WORKING POWER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Business and Investment Advisor
Jay is a business and investment advisor with 15 years of experience providing business theses, growth strategy, operations structuring, funding and project development for public infrastructure, agriculture and technology investments. Jay is managing principal of Fossett & Associates, a boutique advisory firm supporting entrepreneurs, corporations, investors and government clients in the US, Europe and emerging markets.
Colette Pichon Battle is a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana. As founder and Co-Executive Director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy (GCCLP), she develops programming focused on equitable disaster recovery, global migration, community economic development, climate justice, and energy democracy. Under Colette's leadership, the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy serves on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, co-chairs the national Water Equity and Climate Resilient Caucus with PolicyLink, serves on the steering committee of the Ocean Justice Forum, and anchors the 5-state, multi-issue initiative Gulf South for a Green New Deal. Colette was the lead architect of the 13-state Southern Communities for Green New Deal with the Southeast Climate & Energy Network and the Red, Black & Green New Deal, the national climate initiative for the Movement for Black Lives. Colette chairs the Equity Advisory Group of the Louisiana Governor's Climate Initiative Task Force, advises the Kataly Foundation's Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective, serves on the boards of the US Climate Action Network, Center for Constitutional Rights, Highlander Research Education Center, and Healthy Gulf, is a member of the Movement for Black Lives policy table leadership team and the Resilience Roadmap project steering committee.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Founder of BlocPower
Donnel Baird is the founder of BlocPower, a climate tech startup based in Brooklyn. BlocPowers tech platform analyzes, finances, and installs clean energy and building decarbonization upgrades in buildings in underserved communities. BlocPower creates jobs for qualified local low-income workers, energy savings for building owners, reduces carbon emissions and asthma rates, and provides financial returns to investors. In 2021, the company announced a historic partnership with Ithaca, New York to decarbonize 100% of the city's buildings-the first such project in the United States.
BlocPower is backed by Kapor Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the American Family Institute for social and environmental impact, and Salesforce. Baird is a graduate of Duke University and Columbia Business School, where he was a recipient of the Board of Overseers Fellowship and a recipient of investment from the Lang Fund for Entrepreneurial Initiatives. He spent four years as a political and community organizer, and more than two years managing a national initiative to leverage American Reinvestment and Recovery Act energy efficiency investments in underserved communities. He sits on various boards including the New York Federal Reserve Bank Advisory Board. Baird lives in New Jersey with his wife, and children.
Elizabeth Yeampierre is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican environmental/climate justice leader of African and Indigenous ancestry, born and raised in New York City. Elizabeth is co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance, a national frontline led organization and Executive Director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization. Elizabeth was the 1st Latina Chair of the USEPA National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and opening speaker for the first White House Council on Environmental Quality Forum on Environmental Justice under Obama. Elizabeth has been featured in the NY Times as a visionary paving the path to Climate Justice. She was named by Apolitical as Climate 100: The World's Most Influential People in Climate Policy , also featured in Vogue as one of 13 Climate Warriors in the world and a recipient of the Frederick Douglass Abolitionist Award FD200. Recently, she has spoken at Oxford University, the Ethos Conference in Brazil and the Hague.
George joined LISC in 2018 bringing over 20 years of finance and management experience. He currently serves as President of LISC Fund Management, where he has built a business line and team focused on the creation and deployment of multidimensional private equity/private debt impact funds. Each of these funds pursues a range of high-impact real estate or business investments that create jobs, fuel small businesses, revitalize commercial areas, improve housing, expand local incomes and make communities safer and stronger. Since inception, the group has launched eight innovative impact funds with an aggregate value of over $800M on behalf of institutional investors, family offices, corporate citizens, and municipal stakeholders.
George previously served as Co-founder and President of Sol System, a Washington, D.C.-based renewable energy investment firm. There, George worked closely with multinational banks, insurers and energy providers on innovative funds and financial structures, deploying more than $1 billion in tax equity, cash equity and debt over the last decade into renewable energy projects. He also raised and deployed a combined $700 million in project-level debt funds, sponsor equity infrastructure funds and tax equity infrastructure funding. Prior to that, he spent seven years at Fannie Mae where he purchased portfolios of whole loan mortgages and traded mortgage-backed securities on behalf of the 50 large bank relationships he managed with transaction volumes totaling more than $50B in his last year with the firm. George holds a BA in Finance and Economics from William and Mary College and an MBA from University of Maryland.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Chief Sustainability Officer at Amalgamated Bank
Ivan Frishberg is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Amalgamated Bank where he leads impact and shareholder engagement programs. As a commercial banker, Ivan has been instrumental in rallying bank sector commitments to combat climate change, including growing the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). Under Ivan's leadership, Amalgamated has taken a leadership role within (UNEP FI) in helping to develop guidance for how banks set targets to reduce financed emissions. Ivan is on the Steering Group of the NZBA and a member of and on the Advisory Panel for the Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero.
Ivan also steered the way to make Amalgamated Bank the first U.S. bank to set and have validated climate targets under the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), and the first US bank to set portfolio wide targets under the United Nations guidelines for target setting.