How TICA is getting the collaborative wheels turning
by Kevin Jones
There’s a particular moment in building any new field of practice when a room full of well-meaning people who all say the word “impact investing” realize they’ve never actually watched each other invest. Texas recently had that moment.
Kate Knight, former director of a social impact accelerator who now leads institutional investment field-building for the Phillips Foundation, decided somebody needed to do something about it. She did it, and many of the people in the room that day are still talking about it.
I got on a call recently with Kate and my colleague Braxton Martorano to talk about the Texas Impact Capital Alliance (TICA): a statewide collaborative she co-chairs with Susybelle Gosslee of the Episcopal Health Foundation.
It’s a young effort, still in its building phase. But it’s grappling with exactly the question I’ve spent a career circling: how do you move a room from talking about capital to actually deploying it, together, in a particular place?
Born at the Fed, not in a boardroom
TICA didn’t start as a strategic plan. It started as an impact investing bootcamp hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The gathering was originally aimed at a narrower question: Could impact investing help fund broadband access in rural Texas? Quite a few people showed up asking a broader question, about what impact investing even is. The series became a year-long convening.
Kate walked into the first session, looked around the room, and realized she didn’t recognize almost anyone, despite thinking she knew everyone doing this work in Dallas. That gap, it turned out, was the opportunity. The Fed team decided to build on the momentum forming around all these new connections.
They asked Kate to run the new initiative. She is entrepreneurial, unafraid to say what she thinks, and a fast mover. Susybelle, who brought governance instincts to balance Kate’s speed, became her co-chair. Kate calls it a “less talk, more rock” partnership. Someone in Texas, inevitably, reframed that as “more cattle, less hat.”
The steering committee they’ve assembled since is deliberately broad: bankers, community and family foundations, health foundations, Microsoft representing corporate capital, and geographic representation across a state. That last aspect is important in a state where, as Kate put it, someone in El Paso often has no idea what’s happening in Houston.
TICA’s founding bet is that the connective tissue itself — the awareness, the relationships, the shared infrastructure — is worth building before any single deal gets done.
Starting where the water wheel can turn
The design choice I found most interesting is where TICA is choosing to start. It’s not a flashy, high-impact deal, but rather almost boring on purpose: a Texas-scoped fixed income instrument engineered to be easy for any institution’s investment committee to approve without a fight. Kate’s read, informed by conversations with sister collaboratives like NMIC in New Mexico, Opal in Alabama, and Invest Appalachia, is that niche, highly innovative first deals are what killed a previous Dallas impact investing network.
She says that deal had too narrow a focus, too little shared appetite. By contrast, a boring, swappable, low-risk instrument gets everyone in the room actually transacting. It’s not about the excitement of the first deal, it’s about starting the transaction flow, getting liquidity moving, beginning to turn the water wheel. The interesting deals will come later, Kate believes, once the muscle memory exists.
Importantly, TICA itself won’t be the fund. It’s a facilitator that will engage an outside fund manager and support the administrative costs of getting deals built.
The CDFI desert underneath it all
One thread that surfaced almost as an aside is worth our attention at Neighborhood Economics. Texas, by Kate’s account, is a CDFI desert. North Texas in particular has only a handful of community development financial institutions serving a region the size of many states. And no CDFI has an office in Galveston, where we will meet in just a few weeks, though it’s served by one in Houston.
This statewide scarcity is what originally drove Kate to propose a Southern Dallas Guarantee Fund, a smaller, localized cousin of the national Community Investment Guarantee Pool. This fund is aimed at closing the well-documented lending gap between businesses north and south of I-30 in Dallas. Three years into that effort, buy-in from CDFIs has been hard-won. It’s a good reminder that even solid guarantee mechanics can’t outrun the underlying scarcity of institutions willing to participate.
What three and five years look like
Kate’s goals are clear: Within three years, she wants to see active co-investment actually happening across the state—not just pages of aligned language being written about such co-investment. Within five, she wants robust deal-sharing to be normal. Maybe most tellingly, she’ll count the first fully co-invested deal, everyone holding hands and doing it together, as a headline more significant than the dollar amount attached to it.
That’s the real signal in a young ecosystem: not the size of the first check, but whether disparate capital sources can act in concert at all.
Where this connects to Galveston
TICA members will get a look at Neighborhood Economics’ capital stack in Galveston this September. They’ll hear about community-owned commercial real estate, entrepreneurship funds, workforce housing vehicles, and multi-donor collaboratives. These projects are all potential co-investment partners for whatever TICA’s first vehicle becomes.
TICA is inviting its members to a special breakfast at the conference on September 16. Helping strangers discover how they can become unlikely allies is what our gatherings are all about, and we are thrilled to welcome TICA to Galveston.