CREATIVE CAPITAL FOR CLIMATE SOLUTIONS

Alix Lebec's innovative approach to finance and philanthropy is changing the world one faucet at a time

By Yulia Strokova

Alix Lebec | Photo courtesy of The CLEO Institute

Alix Lebec’s life has taken her from Paris to Seoul and Beijing, followed by Dallas, London, and New York City. Across boardrooms, classrooms, and communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Carribean, she has seen wealth and inequality side by side, and how access to capital, education, and opportunity can determine the course of a life.

Today, she spends much of her time in Miami, a city where extreme wealth, rapid growth, and climate risk converge. From there, she founded LEBEC and its investment manager, LEBEC Capital Partners.

Over the past five years, the firm has developed into a platform structured around three functions: strategic advisory, investment management, and narrative change. The goal is not simply to deploy capital, but to redirect it toward climate solutions that are already working and ready to scale.

LEBEC Capital Partners is responding to a persistent market failure. While investor interest in climate solutions has grown, many traditional wealth managers still sidestep private funds driving decarbonization and climate resilience, labeling them as "too niche." 

The firm’s approach aggregates these funds into diversified portfolios spanning asset classes, geographies, and impact themes— mitigating risk, targeting outperformance, and scaling entire ecosystems of climate solutions. 

“Miami is at the center of colliding forces — enormous wealth and entrepreneurial potential alongside rising environmental risks and a growing affordability crisis. As an investor and entrepreneur, I see this moment as both an opportunity and a responsibility,” Alix says.

“From storm surges to rising temperatures and pollution, we need every form of capital working together. With the right intentions and leadership, financial performance can co-exist with impact and build a more resilient, healthier economy and planet.”

For Alix, meeting this moment requires rethinking the role of all capital tools from philanthropy to investment and how they can be used at the right time and in complementary ways to create a portfolio approach to impact. Philanthropy, she argues, can be activated as catalytic capital — money that takes early risk, builds confidence, and helps unlock much larger pools of financing.

“Miami’s philanthropic institutions have a real opportunity to lead,” she adds, “using tools like mission-related investments, philanthropic first loss guarantees, recoverable grants, and zero-interest loans to power solutions that build resilience for the long term.”

Alix Lebec, JaQuel Knight, Chad Bernstein

THE CASE FOR INNOVATIVE FINANCE

The first proof point in Alix’s innovative finance journey started in water, with years of hands-on work on a global scale.

Before launching her own journey as a founder, Alix joined entrepreneur Gary White and actor Matt Damon to help grow Water.org, and eventually to launch and co-build WaterEquity with a global leadership team.

Water.org partnered with microfinance institutions to launch a simple but powerful model called WaterCredit. With philanthropic financing, Water.org was able to provide small grants to microfinance institutions to de-risk their ability to build a new water and sanitation microloan product and portfolio. What followed was transformational.

Nearly $200 million in philanthropic capital helped unlock $5 billion in commercial financing for small loans (around $200) primarily benefiting underserved women. With access to these loans, families could purchase the water and sanitation solutions they needed. With a 99 percent repayment rate, each repaid loan could be recycled to support another household installing a water tap, toilet, or rainwater tank–without the need for new philanthropic funding.

For generations, it has been primarily women and girls who have carried the daily burden of finding water for their families (wasting 6-8 hours a day), hauling heavy buckets for cooking, laundry, and other household needs.

“I’ll never forget visiting women in India and Indonesia who had taken out microloans to build a better future for themselves and their children,” Alix recalls.

“The pride they had in repaying those loans, starting and running their own businesses, and reclaiming their time and economic agency was extraordinary.”

The success of Water.org soon led to the creation of WaterEquity, “the first organization I really helped build from scratch,” Alix says. Alongside White, Damon, and a global leadership team, she helped establish the impact investment firm to prove that water could be both an investable asset and a life-changing resource for the two billion people who still lack access.

At WaterEquity, Alix and the team pioneered the use of philanthropy as first-loss capital in one of their early funds.

“This helped de-risk one of our first funds and unlock $50 million in debt and equity from investors who had never invested in water and sanitation solutions in developing and emerging markets,” she explains. “It created an on-ramp for future funds that no longer required a philanthropic first-loss guarantee once we proved financial performance and impact.”

The model was simple but powerful. Accredited investors placed capital into WaterEquity’s funds, which were then invested in microfinance institutions and enterprises offering safe water and sanitation microloans and solutions. As WaterEquity’s track record grew, it expanded into water infrastructure investments, including its first equity investment in SunCulture, a company demonstrating the economic viability of solar-powered water-pumping technology for smallholder farmers.

Raising those funds, however, was far from easy. “I used to call myself the Chief Rejected Officer,” Alix laughs, remembering the early skepticism.

Yet persistence paid dividends. WaterEquity now manages nearly half a billion dollars in assets, with a recent $10M investment from Fortune 500 Company–Reckitt–which builds on other investments WaterEquity has received from corporates investing directly from their balance sheet. This shows you the incredible role innovative finance played in building the case study. The second WaterEquity fund we mentioned above, which was supported by a $5 million philanthropic guarantee from foundations and high-net-worth individuals, unlocked $50 million in debt and equity from major institutions including Bank of America, IKEA, and the Hilton and Skoll Foundations. The firm’s growth helped demonstrate that water is, in fact, an investable asset class — with now large impact and institutional investors backing WaterEquity’s funds and journey.

“When I saw how powerful this was — by the time we reached our third fund and foundation endowments were starting to invest — I kept asking myself, why aren’t more people doing this?” Alix says. 

“Innovative finance is incredibly promising, and philanthropy can be used in strategic ways to unlock far more capital to scale solutions that are truly sustainable.”

MORE ROOM TO GROW

Despite some progress, philanthropy is still largely underutilized. Alix insists the problem isn’t a lack of money but how it’s used.

“The resources are already there,” she says. The global asset management industry grew to a record-breaking $128 trillion in assets under management in 2024, a 12% increase from the previous year.

The Great Wealth Transfer raises the stakes even higher. By 2048, Gen X and Millennials are expected to inherit about $85 trillion from Baby Boomers. And for this next generation, impact isn’t a side hustle, it’s their identity.

Alix sees signs of momentum. Many initiatives are pooling resources. LEBEC has partnered with Integral Assets (a Dalberg Catalyst spin-off) an as outsourced Chief Investment Officer for several philanthropic and investment vehicles they will launch to accelerate solutions to global system risks.

Philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott are also showing the power of moving quickly and flexibly — just in 2024, six Miami nonprofits received a combined $11 million in unrestricted funds, giving them the freedom to innovate and scale on their own terms.

That urgency is powering her own work today.

“We are going to see a new generation of private  individuals, foundations, family offices, and donor-advised fund platforms feeling the urgency to get more capital out there. Is it going as fast as we’d like? No. Do we have significantly more room to grow? Yes. And this is why it’s so important right now that we continue sharing lessons learned and insights on what we know works.”

Photo courtesy of Alix Lebec

FINANCE & CREATIVITY

For Alix, sustaining her personal mission also means staying connected to her own creativity.

In business school in Paris, she spent her days in finance and strategy classes and her nights in dance and theater rehearsals. “Those creative avenues were essential. They allowed me to unleash another part of my brain and personality,” she recalls.

Years later, in the middle of raising WaterEquity’s second fund, when many still doubted water could be an investable asset class, she went back to dance school at the age of 38: 

“Most of the other dancers were 19, but it unlocked something in me. The importance of being vulnerable. Of always learning. Of being outside my comfort zone. Of nurturing the artist and creativity in us. It gave me the courage to launch LEBEC and keep exploring creative projects and new ideas as a multipassionate entrepreneur.”

On tough days, she still turns to movement, dancing in her garage or improvising while traveling, or doing acting monologues on Zoom with her aunt who is a professional actress in Germany. She jokes that her life often swings between extremes: one moment pitching impact investment strategies in a sharp business suit, the next swapping it for sweatpants and losing herself to underground house music beats.

“Art and creativity are the universal language that connects all of us. What gets me energized every morning is knowing that we all flourish when we create opportunities, build communities, and democratize access to capital in ways that allow everyone to thrive and meet their potential and dreams.”