Heading for Change Investment Toolkit: One Year On
Sharing Insights from the Field
Nearly a year has passed since we launched the Heading for Change Investment Toolkit & Guidance, the result of two years of brainstorming, building, iterating and climate and gender investing. It brings together the tools used to construct our own portfolio of 18 private market climate funds that we built off seminal and foundational tools and frameworks, which prevail in the field and where we also shared lessons learned about deploying capital at the climate and gender nexus.
The toolkit is designed to support investors, fund managers and other intermediaries in translating intention into action. While each approaches this work with distinct values, priorities and constraints, the toolkit serves as a practical guide to building a Climate & Gender Investment Strategy that can reflect their unique objectives, and to move confidently from strategy development to implementation.
Over the past year, the toolkit has informed work across sectors and geographies. Jenny Holden, Principal Consultant at Kore Global, explained its impact on their work in Bangladesh:
“The Heading for Change climate and gender toolkit provided important guidance for our work in Bangladesh. Its integrated focus on gender, climate, and the climate–gender nexus, and its framing of women as agents of change, helped shape our approach, while the scorecard informed the development of an indicators library tailored to impact investors.”
Carey Bohjanen, Founder of The Rallying Cry, highlighted its relevance for climate enterprises and entrepreneur support organisations:
“The Heading for Change Investment Scorecard, while designed for fund screening and due diligence, is so flexible that it can also be leveraged as a practical self-assessment tool for SMEs and other ecosystem actors seeking to strengthen alignment across gender and climate. At The Rallying Cry, we see potential to use — and recommend — the Scorecard as a complementary framework to help enterprises and partners clarify strategy, surface growth areas, and signal credibility to aligned capital providers.”
Last year, two of our Voices in the Field interviews (with Elizabeth Corrado and Laura Francis) shared perspectives from partners on how it had helped them integrate gender considerations into their investing strategies, and why transparency, structured tools and practical guidance are key to advancing impact.
As we approach this one-year anniversary, we want to hear from more voices who have used the toolkit, or who are interested in using it. How did it guide your work? Are you curious to learn more as you advance your climate and gender investing work? How have you used it to structure investments or strategies? Your feedback helps ensure the toolkit continues to serve as a practical resource for advancing effective, equitable and gender-smart climate investing.
Email nadja@headingforchange.org - we’d love to hear from you.