Open Future Fund

Realigning value, redefining our future

In the 1950s, Akira Miyawaki began his studies in what would become known as the Miyawaki Method: he learned that by improving the soil of a future forest site using locally available amendments, then planting a variety of 50 to 100 local plant species in a random mix, and planting them very densely — 20,000 to 30,000 per hectare (compared to a standard 1,000 per hectare) — and monitoring, watering, and weeding the site for two to three years, the resulting trees grow about ten times faster than with traditional methods. Once stabilized, the forest is able to flourish on its own without further outside intervention.

This model serves as an allegory for what we intend to model through Open Future Fund, and the underlying infrastructure it sets out to demonstrate.

Challenge

Across the world, millions of people and billions of dollars have mobilized to solve an unprecedented scale of social & ecological crises by 2030. As we approach the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, investment capital is growing increasingly hungry for returns that better align with the thriving of future generations.

Still, this capital must adhere to the risk and reporting profiles of existing capital markets: leaving a widening gap between thousands of existing impact efforts on the ground that lack the resources needed to scale, and the level of quality, measurability, and reporting required to deploy those funds.

We believe that both the solutions and the capital resources that stand to support them face similar coordinative challenges, resulting in parallel innovations, missed opportunities for learning, and the absorption of unnecessary risk through siloization and competition.

Thesis

We have collectively spent the last decade building tech, governance, social, and financial infrastructure. We have now woven these resources together along with a growing network of vetted on-the-ground impact projects to provide an integrated system for the advancement, optimization, and delivery of high-quality, verified, and meaningful impacts.

We are designing, building, mobilizing, and operationalizing a $500M fund to serve as an example of what is possible when we provide the fertile soil and conditions for our collective thriving.

This will allow us to apply the right forms of “just-in-time” capital at the right time in the project lifecycle, in a supportive, forward-learning environment where interventions and returns improve over time, systemically derisking global baskets of locally supported projects.

By combining our intimate knowledge and understanding of the needs of organizations and networks on the ground with the mechanisms needed to meet existing capital markets where they are, we are well positioned to bridge the gap between everyday citizens, on-the-ground efforts, and a spectrum of public, private, and institutional capital, synchronizing the incentives of philanthropy, debt financing, equity, and non-financial resources.

We will leverage this position to deliver high quality, impact-based returns¹ not just in service of the next quarter, but the thriving of future generations.

Overview & Context

“People need new tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has…I believe that society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.”

— Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality

This model proposes an integrated set of technical, social, legal, and financial infrastructures for the stewardship of intergenerational impact.

We invite — and encourage — others to learn from both our successes and failures while adapting, applying, and learning in their own contexts.

A Common Infrastructure for Collective Action

“The Open Impact platform is what we have been dreaming of as projects on the ground for decades…it’s not just another dream of the technosphere, it’s responding to the real need to bridge the gap between the local realities of regenerative action and funding mechanisms, in a way that is informed by and cooperates with living systems.”

— Pablo Friedlander, PhD

There are already millions of on-the-ground efforts that have spent years, even lifetimes, developing solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. We see incredible efforts spending, on average, 20% of their time on grant reporting, and 30% or more of their budgets on fundraising. Others haven’t had access to the resources needed to share their ideas with the world.

Meanwhile, philanthropy tends to favor those who have the right reporting and the right relationships. What if the person with the next world-changing idea has been raising their hand for years, and simply not yet been called on?

The first chapter of our story is simple: give those who are already on the ground, doing, access to their most powerful resource: one another.

We’ve started by building a platform, network, & marketplace called Open Impact. It provides on-the-ground efforts access to:

• Project & process management
• Community management
• Communication tools
• Measurement & reporting

This integrated stack allows impact efforts to solve complex coordinative challenges, ranging from bridging communications between multiple NGOs on the ground in a refugee crisis, to aggregating the efforts of smallholder farmers together with shared infrastructure to match them with buyers of commodities.

By providing sectoral and cross-sectoral contexts for the sharing of skills, knowledge, and best practices, we can facilitate the advancement of solutions within and across areas like regenerative agriculture, food systems, agroforestry, water, community wellness, and economic equity. As individual efforts apply these learnings in their own bioregions, the network is able to collectively advance the quality of interventions and advance in common.

In addition to fostering greater coherence within and across teams, networks, and networks-of-networks, the platform provides access to a rich peer, funder, volunteer, & service marketplace: providing a powerful source of innovation and multi-capital wealth.

And by measuring progress (quantitative and qualitative) in real time, we’re able to save projects valuable time traditionally spent on searching for and reporting on funds.

A more transparent, participatory future for philanthropy

In today’s philanthropic landscape, we still see funders supporting many efforts to do similar work in silos, rather than benefiting from the wisdom of their peers. Grantees are funded to leverage many of the same tools, vendors, and even skills and learnings in parallel.

We offer these efforts a space to come together, exchange knowledge and best practices, and advance their efforts more effectively — increasing the power of every dollar.

This context for research, education, and training will also help fill the current gap in ongoing project maintenance: oftentimes, once the scope of philanthropic funding ends, the programs or solutions put in place can languish or even reverse course. We will provide contexts for these projects to develop plans and training for ongoing maintenance, and develop the business cases that will make this maintenance possible without perpetual reliance on philanthropic funding.

With access to real-time data and measurement, we will provide funders with the information (both quantitative and qualitative) they need to track their progress, identify challenges early, and distribute their funds wisely. And, individual efforts will gain a powerful storytelling tool to reach and compel a wider global audience of funders and volunteers.

A transitional model for civic innovation

The resulting infrastructure serves as not only an alternative to traditional institutional philanthropy, but as a powerful liberatory tool to bring solutions to local communities: through access to this shared infrastructure, we can easily empower community foundations, donor advised funds, and CDFIs to act as capillaries to identify and nurture local efforts as they mature to access other resources.

Community groups, churches, and civic leaders can gain access to what can effectively serve as a community foundation or donor advised fund in a box: empowering them to launch and curate their own funds, flipping standard models for capital access and rooting down into communities in direct collaboration with those who know those communities best.

Through access to this wider capital stack, we stand to reverse the current flow of public funds out of communities in the U.S. by providing these smaller projects and communities with capital from pension funds and family offices, often reserved for major civic infrastructure projects. This stands to reverse the current flow of local funds out of communities, instead filling gaps in local matching funding to allow communities to access federal matching dollars — while still fitting the requirements of the funds, by providing a diversified portfolio of measurable projects and impacts.

Forging resilience through market access

With global philanthropic assets totaling approx. $1.3T and the projected annual cost of solving the climate crisis alone far exceeding that, we know philanthropy alone won’t be enough.

Meanwhile, hundreds of trillions of dollars sit in pension funds and family offices, with growing pressures to invest in alignment with the survival of future generations. Yet they are left sifting through fragmented and voluntary markets, struggling to aggregate enough verified, high-quality impact.

By providing on-the-ground efforts all over the world the means to measure and validate their impact, we stand to provide direct market access (to carbon and commodities markets, to start) to those who are currently left out, while filling this gap.

At the same time, in carbon markets in particular², small projects on the ground lack access to monopolistic ratings agencies that act as a barrier of entry for smaller land-based projects. We see an opportunity to remediate this gap by pooling smallholder access to the verification of impacts, and, over time, disrupt this structure completely by providing the mechanisms for everyday citizens to train as impact validators: providing learning and economic upliftment along the way.

In time, through partnership with on-the-ground projects, we aim to leverage these same structures to support the emergence of new ecosystem services, green and social bonds, and asset backed securities: transitioning the existing economic system while giving grassroots efforts the power to regeneratively fund themselves just by doing what they do best.

Redefining value, redirecting our future

For millennia, we, as humans, have been held together by story. Religion, culture, even money itself is a story — a belief in what we value.

Through industrialization, globalization, and the rise of new forms of media, we’ve been able to scale many of these stories exponentially. But in this process, we’ve driven our human and ecological ecosystems to the brink. 71 million people have entered extreme poverty in the last year, and 1 million species are currently at risk of extinction.

As humanity, we have an opportunity to come together to write a new story — of what we value, what the world looks like, and what is possible.

By supporting the swell of on-the-ground projects in their capacity to share and amplify their stories, and providing media with coherent calls to action based on real, on-the-ground projects, we can move the dial from apathy and hopelessness to agency.

This shift in perception can inform further media and policy, not just shifting markets, but facilitating the emergence of new forms of value. By moving beyond carbon credits, into water, biodiversity, soil restoration, wellness, and even care, we see a real potential to move towards metrics based on environmental and community wellbeing: a new form of GDP (which was never intended to be a marker of overall economic health, never mind human wellbeing) based on human and planetary thriving.

Mechanics

Opt-in structure

Investors may choose to opt into the total basket of global projects, or select their own areas of interest:

• By zone (eg natural zones, combined zones, economic zones)
• By bioregion
• By topic (eg regenerative agriculture & agroforestry, community wellness, fresh water, oceans, housing, food systems, economic equity, infrastructure )

Each of these subsets will be treated as a cohort of projects, benefitting from the global cross-pollination of knowledge and resources in the network, while having access to curated forums, discussions, and peer groups. Investors will be invited — and in fact expected — to join these cohorts, too: inviting a more engaged form of capital participation, and adding richness to the collective problem-solving capacity of these groups as they tap into multi-faceted dialogues between practitioners, policy experts, funders, community members, and service providers. This funder participation will also help with transparency, shared understanding, and enrich the subject matter expertise of the funders.

These cohorts will be poised to publish their own process templates, curricula, policy papers, research, and transparently share their progress and stories in real time as they collectively learn to better steward their shared resources and infrastructure.

Non-financial capacity building & tech stack

All projects and funders will be given access to the Open Impact platform & its network of global projects & service providers. Each project, sector, bioregion, and funder will gain a unified set of tools for:

• Community building & communications
• Peer-to-peer skill & knowledge matching
• Project & process management
• Publishing (including workflows & curricula)
• Measurement, calculations, and reporting
• Learning management
• Mentorship & provision of technical assistance
• E-commerce
• Events
• Shared services

And as the network grows, funding partners gain a pipeline of capacity-build projects with access to a rich global community of peers and technical assistance providers.

Learn more here.

Philanthropy

Our initial focus will be on applying philanthropic funding, to build the capacity of individual projects in a way that serves future resilience. This will fill the up-front “risk” funding of new or growing efforts, and philanthropic funders will benefit from the greater model that puts these projects on a trajectory towards self sufficiency — providing the tools and skills for the ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and growth of these projects, that today often die on the vine once funding runs out, or are stuck going back to the same philanthropic funders time and time again.

Grantees will agree to:

• Participate in peer learning cohorts to exchange knowledge & advance best practices
• Monitor and report on their progress (following a co-evolving set of quantitative and qualitative standards, with bidirectional feedback and shared goal setting)
• Participate in and inform research and education efforts
• Develop plans (including training where relevant) for ongoing maintenance and monitoring of their projects
• Develop business cases to chart the course for regenerative funding models and the intake of revenue or other forms of capital (depending on structure of project, more on this to come)

These agreements are not intended to exacerbate the existing issues of onerous grant reporting requirements; rather, these activities will be matched with sufficient funding to ensure that projects have the capacity to take part in these efforts: honoring the necessary learning, mistakes, and failures along the way that, in the end, enhance the collective knowledge of the whole network.

We intend to, over time, mitigate the need to have multiple reporting processes across funders, and are deeply committed to partnering with projects to ensure capacity building and technical assistance provided here genuinely benefits and enhances the experience and outcomes of these projects.

This format may be adapted slightly by sector to best fit the unique and evolving needs between different types of projects.

We are also actively partnering with corporate and venture partners to model vehicles to transform equity contributions into philanthropic funds.

Debt

As some projects mature and develop business models, they will gain access to low-interest debt financing through a revolving-loan-style community development fund.

We are also partnering with a network of CDFIs to both capacity build their own efforts, and identify and resource more relevant local projects through the lens of those who know their communities best.

Through this diversified pool of projects and funding mechanisms, we have an opportunity to pass on low or no-interest loans to community projects, who stand to not only recoup the standard interest they would face from traditional lenders, but transform loans into grants and partner with larger lenders to optimize the reimbursement of interest rates as philanthropic contributions.

This unique blend of capacity building and access to multiple forms of project financing — including enhanced access to public funding — will enable projects to scale their capacity while replenishing the available pool, further enhancing the quality and capacity of these projects and bringing further economic opportunity into their local communities.

Investment

Capped, waterfall-style returns based on a percentage of impact-based returns yielded by on-the-ground projects.

A majority of returns will come from the sale of carbon credits, ecosystem services, green bonds, social bonds, and asset backed securities: taking on exposure at the fund level and offering projects replenishable and non-dilutive access to investment capital.

We are also forming a non-dilutive pool for revenue share in projects that have adapted other business models in social enterprise, producing products in areas like agroforestry.

Participatory fund

A portion of returns from the fund will enter a participatory pool, which will sit at the center of the network.

We plan to reward community members, projects, volunteers, and impact validators in the network for everything from their time and participation in citizen science and civic “challenges,” to prosocial behaviors and knowledge sharing.

For these behaviors, members will earn voting rights in this collective pool. Imagine giving everyone from students to volunteers to on-the-ground practitioners the opportunity to help collectively guide millions of dollars — supporting their favorite projects, bioregions, and causes by participating in the world’s largest citizen-driven fund for grantmaking, revolving loans, and community development.

Funder expectations & opportunities

As stated above, funders will be invited (and expected) to participate in ongoing forums, where they will receive updates from and sit directly in problem solving and knowledge sharing with the projects they are supporting and their peers.

They will also have access to a peer group with other funders, to exchange questions, resources, and best practices, and gain access to unique educational and immersion opportunities.

Partnership with existing funds

We are partnering with existing funds to apply this full-spectrum model and shared infrastructure to their existing portfolios.

We are also partnering with donor advised funds, community foundations, CDFIs, venture studios, and others to provide infrastructure for their processes, measurement, reporting and provision of technical assistance: empowering the propagation of a many-to-many network of portfolios and projects that each benefit from one another’s resourcing and networks.

Legal & Governance

We are leveraging a legal stewardship model, with a 501(c)3 that wholly owns a C Corp. Philanthropic funds will be stewarded by a subsidiary of the 501(c)3, and the C Corp will own a series of LLCs denominated by asset type.

The fund will be structured to take in:

• Pure philanthropy
• DAF-style philanthropy with some reinvestment
• Low or no interest revolving loans and debt financing³
• Capped, waterfall-style investment

We are committed to supporting projects in their capacity to take in non-dilutive forms of investment to support this broader structural and financial transition. In cases where projects are participating in activities that would benefit from direct equity investment rather than revenue share, we are committed to sharing resources and access to steward legal structures, leveraging structures like our own or perpetual purpose trusts.

Management

10% of principal will be allocated towards investment in and maintenance of shared infrastructure, including tools for measurement, shared middle and back office, and the provision of a shared service layer for the network (including services like communications, bookkeeping, and legal.)

Initial Pilots

Indigenous-stewarded agroforestry & land restoration with the TreeAngle Foundation

In the afforestation and reforestation space, we are seeing an increasing race to the bottom, with many asking, “how cheaply can we plant a tree?” A dollar? Fifty cents? Can we shoot seeds out of drones more quickly? While there’s a time and place for the right technologies and we appreciate the earnest efforts of those working towards a more livable planet, these reductions in cost are often actually a redirection or obscuration.

Together with the TreeAngle Foundation, we believe that the cost of planting a tree and sustaining a reserve shouldn’t be $1 — maybe it should be $5. A dollar for planting the tree, then a dollar for training, education, peer learning, and research; a dollar for measurement and monitoring; a dollar for co-creation and maintenance of reserves; and a dollar for the development of business cases to fund their sustainability over time.

We plan to model this in a 20-year demonstration effort (in 5-year cycles) in partnership with local NGOs and indigenous-stewarded land restoration projects.

To date, the TreeAngle Foundation has modeled successful demonstration projects in three biomes: in the Andes and Central sierras of Argentina (from Champaquí Mountain with the local Foundation of Biospheric Activities, focused on watershed regeneration via big scale reforestation), in the highest Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil (from the Matutu Valley with the local Matutu Foundation, focused on conservation of intersectoral reserves and forest fires fighting models), and in the mediterranean forests of Montserrat Mountain in Catalonia (from the Bages valley with the Institute of Holistic Research of Montserrat, developing new paradigmatic solutions), through which they have applied philanthropic, debt, and equity funding and successfully launched projects connected with product lines whose proceeds flow 100% into the foundations and their related associations for running demonstrative projects with high bioregional impact.

The next step will be to coordinate efforts for these three ecosystems, each decades into their restoration efforts, towards the most needed front of regenerative action: the aversion of planetary tipping points in the Amazon. Together, we will launch environmental education networks and curricula in synergy with two of the TreeAngle Foundation’s longtime partners, Academia Biospherica Alliance and the Institute of Ecotechnics.

Remediating child labor by connecting women smallholder farmers in West Africa with one another, and with buyers of commodities

Can we redirect an entire supply chain towards the thriving of women and children in West Africa using these models?

Today, buyers of commodities like cocoa often source from large operations that leverage child labor, and smallholder farmers struggle to compete in terms of cost. By providing an existing group of 15,000 women smallholder farmers in West Africa with shared infrastructure, equipment, training, and peer learning opportunities, we can reduce their collective overhead, increase their collective capacity, aggregate their collective supply, and match them with buyers.

By providing these women with wages, we liberate their children to go to school rather than needing to work, thus remediating child labor and making the most ethical practices the most profitable for all.

Supporting local food systems impacted by institutional racism by growing the capacity funding of land grant universities in the U.S.

There are over 220 land grant universities in the U.S., each of which houses an extension program whose responsibility is to touch the ground in local communities, providing capacity and funding to local agricultural programs through federal matching funds provided by NIFA.

There is currently a deep disparity in federal matching funds allocated to predominantly white institutions, 100% of which qualify for their federal matches, compared to 10 out of 19 historically black institutions. These institutions were formerly allowed to apply for a waiver to still receive federal funding, but to a loss to the tune of $18.5M in FY2016. And recent policy changes have eliminated the opportunity to apply for these waivers altogether.

Further, existing funding formulas support farm production, not local communities — those who provide the matching federal funds. As a result, taxpayers are under-represented by these funding formulas.

We plan to partner with an 1890 institution to create a suite of digital extension services, providing a digital workspace and toolbox where individuals, groups, and projects can convene resources and activities in support of and supported by Cooperative Extension Services to expand reach and relevance, overcome barriers, foster collaboration, and record and validate their collective efforts, giving underserved communities and institutions more equitable access to these sources of federal funding.

This will not only help fill the disparity between institutions, but help pull tens of millions in unutilized public funds to on-the-ground efforts directly serving their communities, through both capacity building and scaling of existing programs, and expanding access to additional on-the-ground projects.

We can then leverage this same stack to provide these projects access to not only federal matching funds, but to investment capital through the measurement and validation of commodities and ecosystem services, further scaling these efforts and resourcing their communities.

Next Steps

For inquiries, contact Kaitlin Archambault at kaiti@openfuturecoalition.org.

View & share a short overview deck here.

Note: this is a working draft, and will be evolved over time based on feedback and learnings. Profound thanks to the many peers and allies who have provided feedback and guidance so far.

¹ We believe in applying the right resources from a full spectrum of capital, at the right time in the project lifecycle, to shift the stewardship of currently available forms of funding — meeting the needs of existing structures while redirecting these available resources towards locally directed projects that serve the thriving of people and planet. “Impact,” here, takes on different definitions over time: from maximizing capacity and forward learning through shared tools and services; to more impactfully leveraging public funds towards the resilience of communities; to providing returns based on the sale of existing forms of nature-based assets; to cultivating new definitions of value more closely tied to our collective thriving.

² We by no means see carbon markets as a long term solution, but rather as a transitional tool. Within the context of existing markets, we see an opportunity to shift the flow of funds from large landholders and corporations towards smaller local projects by pooling their impacts and providing direct market access where we currently see major gaps. This provides non-dilutive capital to support the operations of these efforts, as we partner to innovate towards new forms of value and the projects continue to reduce their reliance on outside dollars.

³ We can provide returns on debt financing without passing interest rates along to projects by subsidizing with returns from the total portfolio. We’ll also be holding a loss reserve, and model a handful of financing mechanisms in parallel as appropriate for different project types (eg real estate, land, or ecological restoration) and available co-benefits.