Conservation Loan Collaborative

The mission of the Conservation Loan Collaborative is to connect catalytic capital with high impact opportunities to achieve conservation, restoration and resilience goals at the pace and scale required. The Collaborative mobilizes and deploys bridge financing to enable the conservation community to seize high priority opportunities when they emerge. This requires a team and shared platform with the trust of the conservation and funder communities, the efficiencies of a professional fund management company, and the expertise and experience of seasoned deal makers. This powerful combination connects the resources of funders with the knowledge and networks of conservation groups to enable them to achieve previously unreachable conservation, restoration, and resilience goals together.

The Collaborative is designed to be highly flexible and adaptable to the needs of each Fund Team’s needs and opportunities. Of our 10 initial pilot fund candidates, most are focused on traditional bridge loans to finance land acquisitions for conservation. The first active fund is focused on an innovative asset acquisition model in fisheries and marine conservation. We are also in discussion with groups that need bridge financing for habitat restoration, nature-based disaster resilience solutions and green infrastructure, water conservation, regenerative agriculture, and more. We anticipate that funds will be developed to support an array of opportunities over time, guided by the needs and priorities of the organizations and funders we serve.

The    Conservation Loan Collaborative is designed to catalyze and achieve a spectrum of multi-faceted impacts. These are some of our  core goals:

• Build finance experience and capacity of conservation groups and agencies

• Activate local donors as impact investors via no/low-interest lending

• Enable conservation outcomes prioritized by regional and topical partners

• Empower organizations that lack capital to compete and win larger public grants

• Strengthen regional and topical collaboratives and networks of actors, agencies and capital stewards

• Catalyze local impact investing initiatives as donors become impact investors, opening up possibilities for an array of follow on investments and funds

The Collaborative is designed to be able to accept and manage or otherwise mobilize the full spectrum of private, public and partner impact capital, including:

• Donations, grants, recoverable grants, forgivable loans, no- and low-interest private loans from individuals, families, and family offices

• Grants, recoverable grants and forgivable loans from donor advised funds (DAFs)

• Grants, program related investments (PRIs) and mission related investments (MRIs) from foundations

• Public funding at the federal, state and local levels

  • State Clean Water Revolving Loan Funds (some state funds are authorized to lend to land trusts, and one pilot pool has initial commitments from their state RLF)

  • Capital from Green Banks

  • Other sources of federal funding such as Department of Defense REPI funds for revolving funds that intersect with REPI and Sentinel Landscape geographies and goals

• A variety of risk management mechanisms including first loss capital, loan guarantees, letters of credit and balance sheet guarantees

• A variety of funding from partner institutions including Community Development Finance Institutions, investments and funds

If you have ideas in mind that are not included here, please reach out.

Highly. Each Fund Team develops the terms and policies for their loans, including rates, terms and whether loans are secured or unsecured. We have designed the collaborative and its systems to be able to tailor our services to the needs of each Fund Team. We have also built flexibility into how funds and the Collaborative as a whole work with donors and investors. Anchored by a culture of communication and innovation, our team works to see how we can make things work for funders, funds, and borrowers to get capital flowing to where it is needed most.description

The Collaborative was conceived out of conservation organization needs for reliable access to low cost funding, and conservation, restoration and resilience will be our primary focus areas during the initial stages of the Collaborative’s development. As is increasingly clear though, the compounding crises we face are intertwined, and we cannot advance our conservation goals without simultaneously taking care of community wellbeing. We are currently advancing a feasibility study for a community land trust in the midwest whose primary goal is land acquisitions for affordable housing development, though they are enthusiastic about our suggestions to link conservation and housing to work both ends of that equation. We have also been approached about the need for revolving funds for pre-development expenses for disadvantaged communities seeking federal grants for a variety of needs from water quality to renewable energy to water conservation, since those communities lack the budget to invest in the planning necessary to prepare competitive infrastructure grants. Given the breadth of need for bridge funding and opportunity for impact, we are designing the Collaborative with the flexibility to serve many missions. We anticipate serving any organization that needs funding to accelerate their mission, whether it is disaster resiliency, building resilient communities or rebuilding our economies.

Yes. We are actively supporting several such transactions. Since there will always be high impact opportunities that fall outside of the scope of any given fund within the Collaborative, we anticipate that this will likely always be true. We believe bringing our experience and expertise to connect donors and investors with a borrower in need of capital is the best way to introduce a community to the power of conservation finance, and we expect single loans to lead to additional transactions and opportunities to catalyze the creation of new funds within the Collaborative.