ImpactAlpha Open

European pensions back climate funds + reclaiming homes from private equity

Dennis Price · March 31, 2026

Greetings Agents of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free weekly sampling of the top news and views from ImpactAlpha.

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In this week’s Open:

  • European pensions back climate funds in the name of energy security
  • Converting single-family homes to local ownership, brick by brick
  • Mastercard Foundation’s next act in Africa
  • Podcasts: Carol Galante, Mark Davis and Joy Anderson

Let’s dig in. – Dennis Price\

Must-Reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Oil shock opens pension checkbooks for Europe’s climate – er, ‘energy security’ – fund managers. While the conflict with Iran has choked off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, it has opened the tap from European pension funds and other investors looking to capitalize on increased urgency around the continent’s energy security, reports Danielle Rossingh. More. 
  • Brick by Brick is reclaiming homes from private equity to restore local ownership in the Twin Cities. Private equity real estate firms have been gobbling up single-family homes to turn them into rental units. The nonprofit Brick by Brick is buying them back in order to transition them back to individual home ownership,  reported Roodgally Senatus. Dive in.
  • Challenge for new CEO of Mastercard Foundation: Restore trust and clarify strategy in Africa. The Mastercard Foundation, with approximately $55 billion in assets, is one of the five largest philanthropic institutions in the world, and one of few of its scale working primarily in Africa. In a guest post, InSight54’s Karim Mohamed argues that, three months into a leadership change, participants in and observers of Africa’s growth story are hoping the foundation’s new CEO will usher in increased transparency, efficiency and catalytic philanthropy for the institution. Check it out.
  • Impact funders should bet on consolidation, not competition. Too many organizations are competing for roughly the same philanthropic dollars that existed 15 years ago, when the field was a fraction of its current size. Funders who care about the long-term health of impact investing have a rare, high-leverage opportunity to fix that, not by writing more checks to more organizations, but by funding the consolidation necessary to make the field-building ecosystem stronger, by Margot Brandenburg and Antony Bugg-Levine. Dive in.

Agents of Impact

  • Skoll Foundation tapped Salah Goss, former CEO of Impulse 52, as chief program officer.
  • Unreasonable Group promotes Muzna Khan to president.
  • Ownership Works welcomed John Adler, chief ESG officer of the Office of the New York City Comptroller, and Jill Schurtz of the Minnesota State Board of Investment, to its limited partners leadership council.

The Week’s Podcasts

🦸 Agents of Impact

“We have to build more housing, and we need to build it more cost-effectively than we do today,” Carol Galante, founder of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, tells David Bank. “Those two things together would make a big difference in how many people can affordably own or rent a home in California.” 

👪 Money + Meaning

The moral argument for investing in children is obvious. The economic argument may be just as compelling, Mark Davis of the child advocacy organization TableSense tells David on a special episode of SOCAP’s podcast. He says that eradicating child poverty could increase US GDP by 5%, or nearly $1 trillion dollars. “This is a problem that’s worth solving.”

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast

Host Joy Anderson reframes strategy as readiness: noticing signals, building trust and being prepared to step forward when the moment to act arrives. 

Hear it here.

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • The Nature Conservancy is looking for a climate finance specialist.
  • UBS seeks a sustainable and impact investing specialist for its GWM Alternatives group in New York.
  • Energy Impact Partners seeks an associate for its Deep Decarbonization Frontier Fund in New York.

🤝 Meet up

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