State-level innovation in impact finance + Elevating workers voices with AI

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:

• States take the lead on clean energy, human capital and ownership
• Pivots on the path to high-quality carbon credits
• Podcasts: Kathleen Simpson, David Erickson, Joy Anderson, and This Week in Impact
• Spotlight: Green manufacturing in Africa

Let’s dig in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

• States of the Union: Crafting policy, building funds and delivering outcomes. Away from the long-winded speeches and staged spectacles in Washington, DC, the states of the union are incubating real-world solutions that lower costs, protect consumers and forge pathways to broad ownership and shared prosperity, find ImpactAlpha’s Amy Cortese, Roodgally Senatus and Lafayette Square’s Julien Rosenbloom. Check it out.
  
• From planting trees to burying them, Mast Reforestation follows the market for carbon credits. Millions of tons of burnt, dead lodgepole pines, Douglas firs and other trees dot the wildfire-scarred hills of Montana. Mast Reforestation wants to bury the debris and to get paid for doing it, reports ImpactAlpha’s Isaac Silk. Learn how.
  
• Good jobs, worker voices and ownership in the age of AI. The nonprofit community development financial institution Pacific Community Ventures is incorporating ethical AI into its impact underwriting and measurement, and equipping underserved small businesses and their workers with tailored resources to shape the economic future, shares PCV’s Bulbul Gupta in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. Read more.

Agents of Impact

• Atlanta-based VC firm for underrepresented founders 6.8.10 Partners appointed Nicole Garner Scott, formerly with Northwestern Mutual, as vice president of investor relations and strategic capital.
  
• Lindelwe Lesley Ndlovu, formerly with African Risk Capacity, was appointed CEO of AfrexInsure, the insurance business of African Export-Import Bank.
  
• Eugene Lewis, who founded the startup Every, became director of impact investments at Robin Hood.

RSVP: Next Week’s Call

☎️ Building an investment portfolio that makes aging an asset 

We’re all getting older, creating compelling investment opportunities in companies and funds that expand opportunity, ensure health and promote social inclusion with and for older adults. Denver-based Next50 is aligning its approximately $265 million foundation endowment around an “aging investment framework” that steps up from age-friendly to age-inclusive to age-centered. What’s in and what’s out? Next50’s Peter Kaldes and Preeti Bhattacharji, head of sustainable investing for J.P. Morgan’s US Private Bank, will join other Agents of Impact to share tips for the construction of investment portfolios across asset classes that value and support aging, on Call No. 79, Wednesday, March 11 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. RSVP today.

• Background listening. Hear Peter Kaldes on ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast, “Next50 sets out to invest its entire endowment to value and support aging.” Next50 supports ImpactAlpha’s coverage of Valuing Aging.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact 

Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank and producer Isaac Silk. Up this week: Away from Washington, states are taking leadership in clean energy, the ownership economy, AI regulation and more. Plus, why smaller funds are delivering bigger returns in Africa, and the winding path of Mast Reforestation, as it sought a sweet spot in the market for voluntary carbon markets.

• 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: Kathleen Simpson and David Erickson

This family foundation is trying to ‘meet the moment’ with all of its $100 million in assets. The Russell Family Foundation is a regional small fry among the giant pension, insurance and sovereign wealth funds in the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, which represents more than $9 trillion in assets. With $100 million in assets, Russell “can move a little bit faster,” Russell’s CEO, Kathleen Simpson, tells David Bank. The foundation is activating all of its resources, including grants, convenings and higher-risk “aspirational” investments in climate and inclusion. Learn more.

• For more on Russell’s climate investments, read “How The Russell Family Foundation is seeking to catalyze climate finance,” by Amy Cortese.

NY Fed’s David Erickson on making missing markets to build healthy communities. “The status quo is stupid, expensive and unfair.” That’s the first line of David Erickson’s 2023 book. At the Making Missing Markets gathering at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Erickson told David Bank how place-based collaborations are connecting the builders of health, wealth and vibrant communities with the “buyers,” including hospitals, insurers, corporations and government agencies. We turned their fireside chat into a podcast. Check it out.

• Tune in

📯 Criterion Institute Podcast: Expanding access to business ownership

Host Joy Anderson examines power dynamics, governance and the role of impact investing in “search funds,” a potentially transformative financial tool for entrepreneurship in the US and Africa (see also, “Expanding ‘entrepreneurship through acquisition’ for inclusive wealth creation in the US and Canada”).

• Tune in.

The Week’s Spotlight

🏭 UK’s Manufacturing Africa to launch $200 million fund for green manufacturing startups 

Ethiopia-based Kubik has raised $5 million to expand their work converting hard-to-recycle plastics into affordable green building materials. The company received help from the UK government’s Manufacturing Africa program, which provides technical assistance to small and growing green businesses in seven African nations. “We had been missing a real opportunity,” said Priti Prajapati of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office which oversees the Manufacturing Africa program.

• Learn more and catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

• Climate Policy Initiative is hiring a green and sustainable finance manager in Delhi.
  
• Environmental Defense Fund is looking for an energy communications intern in Boston.
  
• Cultivo seeks a project manager in San Francisco.

🤝 Meet up

• Mar. 16 – 18: MO Summit (Asheville)
  
• May 13 – 14: Total Impact Summit (Philadelphia, PA)
  
• May 19-21: ReFed Food Waste Solutions Summit (Charlotte, NC)
  
• June 1 – 5: Sustainable Finance Initiative’s Impact Week (Hong Kong)

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