TGIF, Agents of Impact!
In today’s Brief:
- Roundup: Leaning in to get deals done
- Podcasts: Activest, Impact(ed) and This Week in Impact
- Pop Impact: Mountainhead and Black Mirror
🗣 Built for this. It’s going to take more than a little political intimidation to stop the green buildout. That was the fighting spirit on this week’s Agents of Impact Call (see below). The kinds of deals that would have been financed through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund still make sense in terms of lower energy costs, improved health and, yes, reduced emissions, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back as much as $20 billion approved by Congress and awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency. The stranded pipeline of green loans represents investable dealflow for private capital, as Amy Cortese and I wrote this week. “What we’re doing right now is looking at the full set of pipeline opportunities that we see in the market,” Climate United’s Beth Bafford said on the Call, “and seeing how we can get those deals done.”
Agents of Impact are finding dealflow – and capital – in pockets of resilience both local and global. In Europe, material risks are still material, as VentureESG’s Johannes Lenhard and Hannah Leach reported from SuperReturn in Berlin. New Energy Nexus’s Henri van Eeghen identified a pipeline of more than 300 early-stage startups working on solar deployment, grid efficiency, the circular economy, electric mobility and more in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Erik Stein mined ImpactAlpha’s deal reporting to identify limited partners that have continued to allocate assets to gender lens investment strategies in Latin America. Lucy Ngige reported on Upstart Co-Lab’s findings that art museums and other endowed institutions are moving capital to creative enterprises even as public funding for the arts withers. Roodgally Senatus dug into the emerging collaboration among Philadelphia’s foundations to deploy local endowments for local impact.
It will take toughness to renegotiate the power relations and embedded practices that have impeded human thriving. Entertainment industry superstars like Taylor Swift and Ryan Coogler have been able to claw back their own rights and residuals, but what about an equitable-to-artists ownership structure at scale, Mark Newberg proposed, suggesting a whole record label or movie studio built to revert ownership rights to the original artists. Adopting such an abundance mindset in investing, RSF’s Jasper van Brakel suggested, could yield not only financial returns but “the restoration of what’s been neglected, damaged or drained, and the creation of paths toward durable shared prosperity.” The pipeline of investable opportunities for both restoration and creation are well-stocked. “And so we need to lean in, regardless of what is happening in Washington and the policy implications,” Bafford said….
Read More: The Week in impact investing: Investable pipelines
