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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In this week’s Open:
- Just Climate is writing big checks for nature
- Burning a forest to mitigate investment risk
- New podcasts from ImpactAlpha and The Rebooting
- Spotlight: ROC USA’s community-owned real estate fund
Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price
Must-reads on ImpactAlpha
- Just Climate leans into ‘natural’ strategies, with Latin flavor. Just Climate is writing big checks for nature. The dedicated climate investment arm of Generation Investment Management is complementing its focus on industrial decarbonization with solutions that could deliver faster results in agriculture, forestry, and waste and water solutions. “Just Climate really wanted to be intentional and say, ‘OK, we will cover this one-third because very few people are covering it with a dedicated perspective,” Just Capital’s Eduardo Mufarej tells ImpactAlpha’s Amy Cortese. Learn more.
- Grupo Gaia is bringing a Big Ag financing tool to Brazil’s smallholder farmers. Traditional bank financing for small farmers is both expensive and hard to secure. Grupo Gaia is using a traditional financing tool to get the deal done. Gaia is using agribusiness receivables certificates, or CRAs – a type of asset-backed debt – to support the country’s smallholder farmers and rural communities, reports Impactalpha contributor Gilberto Lima. See how.
- Why fire belongs in the timberland management toolkit. Professionally managed forests provide steady income and a hedge for investors. Well-managed forests can also sequester carbon and preserve old growth forests. One underused sustainability strategy: Controlled burns. “This cost-effective forest management strategy delivers both environmental and operational co-benefits,” write Charlotte Kaiser of BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group and The Nature Conservancy’s Catherine Burns in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. Read on.
Agents of Impact
🏃 On the move
- Evan Kaufman, previously with KKR, joined TPG Rise Climate as a principal.
- Nora Gilhooly, former director of investment banking at B. Riley Securities, joined SES ESOP Strategies as a managing director.
- Lucy Carmody, former global director of investor partnerships at Climate Impact Partners, joined the Principles for Responsible Investment as a senior specialist of sustainable initiatives.
The Week’s Podcasts
🎧 This Week in Impact
Host Brian Walsh takes up the week’s top stories with ImpactAlpha’s editors and reporters.Up this week: Amy Cortese discusses the “billionaire buyers club” of wealthy donors buying up tons of carbon just to lock it away. Roodgally Senatus dishes on the big changes underway at Turner MIINT. And Jessica Pothering runs down the impact deals and fundraises catching her eye this week.
- Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
🔄 David Bank joins The Rebooting podcast. In a zone flooded by engineered media, publications that rise organically from proximity to engaged communities stand out, says media critic Brian Morrissey, host ofThe Rebooting podcast. That’s the story of ImpactAlpha, which began as a journalistic itch for David Bank. He went from reporting on the growing movement of impact investing to building a publication to serve it. “I assigned myself to cover this idea that private capital could be redirected to the common good,” he told Morrissey on the latest episode of The Rebooting, which takes listeners inside the reinvention of media in a time of great change.
- Building a business. In the episode, David shares where ImpactAlpha’s been and where it’s going, from bootstrapping early growth to raising capital from mission-aligned investors. “If you are covering something that people want to know about, and you are the best beat reporter covering that beat, there is a business.” Listen to the episode.
The Week’s Deal Spotlight
🏠 Financing resident-owned mobile home communities to preserve affordability
The more than eight million manufactured homes in the US that sit on leased land face rent increases and displacement pressures from owners looking to sell to private equity buyers. ROC USA has been working with residents in low-income communities to level the playing field, forming resident-owned cooperatives, or ROCs, to acquire and take control of the land beneath their mobile homes and preserve their long-term affordability (see, “Unlocking and preserving broad-based ownership to make housing more affordable”). “The whole commitment is about helping residents organize collectively, purchase and then run their manufactured housing communities as resident-owned cooperatives,” says ROC USA’s Emily Thaden.
- Keep reading, “Financing resident-owned mobile home communities to preserve affordability,” by Roodgally Senatus. Catch up on all of ImpactAlpha’s dealflow reporting this week.
Pop Impact
🎥 Feeling the emotional impacts of climate change at the Woods Hole Film Festival
In his latest set of Pop Impact reviews, Dmitriy Ioselevich shares more highlights from the Woods Hole Film Festival, which last month showcased over 50 films, many with sustainability themes. This week, Dmitriy looks at two documentaries that used powerful visual storytelling to show how climate change is not an abstract future threat but a present reality erasing landscapes, cultures and ways of life. Dmitriy scoreseach documentary on a scale of one to 10, with five possible points each for entertainment and impact.
- Chasing Time (2025): Visualizing Earth’s vanishing glaciers. The documentary from directors Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Sarah Keo revisits James Balog’s 15-year Extreme Ice Survey, which used time-lapse photography to capture over 1.5 million images of glaciers melting across the globe. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: 4. Check out the review.
- Oceania: Journey to the center (2024). Director Natalie Zimmerman brings us a decade-long portrait of life in Kiribati, where rising seas threaten to make much of the island nation uninhabitable within 10 to 15 years. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3, Impact: 3. Read the review.
Get in the Game
💼 Step up
- Arnold Ventures seeks a senior associate for mission-aligned investments in New York.
- Blackrock is looking for an analyst for their social impact team in New York.
- The Colorado Health Foundation is hiring an impact investing senior officer in Denver.
Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
🤝 Meet up
- Sept. 17: Impact Summit Asia (Singapore)
- Sept. 18: VentureESG’s FRAME 2025 (London)
- Oct. 7-9: GIIN Impact Forum (Berlin)
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