IFI Community Showcase: What Our Community Is Building - June '26 Edition |
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It's hard to believe we're already halfway through the year, and the energy and action of our community shows no sign of slowing down. This month, you've brought us a fund manager rewriting the rules of venture capital, a new tool for impact-first decision making, and a community asking one of the most uncomfortable questions in finance: how much wealth is too much? That's what this Showcase has always been about: making visible the ideas, the experiments, and the quiet progress happening across this network so we can all learn from each other and keep moving the field forward, together. Read on for a snapshot of what the IFI community is creating this month ↓ - Voices from the Field: Rethinking VC fund structures, Bridging the Climate Commercialisation Gap and New Research on Forex Barriers to Impact Investing
- Tools & Market Infrastructure: New Tools for Impact-First Investing, Catalytic Capital, Climate IMM and Systemic Investing
- Opportunities & Field-Building: Systemic Investing Summit in Rio and a Learning Series on Extreme Wealth
- Take Action: Apply to the Employee Ownership Fund Accelerator, and Help Entrepreneurs Rate their Investors
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Breaking a Sacred Rule of Venture Capital What if the fund structure itself is the problem? Venture capital prides itself on backing founders who challenge convention yet the industry's own architecture has remained largely untouched for decades. IFI community member Hans Dellenbach makes a compelling case for why that's worth questioning. After ten years running four flex-term funds, Emerald has found that removing fixed end dates while retaining the core GP/LP structure better serves strategic investors, eliminates artificial decision points, and allows firms to build institutional memory across generations rather than resetting with every new fundraising cycle. A genuinely thought-provoking read for anyone working on the design of capital vehicles. Bridging the Commercial Valley of Death in Climate Innovation We all know the moment: the technology works, customers are interested, the path to impact is clear and then the capital disappears. Autodesk Foundation has written about their investment in Trellis Climate, a catalytic investing program of Prime Coalition built specifically to fund that gap. Trellis deploys pooled, risk-tolerant capital into first-of-a-kind climate infrastructure, and has already mobilised over $65 million in follow-on funding from an initial $11 million in catalytic capital. A proof point worth paying attention to. Local Solutions to Forex Barriers in Impact Investing Back in January, some folks at Bard College put a survey out to the community on foreign exchange barriers to impact investing and many of you took the time to respond. They've now put together those results in a full thought-piece exploring how local actors are finding practical ways to navigate the forex constraints that continue to block capital from flowing where it's most needed. Thank you to everyone in this community who took the time to contribute, your input shaped the findings directly. |
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2. Tools & Market Infrastructure |
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A Climate IMM Playbook That Meets Practitioners Where They Are Measuring climate impact across a portfolio in a way that's credible, practical, and specific enough to be useful is a challenge. The Climate SMILE Community of Practice, developed by Prime Coalition, has published a guide built to answer exactly that. Many existing IMM frameworks are either too generic or too fragmented to apply in a climate-specific context; this Playbook bridges that gap. It covers the full investment lifecycle, from defining impact objectives through to reporting and exit, and includes structured diligence roadmaps, case studies, and a curated table of practitioner-recommended resources. The Systemic Investing Practice Guide If you've been following the systemic investing conversation and we know many of you have, this one's for you. The TransCap Initiative has launched the Systemic Investing Practice Guide, a living resource for designing and implementing systemic investment programs. It brings together methodologies for aligning capital with transformative outcomes and practical strategies for embedding systems thinking into investment practice. As the field begins to codify its early learning, this is a resource worth bookmarking and returning to as it grows. The Impact-First Investing Tool For philanthropic organisations, family offices, and donor-advised funds wondering whether their assets could be working harder, the Impact-First Investing Tool (IFI Tool) offers a useful place to start. Developed by the Social Finance Institute and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at Chicago Booth. It is an interactive tool that helps explore how even modest allocations to impact-first investments, those that accept below-market returns in exchange for deeper impact, can meaningfully increase the total impact of their assets over time. A practical and accessible entry point for anyone starting to think about the relationship between impact and returns. A Playbook for Catalytic Capital What does it actually take to move philanthropic capital beyond the grant check? Renaissance Philanthropy's Catalytic Capital Playbook offers a clear-eyed guide to the full toolkit, concessional debt, guarantees, and concessional equity and how to choose between them depending on the specific barrier you're trying to unlock. It covers governance, legal structures, transactional capacity, and what it looks like in practice across a range of sectors and geographies. Whether you may be new to catalytic capital or would like to deepen your approach, this is a resource worth spending time with. A Study Uncovering the True Cost of Impact First InvestingWe often frame impact-first investing by the financial returns that are “conceded.” This new report from the Miller Center shifts that perspective, exploring the true cost of impact-first investing by balancing those financial trade-offs against the tangible social and ecological outcomes achieved. It provides a necessary framework for practitioners to weigh the “costs” of concessionary capital against the high cost of inaction, offering data-driven arguments for those needing to build a compelling case for impact-first strategies to their boards and wealth advisors. |
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3. Opportunities & Field-Building |
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Takeaways from the Systemic Investing Summit in Rio Last month 250 practitioners from across the world gathered to make sense of systemic investing. Prime Coalition's Anna Goldstein and Dan Block were in Rio too, and they wrote up an honest and generative reflection on the TransCap Initiative's Systemic Investing Summit. They surfaced questions the field is still genuinely wrestling with: who plays the orchestration role, how do you fund the work of collaboration itself, and does systemic investing require everyone at the table to hold a systems lens? Definitely worth a read if you're following this space. A Learning Series on Extreme Wealth for Wealth Holders Determining how much is enough is a topic more wealth holders are starting to consider. Patriotic Millionaires, together with the London School of Economics, Oxfam, the New Economics Foundation and philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, have built a space to explore it seriously. Their 6-part online learning series digs into how extreme wealth harms society, democracy, and the environment and what an Extreme Wealth Line might actually look like in practice. If this conversation feels relevant to your network or your own practice, we'd encourage you to take a look. |
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Apply to the Employee Ownership Fund Accelerator Nearly 3 million U.S. businesses employing 1 in 5 private-sector workers will change hands in the coming decade. Most will be sold to outside buyers or shut down entirely, with the wealth they've built going anywhere but to the people who created it. The Ownership Capital Lab's Employee Ownership Fund Accelerator is a tuition-free, 9-month program for the next generation of EO fund managers and capital entrepreneurs stepping into that gap. They're accepting 8–10 platforms into the inaugural 2026–2027 cohort, with applications open now through July 19th. There's also a virtual Q&A if you want to hear more before applying. Help Entrepreneurs Rate Their Investors The future of impact investing depends on how well we listen to the people building solutions on the ground and Acumen and the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan are trying to make that feedback loop real. Their anonymous survey invites entrepreneurs to share honest feedback on what impact investors are doing well, where they're falling short, and whether they'd raise from the same investor again. It's a rare opportunity for a field that genuinely wants to do better but only works if enough entrepreneurs participate. If you have entrepreneurs in your network, we'd be happy if you can share the link with them. |
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As we round the halfway mark of the year, this showcase feels like a good moment to pause and reflect on just how much this community has built together; new tools, new questions, new ways of thinking about capital. Thank you for continuing to surface the work that moves this field forward. See you next month! |
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P.S. In case you missed it, you can view our May Showcase here. |
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