Innovative Finance and Peacebuilding in a Time of Uncertainty: Reflections from a UPEACE Dialogue with Heather McGee of 17 Asset Management
Authors: Nancy Candel and Melissa Wild
As the final webinar of 2025 organized by the Global Center for Peace Innovation, UPEACE NY joined UPEACE headquarters to explore the impact of financing and the role that a peace innovation framework could play in delivering on sustainability, equity and justice. In conversation with UPEACE NY Executive Director Melissa Wild, Heather McGee, the Chief Executive Officer of Intentional Asset Management, expressed that her company’s commitment to sustainability, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, should be taken seriously as standard across the finance industry.
With insights gained from her firm’s first investment product in the Caribbean, Mcgee spoke about the way sustainability – as a systems approach – is operationalized through working closely with local partners and investors to ensure a place-based investment strategy that accounts for all stages of a supply chain process. In this case, McGee discussed how this strategy was put to use to enhance food systems. The discussion took place within a wider global context, as the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres continues to highlight the need for financial approaches that are better equipped to respond to today’s interconnected global crises.
Within this context the webinar addressed why innovative finance mechanisms are increasingly seen as a necessary complement to traditional funding mechanisms in sustaining peacebuilding efforts under economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Conversely, the session offered an important opportunity for peacebuilders to directly connect across sectors and explore how peace literacy, as innovation, could improve the social and environmental impact of financing.
From Financial Products to Place-Based Investment
Heather described IntentionalAsset Management as an investment firm to “build financial products that solve problems”. She explained that the firm focuses on aligning capital with real world outcomes while meeting fiduciary expectations, emphasizing health of people and planet across systems.
Established in 2019, Intentional Asset Management, (formerly 17 Asset Management) established its first private equity fund, CaribGrow, in the Caribbean, situating the fund within a regional context of histories of extraction, dependency and economic models that have weakened local food systems and community resilience.
In response, CaribGrow focuses on strengthening local food systems through investments across the full supply chain and with the intention of rebuilding value locally through close engagement with the people and communities most affected by these systems, partnering with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in developing the fund. This strategy attempts to harness capital as an instrument to facilitate local ownership and resiliency, where investment is not seen as an extractive force but as an opportunity to tackle issues around food insecurity from social and historic perspectives.
A Widening Gap Between Need and Available Resources
The urgency to address this discussion reflects trends documented in recent research on the evolving finance landscape for nonprofit, humanitarian and peacebuilding work. A 2025 analysis by the Urban Institute found that “a third of nonprofits reported experiencing federal, state, or local government funding disruptions,” (2025) in which affected organization were more likely to report staff reduction and programming cuts, highlighting that even nonprofits that do not directly receive government funding reported that these disruptions have altered the broader philanthropic environment and increased the fundraising challenges revealing what the study describes as a “widening gap between increasing demand for nonprofit services and organizations’ ability to meet it”. The report also warned that the long-term consequences for organizations might likely deepen over time.
Climate adaptation finance gap
Parallel research on climate adaptation finance points to similar finance gaps in contexts most exposed to environmental and social risk. Meraj and Hashimoto (2025), drawing on the Adaptation Gap Report 2024, estimate an annual shortfall of between US$187 billion and US$359 billion in adaptation finance, far exceeding current public finance flows, arguing that even commitments to double international adaptation finance by 2025 would only close a small fraction of this gap and concluding that “addressing this gap is imperative and requires innovative financing solutions, greater international cooperation, and increased involvement from the private sector so that severe human and environmental losses can be prevented.”(2025)
This supports the decades of research around the cost of violence and the opportunities for increased peaceful social conditions when investing in economic development (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2026).
Together, these findings reinforce the context in which the dialogue between McGee and UPEACE took place, addressing why innovative finance is gaining momentum not as a replacement for public and philanthropic funding but as a necessary complement in moments of structural underinvestment. Furthermore, it could open up pathways for innovative cross-sectoral mechanisms that may better address local needs in the context of globalized systems.
Tensions, limits, dialogue, reflection
The dialogue also pinpointed several substantive challenges and tensions arising in peacebuilding and private finance integration. These include challenges from both sides: peacebuilders concerned with how to increase both personal and professional commitments from other sectors, particularly from institutions with financing and political power, to addressing escalating conflict and systems of violence, and humanitarians who are worried about possible continuation of extractive approaches through innovative finance models, recognizing that profit continues to drive decision-making.
McGee noted the critical nature of language and positioning, emphasizing that innovative finance should not be understood as a neutral approach or a means of sidestepping public duty and community engagement.
The dialogue underscored the importance and the difficulty of true partnerships across sectors. In this space, McGee suggested that having a peacebuilder in impact investing projects could help to address the difficulties, as well as hold projects accountable to delivering on a systems-based approach to sustainable financing that centers on the health of people and planet. Peacebuilding is not limited to a single form of value creation and not all of it is compatible with or through markets – that would defy the logic of the work. Yet, as this webinar demonstrated, there is much to learn between the peacebuilding and finance community, as both are actors in the same places and often working against one another.
This dialogue considered what improvements could be made for socio-economic development, climate resilience and conflict reduction, if these actors were working together. In this sense, peace innovation is the act of applying peace frameworks and practices to a new space.
McGee and Wild, through UPEACE NY, are currently exploring ways to partner that could serve as a model of how the finance industry can and should engage peacebuilders as educators, mediators, and advisors. For more information, please reach out to info@upeaceny.org.
List of References
Institute for Economics and Peace. Accessed February 9 2026. https://www.economicsandpeace.org/research/economics-of-peace/
Meraj, S., & Hashimoto, S. (2025). Bridging the adaptation finance gap: The role of nature-based solutions for climate resilience.
Urban Institute (2025). How Government Funding Disruptions Affected Nonprofits in Early 2025.
Author’s short bio
Nancy Candel Nancy Candel is a Salvadoran peace and development practitioner and graduate student in the M.A. in Environment, Development and Peace with a specialization in Climate Change at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Finance which informs a multidisciplinary approach that integrates analytical thinking with peacebuilding practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of climate change, peacebuilding, and strategic communications with particular attention to how narrative and resource mobilization shape peace education initiatives. Nancy is currently a Programme Associate with UPEACE NY where she focuses on programme development, fundraising strategies and institutional communications. Her research and professional interests include climate related conflict risks, innovative financing for peace initiatives, and the role of communication in advancing inclusive and locally grounded peace efforts.
Melissa Wild Melissa Wild (she/her) is a mediator, linguist and anthropologist, focused on the intersection of peacebuilding and technological development. Having worked for over ten years across both the private & public sectors, throughout the SWANA region, Melissa has dedicated her time to training in and expanding the digital peacebuilding sector, ensuring a needs-based approach to integration of digital tools. Melissa co-founded the Global Center of Peace Innovation at the University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica and she currently serves as Founding Director for UPEACE NY, working to expand access to and participation in peace education. Melissa holds a B.A. in Arabic and Sociology and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution. Currently, Melissa is pursuing her Phd in Applied Anthropology where her research looks at “othering” as a colonial technology of social control, embedded in digital infrastructures. Melissa believes ethnographic methods are critical tools for peacebuilding research, that peace is a daily practice, and that work in the name of social progress requires constant self-reflection of intent and interrogation of impact.
