The Brief

The Brief: Andrew Kassoy’s declaration of interdependence of profit and purpose

ImpactAlpha · July 3, 2025

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Greetings Agents of Impact!

🔌Get Plugged In: Climate equity, and the next wave of impact investing. In the next PluggedIn conversation, ImpactAlpha’s Sherrell Dorsey talks with Melissa Pegus of the Future Economy Fund at SecondMuse Capital about climate resilience, economic inclusion and a future economy designed for and by young people. Get PluggedIn, Tuesday, July 8 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP now.

In today’s Brief:

A Declaration of Interdependence from B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy
RSF Social Finance’s ‘broker notes’
Springboard’s farmer co-op in Nigeria
The state of transparency in development finance

Featured: Impact Voices

Declaration of Interdependence: Reconciling profit and purpose. B is for benefit. A public or social-benefit mandate was a foreign concept in capital markets when B Lab cofounder Andrew Kassoy set out to deploy his personal capital for impact more than two decades ago. Capital markets, Kassoy realized, aren’t people, and they don’t have values. “We must build a marketplace where it is possible for individuals to do the right thing,” he decided. The successful New York-based private equity and real estate investor had been wrestling with a slow-burning epiphany, prompted in part by the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, to define his values, to live consistently with them, and to put his capital to work toward that end. The negatively screened socially responsible-investment mutual funds then available lacked positively mission-aligned investments. The assets under management in the hundred or so double- and triple-bottom-line private-equity funds then in the market represented a rounding error in the private equity and public capital markets. “The good news,” Kassoy wrote in an essay originally published on July 4, 2007, is that capital is ultimately owned by individuals – “individuals endowed with the freedom to make choices about how they will use it.” Eighteen years later, that do-the-right-thing marketplace is robust and growing, in no small part due to the work of Kassoy and B Lab. Kassoy died last week after more than two years with advanced prostate cancer. With permission from B Lab, ImpactAlpha is republishing his foundational essay in full.

Individuals and infrastructure. With college friends Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan, who had just sold the global basketball footwear and apparel company AND 1 to American Sporting Goods, Kassoy founded B Lab in 2006 to build that marketplace. In his essay, Kassoy outlined the need for “legal structures to allow the consideration of stakeholders other than shareholders; a marketplace for an entrepreneur or a venture-capital investor to seek liquidity while ensuring that the social mission continues; an effective means for individual investors whose capital is invested on their behalf through pension funds or other financial intermediaries to demand an alignment between their investments and their values; and a way to measure the positive and negative impacts of those investments.” In short, he wrote, “we urgently need a system that makes being good easy for investors, donors, consumers, and entrepreneurs.”

Stakeholder capitalism. “Andrew didn’t just advocate for stakeholder capitalism; he built the infrastructure that makes it possible,” Ford Foundation’s Roy Swan wrote in a tribute on LinkedIn. Nearly 10,000 B Corp certified companies in 102 countries have adopted B Lab’s standards. The certification process complements the separate “benefit corporation” legal structure that allows for-profit companies to pursue positive impact that is now recognized in 45 states and DC (note: ImpactAlpha is a public benefit corporation under Delaware law). Kassoy helped build a quality jobs investment strategy with Ford’s mission investments team, Swan said. “What struck me most about him was his ability to turn systemic challenges into actionable solutions.”
Impact exits. Kassoy recognized early that the social missions of B Corps would be at risk when it came time to exit. Private equity acquirers, or even corporate buyers such as Unilever and Danone, were subject to strategy shifts and personnel changes; after several years, the social mission was often lost. The second part of B Lab’s original strategy was to create a holding company to provide responsible exit opportunities. “We were like, ‘This can’t be that hard. We’ll just create a Berkshire Hathaway for responsible business. We’ll call it B Holdings, and we’ll raise money and we will be available to buy B Corps when they need a buyer,’” Kassoy told ImpactAlpha in May. The B Lab trio put the idea on the back burner, but Kassoy kept returning to it. This year, he became an advisor to Arowana, which is building a B Corp holding company out of Singapore. Just days before he died, Kassoy helped launch Nine Dean, a holding company built around quality jobs, with Ford’s largest direct mission investment to date (disclosure: Ford is an investor in ImpactAlpha).

Profit and purpose. On July 4, 2007 Kassoy declared the interdependence of profit and purpose. “The purpose of my capital now is to help build a marketplace of ideas, talent and capital that will improve the condition of every human being and the earth we collectively inhabit,” he wrote. Kassoy knew that such a transformation in values and market infrastructure would not be completed in a year or perhaps even in his lifetime. “Nonetheless,” he wrote, “we must start somewhere, with individuals who choose to plant a flag out where the buses don’t run – yet.”

Keep reading, “Declaration of Interdependence: Reconciling profit and purpose,” by B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy on ImpactAlpha.

Dealflow: Catalytic Capital

‘Broker notes’ expand access to RSF’s Social Investment Fund. Since it launched in 1984, RSF Social Finance has channeled more than $1 billion to social enterprises improving food systems, communities, education and the environment. To do so, it has cobbled together capital from donor advised funds and bespoke investors. RSF’s new “broker notes” will make it easier to invest in the $137 million Social Investment Fund for financial advisors, asset managers and other institutional investors. “By bringing our notes to the electronic brokerage market, we’re eliminating long-standing barriers and making it radically easier for investors to align their capital with their values,” says RSF’s Kathleen Paylor.

Scaling impact. The model builds on Calvert Impact’s long running impact note program, which are sold through brokerages and support mission-driven lenders. RSF makes low-cost loans directly to social enterprises. RSF’s borrowers include Mad Capital, which secured a $5 million facility to support organic farm transitions in the Midwest and High Plains; Goodr, which used a $500,000 loan to expand its food waste and hunger solutions; and Lotus Foods, which is building sustainable rice supply chains in Asia. With a $5,000 minimum investment, the three-year CUSIP-registered notes offer a 3.5% fixed annualized return and are distributed on Bloomberg’s brokerage platform.
More.

A to Z Impact backs Springbroad to expand its cooperative of small-scale farmers in Nigeria. The Delaware private foundation provided flexible debt capital to Springboard, which helps more than 8,000 smallholder farmers in rural Nigeria gain market access and build sustainable incomes through its co-op model. “Supporting Springboard offers the opportunity to provide truly catalytic capital to a deeply impact oriented organization on the precipice of real growth,” A to Z’s Alex Evangelides writes in a Medium post. The company says that since 2013 it has helped 7,000 farmers more than triple their income, has created 100 farming jobs for rural women and young people and has also supported rural women in starting their own businesses. The company is led by Lawrence Afere and his wife Helen Afere.

Agrifood investing. Rural farmers produce most of Nigeria’s food, but “still live in abject poverty,” according to Evangelides. Springbroad focuses on farmers producing three core products: cocoa, which it sells raw or processes into chocolate; plantains, which it fries into a snack chip; and edible cricket insects, which it uses to create protein-enhanced bread. Springboard had previously relied on its largest cocoa buyer for working capital. The debt funding from A to Z will help Springboard buy cocoa when it needs it and repay the debt when it is sold, enabling Springboard to find more profitable more sales channels. “More profits for Springboard means more income for their farmers!” Evangelides wrote.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

Climeworks, a Swiss carbon removal startup that uses direct air capture technology, raised $162 million of equity capital, led by BigPoint Holding and Partners Group, and expanded its offerings to include other kinds of carbon-removal credits. The financing brings Climeworks’ total raised since 2009 to over $1 billion. (WSJ)
French private equity investor Omnes Capital secured €112 million ($132 million) to invest in deeptech startups focused on defense and security, AI and advanced materials (see, “Calling responsible investors in Europe to invest in… defense”). With backing from the European Investment Fund, Omnes became the first fund to gain financial support from the European Union’s defense mandate. (Tech.eu)

IMPAQTO Capital provided a revenue-based loan to Muyu Education to provide coaching and AI-enabled feedback to educators in Ecuador. (IMPAQTO)

Signals: Publish What You Fund

Development finance institutions lag on transparency and disclosure around capital mobilization. The private sector “take over” of development finance was the talk of the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development wrapping up today in sweltering Seville, Spain (see, “Gathering in Seville, without the US, to mobilize financing for development”). The big institutions funding international development have been under pressure to more effectively leverage private capital. The words “catalyze” and “mobilize” appear all over new funding initiatives, press releases and reports from British International Investment, IDB Invest, International Finance Corp. and other development finance institutions and multilateral development banks. For all the talk, there is little clarity on how the $3 trillion in assets held by DFIs and MDBs are meeting their goals and what exactly they’re mobilizing, according to the latest DFI Transparency Index from Publish What You Fund. All institutions except one improved data tracking, disclosure and accessibility compared to the British nonprofits’s inaugural index two years ago. But “overall performance remains low, especially for non-sovereign DFIs, particularly in the most critical areas: impact data, private capital mobilization, climate finance and assurance of community disclosure,” said Publish What You Fund’s Gary Forster.

Funding drop. Overseas development assistance, often called foreign aid, from wealthy countries to low- and lower-middle income countries is falling at a time when needs for such assistance—for humanitarian disasters, conflicts and the impacts of climate change—is sharply increasing. ODA commitments last year were down 7% from 2023 – and that was before the US abruptly shuttered USAID, which had deployed about $40 billion per year. Other donor countries, including the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, have also cut their ODA spending. Urgency to fill development finance gaps with private money “has been the single dominant theme” in Seville, BII’s Leslie Maasdorp told ImpactAlpha. “The development community recognizes that more standardized instruments and common approaches are required to reach scale.”
Leaders and laggards. ‘Sovereign’ development finance institutions that primarily work with governments have ranked relatively highly on the Index for their data transparency on metrics like private capital mobilization disclosures, impact measurement approaches, and climate finance transparency. The World Bank scored 85.7 out of 100 for its total transparency score, up 20.3 percentage points from 2023. The Asian Development Bank followed at 85.4 and the African Development Bank at 81.6. Just four non-sovereign DFIs, which focus on private-sector investments, scored above 50 on this year’s index. The US International Development Finance Corp. was the only one of the 32 institutions in the transparency index to backslide on its scoring, dropping to 34.2 from 38.2 in 2023, when it was the highest-ranked bilateral DFI. The demotion is due to DFC’s reduced disclosure of climate, gender and other impact information in the face of the Trump administration’s edicts against climate and diversity initiatives.
Keep reading, “Development finance institutions lag on transparency and disclosure around capital mobilization,” by Jessica Pothering on ImpactAlpha.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Joseph Blasi, a leading researcher on employee ownership for more than a half-century, steps down as director of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University… Brandi Colander steps up as interim CEO of DC Green Bank, following last month’s departure of former CEO Trisha Miller… Lauren Stebbins, previously with Barra Foundation, will become the Patricia Kind Family Foundation’s executive director (see, “In Philadelphia, a dozen foundations are starting to deploy local endowments for local impact”)… From the Ground Up, which ranks food companies on their regenerative agriculture practices, will release its latest findings on a webinar, Thursday, July 10 at 1:00pm ET… Aspen Institute will host, “Feeling the Heat: Workplace Safety in a Warming World,” Wednesday, July 30, at 2:00pm ET.