Suggested by WS William Senft over 2 years ago
Venture capital - not equity but hybrid debt instruments that have equity like features - for 501c3 Charitable entities to take on big challenges that government can’t seem to deal with and where private extraction of profits seems inappropriate considering the public interest involved - ie water systems, storm water management, pharmaceuticals, prisons, police, hospitals, daycare, etc etc etc!
Are you interested in addressing this Unmet Need?
Founder, MD @ PivotNorth Capital
so green, social, sustainability bonds are available, 2% interest, $1.2T scale. Google/etc are taking them down for all kinds of green and social projects. and foundations can not just do grants but also PRIs, program related investments, into for profit startups. if these can be organized to fund into tech-enabled impact startups, could get to big scale
NonprofitWater.org @ Executive Director
Thank you Tim for your reply. We are in contact with a group, Quantified Ventures, About all these things but there’s another layer of financing that unfortunately the market is not filling. Everybody is willing to lend and we can get a lot of government financing for projects where there’s construction and the lender will get a collateral interest in the project. The problem is that nobody is willing to lend on the unsecured early stage project development phase where the project needs to get scoped out with engineers lawyers financiers etc. or where the nonprofit is competing with private equity to purchase public assets. That is basically the venture capital layer of financing that in a for-profit entity would be equity to fuel business development. For a nonprofit we don’t have equity to offer and so we’re looking for impact investors who are interested in helping craft venture investment in a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to fuel the scaling of these enterprises and allow them to compete for projects with private equity backed entities that are looking to purchase public assets like water systems prisons schools etc. etc. Our research shows that a mission driven nonprofit entity has many advantages over both the governmentally run/politically governed and the privatized shareholder owned entity models for ownership/governance of large scale public interest enterprises where there’s a vital public interest and also a need for substantial investment in capital assets. We are focused on water systems particularly but it applies to a lot other enterprises too. Thanks for your interest.