A collaborative endowment to fund responses to the Metacrisis that combines integrated capital and participatory governance to make it easy for a funder to support effective responses to global challenges.
Proof of Concept
1 - 6 months
$10,000.00
Last update: October 05, 2023
Traditional funding mechanisms are fundamentally misaligned with the nature of systemic change required to address the Metacrisis. Philanthropic grants and impact investments operate in isolation, fragmenting solutions across disconnected initiatives rather than building coherent ecosystem responses. Funding timelines imposed by conventional financial products rarely match the multi-year, nonlinear cycles of systems transformation. The artificial separation of “investment” capital from “philanthropic” capital prevents the intelligent cross-subsidization necessary to fund both profitable ventures and essential public goods like research, policy advocacy, and movement building. Moreover, traditional approaches underinvest in the shared infrastructure, coordination mechanisms, and field-building capacity that enable distributed actors to work coherently rather than at cross-purposes. The result is that funding efforts remain fragmented, poorly coordinated, and inadequately resourced at the systemic level. We lack a financial architecture that can simultaneously attract diverse funder motivations, maintain portfolio coherence around civilizational priorities, and build the organizational capacity needed for genuine systems-level transformation. In summary, it is hard to invest in systemic change and very little funding flows in these directions when we need it to be easy and with substantial amounts being allocated.
The Metacrisis Response Finance Structure creates an integrated capital platform designed to mobilize diverse funding sources toward coordinated systems change. At its core is a shared endowment that pools resources from philanthropists and impact investors to build organizational capacity and field infrastructure for ecosystem-wide responses to interconnected crises. The platform applies portfolio theory to blend grants and investments strategically—pairing profitable ventures with essential public goods, allowing successful investments to cross-subsidize critical infrastructure work. The structure makes resource allocation straightforward for both philanthropic and investor funders through multiple entry points: an ecosystem endowment for traditional donors and an impact fixed income product offering stable returns to conservative capital. To derisk these investments and attract mainstream institutional capital, the platform employs guarantees from mission-aligned foundations, return pooling mechanisms, and diversified portfolios spanning different intervention types, geographies, and organizational stages. The approach builds directly on pioneering work in systems finance by organizations like TransCap, BioFi, and Pando Funding, adapting and integrating their innovations into a unified platform. By combining participatory governance with sophisticated financial engineering, the platform ensures that field leaders and ecosystem participants guide allocation decisions while maintaining fiduciary responsibility, ultimately creating a scalable financial architecture that channels both philanthropic and institutional capital toward genuine systems-level transformation.
Phase 1 Outcomes
Phase 1 establishes the foundational elements required to move from concept to implementation. Key outcomes include:
Product Design and Viability: Comprehensive financial modeling and design documentation demonstrating the viability of both the ecosystem endowment and impact fixed income product structures, including detailed specifications for how capital flows, returns are distributed, and cross-subsidization mechanisms function.
Legal and Regulatory Framework: Analysis of regulatory requirements across relevant jurisdictions, establishment of appropriate legal structures, and development of compliant documentation and governance protocols for both funding vehicles.
Basic Portfolio Strategy: Development of a model portfolio identifying potential high-return ventures, medium-return social enterprises, and grant-funded initiatives that demonstrate portfolio coherence around Metacrisis response priorities and illustrate how cross-subsidization would operate in practice.
Implementation Budget: Detailed financial projections outlining the resources required to establish legal structures, build governance processes, develop management systems, and launch pilot operations in Phase 2.
Field Leader and Stakeholder Engagement: Structured conversations with key ecosystem participants—from climate and biodiversity organizations to social justice movements and community-based groups—to co-develop governance processes, test core assumptions, validate the approach, and build ecosystem buy-in for the platform’s priorities and decision-making structures.
