There is Power in Collective Action at Home: Reflections from ImpactPHL’s Total Impact Summit

Featured Thought Leaders

Earlier this month, ImpactPHL hosted the sixth iteration of Total Impact Summit, a multi-day convening bringing together investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem leaders committed to building a more just and equitable economy in Philadelphia and beyond. Georgia’s impact investing ecosystem was represented at TIS25, and we’ve invited three thought leaders – Anna Cable, Kelsey Russell, and Khaliff Davis – to share their key takeaways and experiences. Their perspectives offer a window into the evolving landscape of impact investing and the power of place-based collaboration.

Anna Cable

The Launchpad, REMERGE

Anna Cable

The Launchpad, REMERGE

Kelsey Russell

Brighter Investing

Kelsey Russell

Brighter Investing

Khaliff Davis

Reinvestment Fund

Khaliff Davis

Reinvestment Fund

While Total Impact Summit 2025 (TIS25) has historically focused on the Northeast, it now attracts a national audience of impact investors, wealth advisors, and community builders. This year, conference programming centered around three tracks: People, Planet, and Place. The third track, “Place,” sparked a number of ideas that Anna, Kelsey, and Khaliff felt were important to share with Georgia’s impact investing ecosystem!

The Urgent Need for Reimagined Investing

At this year’s Summit, a clear message emerged: despite the uncertainty and challenges shaping the current political and economic landscape, hope and collaboration remain powerful forces for change. The energy in the room wasn’t naïve optimism. Rather it was rooted in the resilience of communities, the momentum of cross-sector partnerships, and the clarity that the old systems simply don’t serve the needs of most people. In her opening remarks, ImpactPHL CEO Kafi Lindsey, one of the event’s keynote voices, offered a compelling metaphor: like a caterpillar in metamorphosis, society is in a liminal stage—transforming through the power of “imaginal cells.” These are the seeds of a new reality—innovative ideas, models, and movements that hold the potential to reshape our economic systems into something more just, regenerative, and inclusive.

Examining Financial Tools: Opportunity Zones

The reimaging and reshaping of our community investment and capital systems is happening now. For example, there’s currently a field-level examination and conversation on the future of Opportunity Zones (OZs). While OZ 1.0 fell short of delivering the deep, place-based impact many in the community development field had hoped for, there is cautious optimism that proposed reauthorization efforts could correct course. The new proposals suggest stronger requirements around impact measurement and a renewed focus on directing capital to rural and low-income census tracts, potentially aligning more closely with the original spirit of the policy.

"Backing" Front-Line Community Wealth-Builders

Financial instruments, tools, and community investment-related policy are incredibly important components of a reimagined investment system, but so too are innovative, frontline investment deployers and intermediaries focused on community wealth-building. Wealth-building investing emerged as a central theme throughout TIS25, with presenters highlighting models like The Guild, Chicago TREND, and Kensington Corridor Trust. Each of these initiatives is working to shift power and ownership back into the hands of communities. Tools like community-based and trust-based underwriting, exemplified by organizations like Common Future, are helping to reimagine capital deployment in ways that center people over profits and challenge the extractive tendencies of traditional finance.

Khaliff Davis joined a panel discussion exploring how place-based strategies that balance financial sustainability with meaningful resident participation, creating development that builds local wealth, expands opportunity, and preserves the unique character and cultural assets that make places worth calling home.

From Traditional to Holistic Real Estate Development

A Thought-Provoking Case Study: ConnCORP (New Haven, CT)

While macroeconomic shifts such as reduced federal funding have forced communities to seek new sources of capital, place-based investing has emerged as a compelling solution, fueled by both need and opportunity. These investments increasingly go beyond real estate to support holistic, community-informed developments that serve as economic engines. When done thoughtfully, they create the kind of “rising tide” outcomes that benefit investors and communities alike. To illustrate this in action, TIS25 featured a thought-provoking case study on the Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program (ConnCORP), a New Haven-based economic development organization focused on acquisition and revitalization of commercial properties, investment in new and existing local community-based businesses, and business attraction.

After more than five years of study, community engagement, and project planning, in October 2024, ConnCORP broke ground on a $200M large-scale redevelopment effort of Dixwell Plaza. When complete, the development itself includes elements that consider the holistic needs of the community, such as: a full-service grocery store and market, early childhood education and daycare, entrepreneurial incubator space, mixed-income housing (150 units!), homeownership and workforce housing options, a food hall for local vendors, and a performing arts space for cultural expression. Listening to Anna Blanding, ConnCORP’s Chief Investment Officer, share about ConnCORP’s transformative $200M project in New Haven led us to think more creatively about Georgia and cap tables. With a catalytic $50M philanthropic donation accelerating pre-development, the project is poised to deliver significant impact across economic, social, and cultural domains.

“Deeply embedded within ConnCAT’s vision statement is economic empowerment—and that begins with a focus on jobs.” This commitment translates into measured outcomes around job creation during and after construction, with an estimated $39M increase in labor income and 131 jobs over four years for residents and includes workforce training integrated into ConnCAT’s state-of-the-art headquarters.”

Carlton HighsmithBoard Chair, ConnCORP

TIS25 Spotlights Georgia Innovator:
The Guild | Atlanta, GA

The Guild’s Founder and CEO, Nikishka Iyengar, joined a panel discussing different investor and sector models – including banking, BIPOC-centered investment, employee ownership, and more – proving how capital can serve community interests at scale while bridging divides and building wealth.

The Guild, based in Atlanta, is a community-driven organization dedicated to transforming the traditional real estate landscape to empower Black, Brown, and working-class communities. Recognizing that conventional development often leads to displacement and loss of cultural identity, The Guild focuses on creating community-owned models of land, housing, and real estate that prioritize local control and long-term affordability. Their mission is to ensure that residents have the opportunity to own, steward, and build collective wealth within their own neighborhoods. As a 100% BIPOC worker-owned cooperative, The Guild embodies the values it promotes, ensuring that its organizational structure reflects its commitment to economic democracy and community self-determination.

Central to The Guild’s approach are two innovative models: the Community Stewardship Trust (CST) and the People’s Community Land Trust (PCLT). The CST allows local residents to co-own and manage essential neighborhood spaces, such as affordable housing, grocery stores, and co-working spaces, thereby fostering stability and preventing displacement. The PCLT focuses on removing homes from the speculative real estate market to secure permanently affordable housing, ensuring that families can remain in their communities amidst rising housing costs. Beyond real estate development, The Guild invests in community capacity building through programs that support entrepreneurs of color, promote cooperative business models, and provide access to non-extractive capital via their Groundcover fund. This fund channels reparative capital into scaling cooperative models, creating real pathways to ownership for marginalized communities. Through these initiatives and more, The Guild is not only addressing the immediate challenges of gentrification and displacement but also laying the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive economic system that centers the voices and needs of historically marginalized communities.

Georgia Investors: Don’t Wait on Impact Investing

TIS25 featured a number of speakers – Andrew Siwo (Director of Sustainable Investments and Climate Solutions, New York State Common Retirement Fund), Melanie Schnoll Begun (Managing Director, Morgan Stanley), Erika Seth Davies (CEO, Rhia Venture), and many more – who highlighted the roles impact-first or impact-minded investors. Many impact investing organizations, from banks to investment funds to advisors and consultants, are waiting (or working to accelerate) for more foundations, family offices, and HNWI to embrace impact investing. Attendees learned that the Fed has a dedicated team focused on impact investing, led by Otto Kerr. His team’s work, including resources like “The Making Missing Markets Initiative” and “What’s Possible: Investing Now for Prosperous, Sustainable Neighborhoods,” underscores the growing recognition—at even the highest levels of finance—that inclusive economic prosperity requires targeted, mission-aligned investment strategies.

As federal dollars continue to shrink, the role of individual capital becomes even more critical. Through private investments, everyday investors can help bring essential community projects to life and see the tangible outcomes in their own backyards. Being at TIS25 led us to reflect on and ideate around the compounding impact of middle-class capital participating in private projects, as a well-thought-out part of their diversified strategy. Could this be a helpful diversifier on a development’s capital stack, along with institutions and family offices?

Here’s a tangible yet theoretical example here in Atlanta: What if a group of 100 upper-middle-class retail investors allocated, say, 5% of their portfolio to private investments? That capital could be pooled and invested in a fund like New Majority Capital (NMC), which is focused on minority access to entrepreneurship through acquisition. NMC could then partner with a local development project like South Downtown to bring a proven tenant with a history of business revenue, thereby giving that business an opportunity in a new, growing market and geography. Now imagine the compounded capital this could unlock for innovative, impact-driven development here locally if 10,000 retail investors allocated a portion of their portfolios to that purpose and execution.

Though this isn’t an easy challenge to tackle (especially as we acknowledge the risk in private market investments), we believe there is a significant win-win opportunity here–democratized access to this asset class for a broader socio-economic stratum of investors, and more capital unlocked for community-impact investments like affordable housing. As COO at Brighter Investing (an Atlanta-based RIA specializing in values-aligned investment strategies for anyone from middle-class investors to institutions and foundations), Kelsey has been building a strategy to create these retail-accessible capital deployment pathways, with a particular impact thesis around social justice here locally in Georgia. If you’d like to learn more, collaborate, or have individuals in your network interested in activating their capital in this way, please reach out!

Acknowledgments

In a world that’s very much in transition, gatherings like the Total Impact Summit offer more than just insight. They provide direction, connection, and a shared sense of possibility. We’re immensely grateful for ImpactPHL’s leadership in organizing this incredible field-building event, and we want to thank Anna Cable, Kelsey Russell, and Khaliff Davis for sharing their insights and reflections with the Georgia impact investing ecosystem! As we imagine what comes next, TIS25 and similar events are a reminder that transformation isn’t just possible — it’s already underway.

There is Power in Collective Action at Home: Reflections from ImpactPHL’s Total Impact Summit

Anna Cable

The Launchpad, REMERGE

Anna Cable

The Launchpad, REMERGE

Kelsey Russell

Brighter Investing

Kelsey Russell

Brighter Investing

Khaliff Davis

Reinvestment Fund

Khaliff Davis

Reinvestment Fund

The Urgent Need for Reimagined Investing

From Traditional to Holistic Real Estate Development

A Thought-Provoking Case Study: ConnCORP (New Haven, CT)

TIS25 Spotlights Georgia Innovator:

The Guild’s Founder and CEO, Nikishka Iyengar, joined a panel discussing different investor and sector models – including banking, BIPOC-centered investment, employee ownership, and more – proving how capital can serve community interests at scale while bridging divides and building wealth.

Georgia Investors: Don’t Wait on Impact Investing

Acknowledgments

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