Impact

Elizabeth Killough and Laura Kind McKenna: Catalysts for mission-aligned investing.  After shifting their foundations’ assets to align with their missions, and catalyzing more than a dozen private foundations in the Philadelphia to do the same, Laura Kind McKenna and Elizabeth Killough are taking their message to a broader – and bigger – set of foundations (see, “In Philadelphia, a dozen foundations are starting to deploy local endowments for local impact”). To do so, they’re directly working to persuade the board members of large foundations to buy into the concept. “A lot of big foundations have people consulting them that are so tied to the traditional,” says Kind McKenna of the Patricia Kind Family Foundation. Killough, co-CEO of the UnTours Foundation, has launched Paradigm Shifters, a monthly newsletter that highlights mission-aligned investing journeys of foundations, from the Stupski Foundation to the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. More US foundations are carving out a portion of their endowments for mission-aligned investing. Kind McKenna and Killough want them to go all in. “If you want to have more impact, use more money,” Kind McKenna tells ImpactAlpha. 

• Reimagining philanthropy. Kind McKenna, a nurse practitioner, took over her family’s foundation in 1998 from her late mother Patricia Kind, who had launched it just two years earlier with a gift from Kind McKenna’s grandparents’ estate. She led the foundation to invest all of its $35 million endowment in line with its mission of supporting the health and wellbeing of low-income Philadelphians. “With the wealth that’s being hoarded in foundations and donor-advised funds, the mattresses are overflowing and the world is burning,” says Kind McKenna, who spends most of her time these days looking after her grandchildren and volunteering as a nurse at a free medical clinic in North Philadelphia. “I’m passionate about getting this money out of those foundations and into communities.”
  
• Shifting paradigms. Killough met Kind McKenna met over a decade ago at a B Corp party and learned from her that “most foundations do nothing with 95% of their assets, and in fact invest them in ways that often harm their mission,” Killough recalls. “I was hooked to try to change that paradigm.” Since 2002 Killough has led the endowment of the UnTours Foundation, launched in 1992 by Hal and Norma Taussig through their UnTours travel company, which was the first certified B Corp. The Taussigs were keen on mission-aligned investing well before the term was coined. “People thought Hal was crazy for using the endowment as a revolving loan fund,” says Killough. UnTours has deployed $11 million via low-interest loans and equity in businesses solving social, economic and environmental challenges. “Elizabeth’s a wonderful human being and really committed to the values,” Kind McKenna says. “I’m much more the bully pulpit and much more direct.”
  
• Keep reading, “Elizabeth Killough and Laura Kind McKenna: Evangelists for mission-aligned investing,” by Roodgally Senatus.

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

Robbie Allen joined Autism Impact Fund as a part-time operating partner… Nina Panda, previously with 3M, joined 3R Sustainability as a sustainability strategy associate director… Caoimhe MacRunnels was promoted from senior associate to principal at Reach Capital… Three Cairns Group welcomed Sarah Charlop-Powers, previously with Natural Areas Conservancy, as a climate program officer.

The Indigenous Prosperity Foundation welcomed Alejandra Metallic-Janvier, a former program lead at Indigenous Clean Energy, as a program officer… Baani Kaur Sethi stepped down as marketing and development coordinator of the Boston Impact Initiative… Blueridge Climate Ventures welcomed Frances Gurzenda, a Duke University MBA candidate, as a summer intern… Supply Chain Capital added Alexa Iadarola, an MBA candidate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, as a summer fellow.

Corwin Thomas joined Capitalize Good as its partnerships and field building director… Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, previously with Balderton Capital, joined Owl Ventures as general partner to lead the firm’s edtech expansion in emerging markets… Revolution Foods, the California-based vendor of healthy school meals, named George Blanco as CEO… Eddine Sarroukh will succeed Margot Cooijmans as senior director of the Philips Foundation in August. 

Baltimore Development Corp. welcomed Otis Rolley, previously with Wells and Rockefeller foundations, as president and CEO… Ownership Works added Maddy Banker, previously with US Impact Investing Alliance, as a marketing and communications senior associate… Social Finance promoted Erin Flaherty to communications coordinator… Capricorn Investment Group’s Kunle Apampa joined the Clara Lionel Foundation as a board member.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– June 27, 2025