NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

If money alone could fix it, we would be further along. From a sobering SDG scoreboard — with less than one fifth of targets on track — to mounting evidence of climate stress and democratic backsliding, the pattern is clear: our bottleneck is not capital availability but capital architecture, allocation, and accountability. In this timely Luminarias session, we move past optics and acronyms to examine how impact capital actually gets mobilized and deployed where the mainstream is ill equipped to assess real risks or strengthen ecosystems.

Our featured guest, Dr. Gillian Marcelle, argues that progress stalls when we ignore three realities: structural bottlenecks, cognitive and organizational blind spots, and the need for reimagined blended finance that braids financial and non-financial capital — knowledge, networks, policy, and cultural and social capital — to unlock durable change. As ESG and DEI face political headwinds in the United States and “impact” rhetoric risks drifting into complacency, this conversation offers an imaginative and challenging approach to investing that begins with root causes and includes recommendations for getting capital unstuck — and for establishing the trust and execution capacity the global impact economy requires.

Topics to be covered

Bottlenecks, blind spots, blended finance — an original framework for moving capital from promise to performance.
Place-based architectures — designing country and regional platforms that de-risk pipeline, reduce transaction costs, and build local execution capacity.
Braiding financial and non-financial capital — aligning policy, knowledge, networks, and culture with investment flows.
Governance and accountability — approaches to ground accountability though addressing frameworks and practices that shift power, expand access, and accelerate SDG-aligned outcomes.
Operating amid headwinds — maintaining mission integrity as ESG and DEI come under attack in the United States, and avoiding impact-washing.
Overlooked deal sources — Diaspora capital, community wealth vehicles, trapped capital in insurance companies, pension funds and SWFs, and public-interest tech as pipelines for investable opportunities.