Greetings Agents of Impact!

☎️ Agents of Impact Call: Financing Indigenous sovereignty in southeast Alaska. When federal funding for Native communities was frozen last year, a self-directed endowment kept community development projects in southeast Alaska moving forward. Spruce Root, a Native-run community development financial institution, established Seacoast Trust in 2022 as a perpetual capital pool to fund food security, energy independence and natural-resource stewardship without dependence on Washington. Seeded with $20 million from Sealaska, The Nature Conservancy and others, Seacoast is targeting ambitious growth under AlTi Global’s management. Explore this model of Indigenous-led, place-based investing with Spruce Root’s Alana Peterson, Sealaska’s former CEO Anthony Mallott, Ian Johnson of the Hoonah Indian Association, and AlTi’s Brad Harrison, in conversation with ImpactAlpha’s David Bank, Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 9am Alaska / 10am PT / 1pm ET. RSVP now.

In today’s Brief:

Optimism and action at Climate Week NYC

Financing Native home ownership in South Dakota

Gender-lens investing in public markets

Featured: Climate Finance

Hoax this! Climate Week NYC showcases real solutions to real (really!) climate change. Climate entrepreneurs and investors have moved on from you-know-who. Across New York City’s Climate Week, initiatives were rolled out, funds were raised, and solutions were showcased, all as if the real risks of climate change created real opportunities to address them. “There are real results to point to,” Jahed Momand of VC firm Cerulean Ventures told ImpactAlpha. “In the last year we have had some seriously good results around energy and decarbonization and water.” The more than 1,000 Climate Week activities demonstrated the parallel reality of climate action and progress happening in the same week that US President Donald Trump trashed climate science in an extended riff at the United Nations, where he again claimed that climate change is a “hoax.” The get-things-done attitude of more than 100,000 Climate Week attendees has produced something rare in recent climate conversations: optimism. “You’re hearing a lot of practical strategies, practical advice, and a lot of real talk about what has to happen,” said Robert Munson of the Sorenson Impact Institute, which hosted a daylong program on nature-based solutions to climate challenges. 

Signs of life. “Net zero” sounds so… 2024. Investment strategies these days are more likely to be couched as energy sovereignty, resilience or adaptation. “Sometimes the upfront narrative changes in terms of how you get to an investment strategy, but the underlying asset that you end up investing in remains the same,” said Colin le Duc of Generation Investment Management. Institutional investors and high net-worth families are returning to such opportunities after the climate fundraising winter of recent years. On Wednesday, New York Comptroller Mark Levine, who oversees the city’s five major pension systems with a combined asset base of more than $325 billion, said he will propose allocating $5 billion to new private market climate investment opportunities. At One Ventures, a San Francisco-based climate tech investor, is two-thirds of the way to its $350 million goal for its third fund, according to At One’s Tom Chi. California-based Candide Group has closed its Afterglow Climate Justice Fund at $70 million.

Power and place. Affordability and community resilience remain good bets, even as the Biden-era Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF, remains tied up in legal battles with the Trump administration. Just in time for Climate Week, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s termination of $7 billion in the Solar for All portion of the GGRF was unlawful. Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation said it would back a $150 million fund to fill the gap in the Midwest for the kind of green, community-based infrastructure projects that the GGRF was intended to finance. “Communities have real projects and real leaders and real community support,” said McKnight’s Tonya Allen. “The challenge now is making sure that capital flows to them so they can shape and build the future.” Enerwealth, a community solar and storage developer in the Southeast, is lowering electricity bills, diversifying revenue streams for farmers and landowners, and distributing what it calls “freedom dividends,” a form of universal basic income for single mothers. Separately, the Richard King Mellon Foundation made a $250,000 investment in Frontline Gig, a Baltimore-based venture that staffs local climate projects to create pathways into the green economy for local residents.

Keep reading, “Hoax this! Climate Week NYC showcases real solutions to real (really!) climate change,” by Amy Cortese. 

A spotlight on cash: Doing good with deposits. Cash is called “king” because it provides security, liquidity and flexibility – and remains the foundation of financial decisions. Today, more than $18 trillion in cash sits in US bank accounts, alongside more than $8 trillion in money market funds. This scale underscores the importance of cash and its potential for impact. StoneCastle was founded to drive deposits to community banks that strengthen local communities. Today our network includes more than 1,000 financial institutions, including community banks, MDIs, CDFIs and credit unions. We believe cash can do more than sit on the sidelines. When directed to institutions serving communities, it can help support small businesses and their workers, housing, agriculture and infrastructure priorities.

KEEP by StoneCastle helps advisors and clients put cash to work with a competitive yield, federal insurance, overnight liquidity and a streamlined digital experience. By making cash movement scalable, KEEP helps turn everyday cash into an opportunity for clients and communities. For more information, download our report.

Dealflow: Indigenous Finance

🏘️Enterprise invests in mortgage finance fund to support Indigenous homeownership. The Enterprise Community Loan Fund approved a $1 million loan to Great Plains Housing Initiative to expand the availability of mortgages in South Dakota. Great Plains Housing Initiative’s Native Impact Fund buys up performing mortgages from Native-led CDFIs to free up capital to originate new mortgages in Indigenous communities. Such mortgage sales are common in the US housing finance market. What is unique to the Native Impact Fund is that the originating lenders maintain underwriting control and servicing rights after the sale. “This structure helps Native CDFIs to preserve community relationships at the heart of their work,” Enterprise explained in a statement. Share this post.

In other impact deal news:

🌳Nature-based investing. IDB Lab, the Inter-American Development Bank’s venture group, invested $1 million in Amazonia Impact Ventures to support access to financing for small producers in the Amazon in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. IDB Lab invested via its Clean Technology Fund in the catalytic tranche of Amazonia Impact Ventures’s debt fund. The investment comes as IADB is reportedly under pressure from the Trump administration to drop its climate targets. (Amazonia Impact Ventures)

☀️Energy access. Acumen made a $5 million equity investment in Sun King to support the off-grid solar company’s work in Zambia. The investment is expected to help up to 4.5 million people access clean and reliable energy for the first time. Acumen invested from its Hardest to Reach Catalyze initiative (see, “How Acumen’s Jacqueline Novogratz is blending capital to bring electricity to the hardest to reach“). (Acumen)

🇬🇧Infrastructure finance. Energy infrastructure investor Generate Capital exited its anaerobic digestion portfolio, Generate Upcycle. The portfolio includes 12 sites in the US and UK. UK-based Pinta Energy acquired the seven UK-based sites, while Vanguard Renewables is acquiring the five US-based sites. Generate said the purpose of the sale is to free up capital for new renewables investments. (Generate Capital)

Signals: Gender Smart

Gender-lens investors look to scale capital in public markets. It has been a difficult 18 months for investors working to advance gender inclusion in the capital markets. The more than 270 investors, asset owners and managers, financial institutions, development finance institutions and multilateral organisations that gathered in Montreal last week for the 2X Global Summit were looking ahead, not back (see, “Deepening, not disengaging from, gender-lens investing”). The uncharted territory for gender-lens investing may be the $270 trillion, or 95% of global capital, that is invested in the public markets. “The consensus of the convening: honor what has been built, do not retreat from the work, keep moving forward,” writes 2X Global advisor Natasha Ferrari in a guest post. Looking ahead means directing the tools built largely for private investors in development finance into mainstream financial architecture without sacrificing rigor, credibility or accountability, she says. “Reaching public equities and debt is not a side conversation. It is the field’s next test of scale.”

Leading by example. The convening, held in Montreal and co-hosted with FinDev Canada and Global Affairs Canada, was a full-circle moment for the gender-lens investing movement. Canada was a launch partner of the 2X Challenge in 2018. Then the goal was to mobilize $3 billion for investments that advance women as entrepreneurs, leaders, employees and consumers. Within six years, participants in the challenge had mobilized more than 10 times that amount and set a goal of adding another $20 billion by 2027 (see, “Spurring a global race to the top for investing with a gender lens”). FinDev Canada, Canada’s development finance institution, announced two new investments totalling C$110 million ($78 million) at the summit. Mirova, Triple Jump and FSD Africa Investment, meanwhile, signed on to the 2X Challenge. “We are not asking for favors,” 2X Global’s Jessica Espinoza told the gathering. “We are building markets.”

Keep reading. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Impact Performance Reporting Norms welcomes its founding adopters, including Accion, Capricorn Investment Group, SJF Ventures and The Rockefeller Foundation… IIX brings on Son Nguyen as senior vice president…  Lydia Merry joins Thriving Investments as director of investor relations and product… ArcLight Capital Partners appoints Peter Podurgiel as president and board director of its portfolio company Advanced Power. 

Global Partnerships seeks an administrative assistant in Bogotá… Better Society Capital is hiring an investment partnerships and advisory officer in London… BerkeleyHaas Ventures is on the hunt for a managing director… Hanna Ebeling becomes an independent investment committee member for Minderoo Foundation’s Strategic Impact Fund… Ford Foundation’s Roy Swan joins Mission Investors Exchange’s Matt Onek for a virtual discussion about building inclusive prosperity through impact investing, and Swan’s new book, “Positive Sum,” (see, “Ford Foundation’s Roy Swan makes the case for ‘positive-sum’ capitalism“), Tuesday, Oct. 6.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– Sept. 24, 2026