Hi there, Agents of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free weekly sampling of the top news and views from ImpactAlpha.
☎️ Agents of Impact Call: Tackling advisor roadblocks. Clients want to do more with their money. Advisors want to do more with their clients. Financial advisors who engage with clients about their values and offer credible impact strategies can deepen their relationships and prepare for generational shifts. Join CapShift’s Liz Sessler, ImpactPHL’s Cory Donovan, Westfuller’s Randall Strickland and Glenmede’s Julia Fish, in conversation with David Bank, Thursday, Dec. 11, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP here.
- New on Advisors’ Corner: “Deep dive: Solve three common year-end giving challenges for your clients,” by CapShift’s Liz Sessler.
In this week’s Open:
- Designing capital stacks for political and market resilience
- Podcast: New Mexico leverages sovereign wealth fund to attract climate projects
- Agent of Impact: Epic Angels’ Maaike Doyer
- PluggedIn: Savia Ventures’ Andres Baehr
Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price
Must-reads on ImpactAlpha
- Building durable financing for the energy transition and climate action in local communities. Communities across the US are confronting the need to build financial architectures for projects that deliver economic savings and climate action despite political cycles, policy shifts and market volatility. These resilient capital stacks move beyond taxes, fees, muni bonds and fragmented, one-off grants toward blended, risk-balanced funding strategies that enable long-term impact, HIP Investor’s Nick Gower writes on ImpactAlpha. See how.
- Building a supply chain and boosting farmers’ incomes in Nicaragua. Amid Covid’s disruption to global supply chains, an agriprocessing company in Nicaragua seized a high-value opportunity to build a sustainable business around a home-grown crop. Alcasa, short for Almidones de Centroamérica, is leveraging corporate contracts, off-take agreements and low-cost financing to build a domestic production market for cassava, a starch used in everything from sauces to processed meats to industrial adhesives. Read on.
- PosiGen bankruptcy highlights solar industry woes and puts Brookfield in the hot seat. Residential solar company PosiGen is the latest US solar company to go bust. The Brookfield Asset Management-backed company, relied heavily on federal incentives that, under the Trump administration, have been prematurely phased out. “For so many of the families we serve at PosiGen, energy tax credits are what make solar possible,” wrote Posigen’s founder Thomas Neyhart this spring. Learn more.
Agents of Impact
♀️ Maaike Doyer, Epic Angels: Mobilizing female angels
Maaike Doyer remembers walking into her university’s math program in the Netherlands as one of only four women. It was an experience repeated throughout her career at major accounting firms and later as an angel investor – and led her four years ago to launch Epic Angels, one the world’s largest female-only investor networks. “If we want to get more money to female founders, we simply need to change who the investor is,” she tells ImpactAlpha.
- Keep reading, “Maaike Doyer, Epic Angels: Mobilizing female angels,” by Erik Stein.
🏃 On the move
- Green Impact Exchange welcomes Marie Mähl, previously with ESG Book, as chief product officer and executive vice president.
- Adam Smith joins Zeal Capital Partners as a full-time investment associate.
- Michelle Okere returns to Indigenous Prosperity Foundation as executive director.
The Week’s Podcast
🎧 This Week in Impact
Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: The ambitious strategy behind New Mexico’s $67 billion sovereign wealth fund; how cutting “dealer fees” can keep residential solar affordable without tax credits; and, how cities are stacking capital for climate action as federal support evaporates.
- 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 Podcast: New Mexico’s sovereign wealth fund
New Mexico’s solar resources, geothermal features and nuclear know-how attract many climate tech startups, and the venture capitalists who back them. There’s also the state’s $67 billion State Investment Council, or SIC, which in recent years has grown into the second-largest sovereign wealth fund among US states. Bruce Brown, head of the SIC’s new office of strategic climate initiatives, joins the podcast to share how the sovereign wealth fund is wielding its climate clout.
The Week’s Call
🔌 PluggedIn: Savia Ventures’ Andres Baehr on Latin America’s climate moment
Latin America is the one of the largest untapped climate markets in the world, says Savia Ventures’ Andres Baehr. Investors who get in early stand to benefit. Baehr joined PluggedIn host Sherrell Dorsey this week to discuss how the region is becoming a proving ground for climate innovation, from bio-based materials to urban mining to distributed energy. “Founders here are experts at managing inflation, regulation and scarcity,” he said. “They’re building solutions that can scale globally because they’ve been battle-tested at home.”
- Keep reading and watch the episode.
Get in the Game
💼 Step up
- Kiva is looking for a Colombia based investment manager for social enterprises for a hybrid remote role.
- Advantage Capital is hiring a senior vice president for impact investing in St. Louis.
- Watershed is searching for a sustainability data advisor in Mexico City.
🤝 Meet up
- Feb. 26 – 27: Purpose Trust Ownership (Austin, Texas)
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