Wrestling a Faberge egg onto a story board
We’ve gotten team agreement on the storyboard process we created for the summary family office to be our initial go-to-market story for Ejido Verde. Now it’s trim those 250 words into a deck and find other stories that put us in context.
People can’t see a big new, complex story on it’s own; you have to put several in context within an initially fairly tight spectrum.

That’s how we built SOCAP; starting from venture philanthropy like the Acumen Fund (you donate they invest your money to do good), next to non profit concessionary loan funds like Root Capital, which essentially created Fair Trade as an investable category, (which Good Capital invested in successfully,) to our own Social Enterprise Expansion Fund. GoodCap’s pioneering investors agreed they would accept a cost to doing good and compromise returns somewhat if we had to make catalytic impact with our risk capital for growth. We were lucky that discount to financial return did not happen. Then SOCAP’s initial spectrum framing moved on to the right side of the spectrum; venture funds (they were the focus of impact investing back in 2008) that promised high impact high return; saving the world at no discount, like DBL. And of course DBL’s first two investors were concessionary, the Ford Foundation and MacArthur, which is not a story told very often).
So that’s what I am looking to recreate around Ejido Verde; relatively close peers that put us in context. Green World Ventures is one peer that does that. They do regenerative forestry, like EVR, and also create indigenous local health/nutrition in a couple of African countries. They do biodiverse intercropping of traditional perennial plants using permaculture, whereas EVR does regenerative forestry that creates indigenous community wealth. They do regenerative and health, we do regenerative and wealth.
Then there is a Mexican pine resin startup called Bosque Village that reached out after seeing me post in the Regenerative ag group on Facebook. They are smaller and deeper with significant intercropping to produce biodiversity and local income. More of a Blue Economy kind of project; they also use it as an immersive experience, inviting groups to come and learn, etc.
Ejido Verde accomplishes ecosystem services, improving groundwater and increasing wildlife, but real biodiversity, as well as matrix management of wildlife corridors to enhance animal and bird pathways are on the drawing board but set for the next phase of Ejido Verde because we are at a larger scale, increasing production 10x of a regenerative resource (pine that produces resin for 70 years without harming the tree) for an industrial supply chain that the local Purhepecha people of Michoacan have done for millennia.
Laura O’s larger spectrum from extractive to regenerative investing is a useful larger framing
that Ejido Verde fits within, and we are grateful she included EVR as one of her examples
Ejido Verde’s storyboard goes like this: Regenerative forestry inside an industrial supply chain first, that creates large scale community wealth and thousands of jobs where day laborers are making 5x more today, that is market rate financial return for investors.
Regenerative leads, followed by community wealth and jobs, then market rate as the story board order.
