How the Justice Climate Fund Is Scaling Climate Solutions Through Community-Level Investing
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters Milken Conference Series episode, Adam Torres interviews Amir Kirkwood, CEO of the Justice Climate Fund, to discuss how climate equity and clean energy can go hand in hand. Kirkwood shares how his fund channels capital through local banks and lenders to bring clean energy infrastructure—like solar panels and EV financing—to underserved communities. The goal: make the green transition accessible, scalable, and just.
About Justice Climate Fund
JCF mobilizes capital and resources to strengthen under-resourced communities, funding projects that provide clean energy, support cleaner air and water, improve public health, and build economic resilience so communities across the country can thrive.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Amir Kirkwood, and he’s CEO over at Justice Climate Fund.
Today’s episode is part of our Milken Conference coverage series where we, bring on some of the attendees, some of the guests, the participants, the speakers, and we interview them and kind of get the best of what they’re doing and also their experience at the conference. So first thing, first, Amir, welcome to the show.
Good to have you. Thank you, Adam. Appreciate you inviting me. All right. So I know you’re at the Milken Conference this year. What first time or have you been in the past? Like what, what’s your connection to the conference? It was absolutely my first time and I was invited by the folks. Oh, newbie. I love it.
New to the community, man. Well, how, how did it go for you? Talk to me. You know, it was a really inspiring opportunity for me to see that level of passion and commitment, but so many different investors and others around solving some of the urgent challenges, and particularly the ones around sustainability and scaling clean energy and climate solutions.
So, innovative ideas and approaches that I learned. Lots of really wonderful conversations, so it’s truly appreciative of the opportunity. That’s awesome. I have a feeling you’ll be going back. That’s what normally happens. You get hooked, you go there, you need a bunch of people, then you go back and then by year 2, 3, 4, your family.
So that’s gonna be that’s gonna be good. And hopefully, I know we didn’t get to meet in person this time, but I’m sure I’ll see you there next. Yes. That’s awesome. I look forward to it. So let’s get further into the work that you’re up to now. So Justice Climate Fund, tell us a little bit more about the fund.
So, justice Climate Fund is essentially a. Investment fund that was created in 2023 for the purposes of scaling and accelerating clean energy financing in low to moderate commun income communities across America. The way in which we do it is by raising funds from private investors, government, or other sources, and then helping to facilitate that financing largely through a network of community level banks and loan funds across the country.
Your listeners may have heard of the term community development financial strategics. Mm-hmm. Well, those are the type of community level lenders that we work with, and the idea is that many of them have commitments to do green lending, whether it’s distributive energy, med zero buildings, electrification of vehicles.
But often what they don’t have is the complete form of capital They need to really execute on the pipeline of opportunities. So what we’re doing is working with those community lenders to get them the capital that they need in order to be able to really execute on their mission and strategies and flourish.
let’s take that from the investor side of things. Why is it so important for the investors side or the investors out there to start to be thinking at the community or local level? Like, what does that look like? Because I feel like we don’t talk about it that much as you, as you kind of propose this.
Go ahead. I think the main reason why is that most, most investors, no matter how large their portfolios are, fundamentally local. If you think about it, a pension fund in the state of California like CalPERS or Calsters, well, they manage hundreds of billions of dollars of capital. They’re managing it for features.
They’re managing it for state workers who all live in communities and are all faced with the challenges associated with. Energy costs and clean air and health systems and all the things that focusing on clean energy will ultimately improve. So no matter how big the portfolio, ultimately each of these investors are local.
Hmm. What drew you to this work yourself? Like what a lot of things you can do. What drew you to this work? So I have a career now, 25 plus years in banking and. No matter what I did, whether it was at a investment bank at like one point Citi Group to a more impact bank like Amalgamated Bank, all of those experiences led me to understand the importance of financing at the local and community level.
Mm. Whether it’s a school, whether it’s working with the church, whether it’s working with, you know, residential homes or small businesses, financing is really a local effort and mm-hmm. I just got hooked. what a story. I want to stick on that investor theme a little bit longer. So especially for the investors, we got a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives, a lot of investors that listen to this show.
And, you know, maybe generally they seek scaled investments and, and they’re, they’re looking at a certain thing, but maybe they haven’t considered at the local level. So how do investors generally speaking, like make sound investments at the local level? It’s a very fair point. Most investors do seek to generally invest at scale.
So for a fe fund or for an institutional wealth manager doing a $2 million or $1 million, local investment is often very hard given their investment policy statements and just the return expectations. So that’s why JCS is here to help scale. By bringing together lots of lending opportunities at a small level, pooling them into larger transactions.
So institutional investors can then lend at the scale with relevant for their strategies, but ultimately drive funding down to very local and community based lending. So we sit in a sense, in a sense, as the intermediary between their scaled opportunities and what has to be designed for local level investments.
Yeah. that makes a lot of sense. And maybe talk a little bit about the vetting process of what that even looks like on your end, like the internal like to, to be that intermediary. Sure. Absolutely. The most exciting thing about having a network of community lenders is those community lenders are great sources of a pipeline.
They understand their communities and they know where the deals are, but two. All of our community lenders are either regulated banking institutions mm-hmm. Or certified loan funds who are part, who are either regulated by entities like the OCC and Federal Reserve. They have credit policies, they have investment policy statements themselves.
So any institutional investor looking for work with justice Private Fund and our network already benefit from the fact that they would be partnered with organizations who have disciplined models in which they do their lending and investing. Also they’re willing to put skin in the band. They have their own deposit base, they have their own investor base.
So again, it’s the best of both worlds because you get the discipline of a regulated entity, but you also get groups that have their own capital to invest. And so therefore, as an institutional investor, you don’t have to worry about taking undue risks. If somebody who really does really understands the market is not able to stand beside you.
Yeah, could you give some invest some examples of like, what some deals could look like just in, in, just in general, either current ones, past ones, like whatever you can share. Can you give some examples? Absolutely. So an example would be for a typical community lender to finance a megawatt or two or three megawatts solar farm or solar installation.
That might be located on the top of a church, for example, that has a wide flat roof and a carport. So it’s the perfect environment for them to install source analysts. And so what the community lender would do, would pr would be the one who provides the financing. To that church of institution to do the installation.
Now, where they would want to have an institutional investment partner is that often the scale and size to really meet, meet the footprint of that investment, what might require more than they would be able to individually take on their balance sheet. So the ability to have a co lender or to have a takeout source of financing really just enables them to execute on a project like that.
Another example would be. That in the affordable housing world, which is really housing designed to meet the needs of working class families, these are generally large multifamily buildings, five, 10 stories 50 to a hundred units. So as a result, they have very wide footprints on their roof and that creates an opportunity to install solar panels as well.
And so you get the benefit of a stable asset that has cash flow due to rental income. Then you can directly see the benefits that come from reducing the cost of, energy consumption by adding the solar panels to mm-hmm. That building and, generating the benefits back. So these are the types of work that community leaders do that are very much aligned with the overall clean energy strategy that benefits.
Hmm. that’s great. That’s great. And don’t wanna assume, like, let’s go a step further and look at some of the, you mentioned you worked for impact funds and some, just some other types of funds in the past as well. Like how does it affect, let’s just say, you know, lower income or even working class communities, like, why is it important to ensure that clean energy investment occurs, in those areas as well, like at the community level?
Well, I think the biggest reason why it’s so important is that. As our country experiences climate shocks, what happens too often is that in the recovery period, the impacts of that climate shock linger longer in low to moderate income communities. Just think about hurricane Halloween last year, which went through the Appalachian region Western Carolina.
They’re still dealing with the long term effects of that hurricane event. What made it so dramatic is the impact on basic real estate, the residents and homes of people, community, physical infrastructure around them. So low income communities tend to experience longer impacts over time as a result of climate events.
They also tend to, because they’re not addressed. Through retrofitting and others and other aspects of clean refinancing are vulnerable to even worse outcomes the next time a cyclical event would happen. Now compare that to where I live in Arlington, Virginia, where it’s one of the wealthier income communities in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Mm-hmm. Everyone who owns a property has solar panels on their roof, and how do they finance that Through home equity lines of credit. If you’re low income, you don’t own property, how do you then finance that improvement on your own? And so that’s the INS disparity that we’re trying to address at the Justice Climate Fund.
Yeah. Well, this is great. First off, Amir, it’s been excellent having you on the show today and learning more about the work that you’re doing. If somebody’s listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up and they want to connect with you and your team, how do they do that? That’s great and I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.
The best way to follow up would be justice climate fund.org, which is our company’s website, all one word, justice climate fund.org on that website and have contact information to learn more about Justice Climate Fund and also if you wanted to make a contribution to some of the philanthropic work that we do there’s a capacity to do that as well.
Perfect. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the in the show notes, so you can just click on ’em and head right on over. And speaking to the audience. If this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Amir, thanks again for coming on the show, Adam. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.
