Sparking Innovation: The Power of Catalytic Capital to Reduce Food Waste

Angel Veza serves as ReFED's Senior Manager of Capital, Innovation, & Engagement, working to catalyze adoption of top food waste solutions. She originally worked in the education field teaching underserved communities. After working with students for 7 years, Angel received her Grade Diplome at the French Culinary Institute and worked through New York City’s top restaurants including Morimoto and two-Michelin starred Atera and with foodservice companies like Compass Group. During that time, she witnessed the significant amount of food being wasted in the hospitality industry and decided to work with the Food Waste team at World Wildlife Fund. As an expansion of that, she worked in supply chain and led strategic sourcing and procurement with a focus on food waste reduction at Manahtta Restaurant, part of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group in NYC.

Dennis is Chief Impact Officer at ImpactAlpha, a digital media company that provides news and intelligence for impact investors and sustainable financiers. Earlier, Dennis co-founded 118 Capital and worked with Media Development Investment Fund and the Global Impact Investing Network. He began his career in the Peace Corps in Armenia and at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. He lives in Austin with his wife and four kids.

Sarah Kearney is the Founder and Executive Director of Prime Coalition, a nonprofit public charity that partners with philanthropists to place catalytic capital into market-based solutions to climate change. She has designed and implemented interventions at the nonprofit/for-profit boundary of climate innovation since 2006, first on behalf of a philanthropic grantmaking organization, then as a scholar investigating both the innovation and philanthropy systems globally, and then founding and building Prime.

Prime is a 501c3 public charity founded in 2014 that invests in extraordinary companies that combat climate change, have a high likelihood of achieving commercial success, and are otherwise unlikely to be sufficiently supported. It has mobilized over $300MM in catalytic capital since its founding from over 250 philanthropic partners, where 78 partners were first-time catalytic investors and 50 were first-time climate financiers. As its Executive Director, Sarah is responsible for envisioning the future of the organization, evangelizing its mission, staffing it for success, and overseeing its administration, programs and strategic plan. 

Before Prime, Sarah served as Executive Director and Trustee of the Chesonis Family Foundation, a grantmaking organization that supports transformational energy research, development and deployment. Her work at CFF led her to conduct research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in 2012 she published her thesis “The Role of Philanthropic Capital in Entrepreneurship: An empirical analysis of financial vehicles at the nonprofit/for-profit boundary of science and engineering.”

Sarah holds a B.S. in Commerce from the University of Virginia and an M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT’s Engineering Systems Division. Based on her work, Sarah was inducted into the Raven Society at the University of Virginia, and has been awarded the 2012 MIT Ronald Heller Entrepreneurship Award, 2014 Caltech Resonate Award, 2014 Echoing Green Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review’s 2014 35 Innovators Under 35, and the 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30. She was featured as ImpactAlpha’s “Agent of Change” in May 2020.

Margot Kane serves as Chief Investment Officer for Spring Point Partners LLC (SPP), a Philadelphia-based social impact organization that invests in the transformative leaders, networks, and solutions that power community change and advance justice. Her leadership helps the organization express its values and achieve impact through investment tools.  Margot also currently serves on the investment committees of Calvert Impact Capital, Circulate Capital (Singapore), Maycomb Capital, and Builders Initiative Foundation. She is a member of the Environmental Advisory Finance Board to the U.S. EPA (EFAB).

After growing up in Greater Boston, Margot attended Macalester College in Minnesota, where she majored in history and Spanish with a concentration in anthropology and was captain of the women’s soccer team. Always service oriented, she began her professional career in Boston and Ethiopia as a communications officer for Pathfinder International, an NGO focused on reproductive rights and health. After attending business school at UC Berkeley’s Walter A. Haas School of Business, she went on to hold investment and strategy roles at Capital Impact Partners (NCB), Calvert Impact Capital, and Closed Loop Partners before running a consulting business in impact investing. In 2019, she became Spring Point’s inaugural CIO to build the organization’s internal impact investment capacity. Drawing on her experience designing blended investment strategies to address complex social and environmental challenges, she enabled Spring Point to activate its impact-first focus and propensity for risk taking across multiple sectors and types of investments.  Margot is driven to influence capitalism to better serve society and the earth. A mother of two who enjoys cooking, tennis, and hiking, Margot enjoys creative approaches to investing in order to generate sustainable and meaningful impact.