ImpactAlpha Open

Defense as an impact investment + outcomes-based financing for recovery

Dennis Price ¡ July 8, 2025

Hi there, Agent of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free weekly sampling of the top news and views from ImpactAlpha.

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🔌 Join PluggedIn, today: Investing in a future economy built for young people.ImpactAlpha’s Sherrell Dorsey sits down with Melissa Pegus, managing partner of the Future Economy Fund, to unpack how capital can drive structural change by investing in solutions built for and by young people. Get PluggedIn, TODAY at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP to log in.

In this week’s Open:

  • Making defense investing more responsible
  • Outcomes-based financing for substance use recovery
  • New podcasts from ImpactAlpha, The Criterion Institute and Community Capital Live
  • Pop Impact: Ocean’s powerful case for marine conservation

Let’s dig in. â€“ Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Calling responsible investors in Europe to invest in… defense. Can military technology be an impact investment? European investors are confronting that question as shifting geopolitics and an unreliable US has pushed domestic security to the top of national agendas and spurred a frenzy of spending. Venture ESG’s Susan Winterberg and Johannes Lenhard dig into the thorny issue in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. Learn more.
  • A different Medicaid story in Washington DC. A national network of nonprofits is offering community support for individuals recovering from homelessness, addiction, mental health challenges and other traumas in more than 80 US cities. ImpactAlpha’s Roodgally Senatus stopped by Recovery Cafe’s project in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington DC, which is tapping a novel financing mechanism to support the recovery of about 300 individuals each year. Keep reading.
  • Now is the time to be an emerging markets debt investor. Global investors often flee emerging markets at the first sign of market uncertainty. Beyond Capital Ventures is doubling down. “In many parts of the world, especially in emerging markets, the best timing doesn’t come with noise or headlines. It comes quietly – in the moments when attention fades and capital retreats,” writes Beyond Capital’s Eva Yazhari. Hear her out.

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Agents of Impact

Remembering B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy

Andrew Kassoy, the co-founder of B Lab, died last month after more than two years with advanced prostate cancer. “The B Corp movement is more important than it’s ever been,” Kassoy said in a powerful conversation with B Lab cofounders Bart Houlahan and Jay Coen Gilbert, recorded while he was in hospice. Andrew was 55 years old. He is survived by his wife, Margot Brandenburg, and their four children.

A public or social-benefit mandate was a foreign concept in capital markets when Kassoy set out to deploy his personal capital for impact more than two decades ago. Capital markets, Kassoy realized, aren’t people, and they don’t have values. “We must build a marketplace where it is possible for individuals to do the right thing,” he decided. “The good news,” Kassoy wrote in an essay originally published on July 4, 2007, is that capital is ultimately owned by individuals – “individuals endowed with the freedom to make choices about how they will use it.”

  • With permission from B Lab, ImpactAlpha has republished Kassoy’s foundational essay in full.

🏃 On the move

  • Brandi Colander stepped up as interim CEO of DC Green Bank, following last month’s departure of former CEO Trisha Miller.
  • Jitendra Balana, previously with Habitat for Humanity, joined the Asian Development Bank as a senior urban development specialist.
  • Boston Impact Initiative welcomed Meghan Burke as a marketing and development intern, Patricia Porekuu and Tsega Wondwossen as impact investing interns, and Rajat Kumar as an impact measurement and management intern.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Doing more with less – the blended finance fallout from shrinking development aid and a shuttered USAID. A call for responsible investors to invest in… defence companies. And, remembering B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy, an Agent of Impact who launched a movement to align capital with purpose. 

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Burnout, autonomy and the cost of leadership. Criterion’s Joy Anderson discusses feeling overwhelmed in today’s world, the difference between self-diagnosis and honest reflection, and the significance of autonomy and control in one’s work life. She emphasizes the need for structure and accountability, freedom in decision-making and the power of choice. Tune in.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Building a sustainable future in Appalachia. Host Joel Skene speaks with Annie Forrest of the REDF Appalachian Growth Fund, a mission-driven initiative scaling social enterprises in Appalachia. Their conversation ranges across job creation, the region’s unique challenges and opportunities and the role of impact investing in building a sustainable ecosystem for employment-focused social enterprises. Watch now.

Pop Impact

‘Ocean’ makes the case for marine conservation and global cooperation. Many readers will spend time at the beach this summer, and enjoy the bounty of the world’s oceans. Below the surface, marine life is in urgent need of protection. That’s the message of Ocean, the new documentary from David Attenborough, streaming now on Disney+ and produced with National Geographic. It may be Attenborough’s most urgent and compelling documentary yet, writes Dmitriy Ioselivich in his latest Pop Impact review. He calls Ocean a masterpiece and awards it Pop Impact’s first perfect score of fifteen – the full five points each for entertainment, accuracy and impact. 

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • Foreground Capital is seeking an investment associate in Boston.
  • Kataly Foundation is looking for a program officer for their Restorative Economies Fund in San Francisco or remote.
  • The UK’s Office for Investment is searching for a head of impact investing and philanthropy in London.

Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

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