Looking Ahead to 2026

Holiday List No. 4: A dozen Impact Voices who sparked the conversation in 2025

Isaac Silk ¡ December 30, 2025

Greetings, Agents of Impact! If you missed any of our look-aheads to 2026, you can find them all here.

As the operating environment shifted and long-held assumptions were tested, ImpactAlpha offered a forum for practitioners to share ideas for moving forward in 2025. 

This year’s Impact Voices tackled some of the most consequential questions facing impact investing. Shrinking public funding. The future of blended finance. Community ownership. Defense investing. Gender and racial justice. Governance and the changing rules of the market itself.

Written by Agents of Impact – practitioners, investors, policymakers and field-builders – these op-eds surface investable ideas, challenge complacency and press the impact community to reckon with trade-offs, power and responsibility in a more contested political environment.

Here’s a dozen guest contributions that sparked debate, reframed narratives and helped define the year:

Federal funding cuts have left gaps in the ‘care economy’ – and a pipeline of opportunities for private investors 

Funding gaps left by the Trump administration’s budget cuts make more visible the spaces where private markets can do better at creating systemic equity and shared prosperity, says Candide Group’s Morgan Simon. In a guest post on ImpactAlpha, Simon points to investable strategies that demonstrate how mission-driven capital can plug government deficits to build a more equitable economy.

How has the impact investing job market changed since 2024? 

Rumors of the demise of impact-related jobs have been greatly exaggerated, say Shawn Cole, Jonah Zahnd and Anushka Kataruka of Harvard Business School’s Project on Impact Investment. They find that, despite headline-grabbing layoffs, the impact investing job market contracted only modestly – about 2.2% – for the period from May 2024 to May 2025.

Financing the future of community ownership

Community land trusts. Co-ops. Resident-owned communities. Housing solutions like these reduce displacement, preserve long-term affordability, and provide steady equity gains for low-income households. Funds like Grounded Solutions Network’s Homes for the Future Fund and Enterprise Community Partners’ Renter Wealth Creation Fund are positioned to broaden access to these models. Building market infrastructure to scale the sector is the essential next step, write Grounded Solutions Network’s Devin Culbertson and Integrated Purpose’s Devin Murphy in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. 

Why more responsible investors are needed in defense VC investing 

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.

Capital market shaping: The next frontier for impact investors 

In impact investing’s early days, scattered innovators and investors challenging assumptions started to recognize they are on a similar path. A field emerged with common language, efficient collaboration and established practices for delivering and measuring results. That’s the story of impact investing 15 to 20 years ago. And it may be the story of the market-shaping field emerging today in response to stubborn obstacles, both old and new. “There’s growing excitement about the role investors can play not just in deploying capital, but in redesigning the systems that determine where capital flows in the first place,” says Antony Bugg-Levine, an impact investing consultant and former CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Blending finance, mobilizing capital and overcoming opposition for sustainable development and aid 

The shuttering of USAID, and the broader pullback in foreign aid, has left a $70 billion annual hole in concessional finance, according to Boston Consulting Group, and is likely to contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths by year end, according to another study. “This presents a massive challenge to blended finance – the use of public and philanthropic capital to mobilize private investment in sustainable development,” Joan Larrea of Convergence writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “We should care about blended finance, because it is one of the only tools for channeling private capital to places that need it – a need that will only grow as aid declines.” 

An impact lawyer’s practical advice for raising a fund in a post-DEI world 

In March, the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 leading law firms asking for information about employment practices advancing diversity, equity and inclusion, with the intent of rooting them out. Chintan Panchal of impact-focused law firm RPCK Rastegar Panchal LLP shares guidance for impact fund managers seeking to navigate the new terrain.“How do you raise an impact fund that is fundable, defensible and scalable in today’s environment? The answer lies in strategy, structure and storytelling,” explains Panchal

Taylor Swift, Ryan Coogler and the emerging ownership economy in music and film

When you think about Taylor Swift and Ryan Coogler, do you think impact? “You should. And the ‘ownership economy’ is a big part of the reason,” argues Mark Newberg of Stockbridge Advisors in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. 

Proxy advisors follow big brands in ditching diversity guidelines 

First, it was the corporations. Now, the proxy advisors. As this year’s corporate annual meeting season kicked into gear, the influential proxy-vote advisor Institutional Shareholder Services, or ISS, announced it would stop considering the gender, racial and ethnic diversity of US companies’ boards when recommending election or reelection of directors. The decision by ISS, writes As You Sow’s Andrew Behar, “is a clear abdication to political pressure at the expense of clients and sets a path for intentional financial underperformance – a possible breach of fiduciary duty.” 

Impermanence is the future: Four unsolicited ideas for sunsetting the Gates Foundation 

In May, the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, announced it would double its giving, distribute around $200 billion, and sunset the organization by 2045, decades ahead of schedule. “What purpose does perpetuity serve if the very problems we exist to solve are rapidly outpacing our willingness to deploy resources?” Santhosh Ramdoss of Gary Community Ventures writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. The Colorado grantmaking organization plans to transfer all of its assets to its community’s balance sheet and sunset by 2035.

Gender-lens investing is still ‘smart’ 

The Trump administration has scrubbed vocabulary around gender and inclusion from agency websites and materials. Financial institutions, corporations and law firms have dialed back their own language and programs in response. In a dispatch from the Skoll World Forum, Sana Kapadia, a long-time builder of the field of gender-lens investing, reminds colleagues that no matter the rhetoric from Washington, “the fundamentals are unchanged.” Research over two decades has built the case that gender and inclusion are material factors in business: considering them in decision-making leads to better returns and impact outcomes, and enhances GDP.

Measuring founder ‘wealth creation’ to track the impact of small business finance

Until last year Founders First Capital Partners measured the impact of its small business financing using traditional metrics like job creation and revenue growth. The San Diego-based firm is now also considering projected wealth creation for the entrepreneurs it supports. Wealth creation “is how families achieve stability across generations and how communities break cycles of poverty,” writes Founders First’s Kim Folsom in a guest post. “Wealth creation is not just a financial milestone. It is a structural change agent.”