Roll on New York Climate Week and, with it, a shift into autumn action - harvesting, processing, prepping and replanting. Not that the summer was restful - we’ve been out in the field sharing our analyses, expanding our partnerships and tinkering with investment concepts. In the background, like everyone else, we have been battered and bruised by the impact that changing climate is putting on landscapes and livelihoods - wildfires, heatwaves, flooding.
Within that context, we’ve been lucky to build traction with such constructive funders and partners. Your response to our work has unlocked follow-on funding and new opportunities that we’re excited to deliver on in the rest of the quarter - doing more research, moving into implementation and raising capital.
Activities
With our tremendous partners at the US Endowment for Forestry and Communities, we’ve published the high level takeaways from our upstream forestry supply chain assessment - available in summary and full form - and we’ve been thrilled by the engagement so far.
The team has spent down time across National Forests and National Parks - El Dorado, Shenandoah, Wasatch, Green Mountain, George Washington and Jefferson
Greg and Harry were appointed as adjunct professors at Columbia, teaching a class on impact investing, so look out for students hitting the job market in 12-24 months. Notably, Hillary Clinton has gone up against us in the same time slot. No comment on how that’s affected our (or her) turnout.
We are investing in new product scoping and development threads including:
Transaction support to finance urban forests
Equity for urban nurseries and supply chains
Nature-based carbon removal fund
Small landowner project finance CDFI model
We've revamped our website to try to add a bit more context for our work.
Funding
Our Nursery Finance Facility is moving from theory into practice - see more information here- supported by US Endowment, JM Kaplan Fund as well as some anonymous new funders.
We're working on a few new proposals and funding channels, including submissions for the USFS NOFOon innovative support for underserved landowners. Ping us if you are interested in learning more, need a financing team for your own plans or for other partnership options.
Team
We have been recruiting and hope to bring on board a few new faces - watch this space for some announcements. We’re extremely happy with the candidates in our process, and excited to get to know them better.
We're always open to new candidates, so please get in touch if anyone you know is in the hunt for a job and is up for mixed menu of climate finance challenges!
