Foundational Lens

Systemic Finance

Transition Finance Infrastructure. We are moving beyond "aligning values" to designing new financial instruments that make resilience profitable.

The Challenge

Misalignment of Value

Modern financial systems are optimized for short-term monetary returns, often at the expense of long-term resilience. This creates a fundamental mismatch:

What communities need: Patient capital, prevention, ecosystem health.
What markets provide: Fast capital, externalized costs, short-termism.

The gap isn't just about "impact washing." It's about fundamentally redesigning how we measure, move, and create value.

Our Approach

Beyond Monetary Returns

We work to expand how systems recognize and reward value creation:

Health Outcomes as Returns

Connecting upstream investment (e.g., housing) to downstream value (e.g., reduced hospital costs). We design instruments that capture these cross-system returns.

Ecosystem Services as Assets

Recognizing the economic value of wetlands, forests, and green spaces in preventing disaster and ensuring resilience.

Social Capital as Infrastructure

Valuing trust and relationships as essential assets that reduce transaction costs and enable cooperation.

Interventions

Specific Instruments

Blended Capital Stacks
Structures where philanthropic or public capital absorbs early risk, identifying "valley of death" opportunities for private capital.
Wellness Bonds
Instruments where savings in public costs (healthcare, justice) generate returns for investors funding preventative measures.
Community Wealth Building
Cooperative ownership models that keep economic value circulating locally rather than extracting it.

Complexity Sc.

The Role of Complexity Science

Systemic finance requires understanding feedback loops and time delays. We apply complexity science to:

Map Value Flows: Identifying where value is created vs. captured.
Identify Leverage Points: finding small investments with cascading positive effects.
Model Long-Term Dynamics: Using agent-based models to understand emergent market behaviors.

Learning

What We're Learning

Capital follows measurement: If we only measure money, we only get monetary returns.
Intermediaries matter: New institutional forms are needed to bridge different logics.
Trust is prerequisite: Blended finance fails without deep relational trust between partners.