Systemic investing and financing

To get to a scale that matters, businesses that improve the life of the poor or protect the environment must get to the point where they can either bootstrap growth or access commercial capital.

What emerges from this menu is that financial backbones play three critical meta-roles: • Mobilizing and building bridges between system stakeholders and coordinating capital deployment in ways that generate combinatorial effects; • Building capacity and developing the mindsets for systems work amongst stakeholders; and • Managing change in complex... See more

The overall purpose of financial backbones should be to enable the effective and efficient allocation of a multitude of different kinds of capital from a multitude of sources to a multitude of destinations, guided by a theory of change for a particular systemic issue. The pathways to such enablement include influencing , governing , and controlling... See more

2.2 Why don’t we see capital orchestration happening yet? It has long been recognized that changing systems requires systems orchestration. Such orchestration often needs entities to act as the “glue” or connective tissue— what is commonly known as backbone organizations. Usually, backbone organizations convene, coordinate, translate, and advocate.... See more

The issues that capital orchestration can address directly and within a reasonable timeframe tend to fall into three categories: • Improving the systemic intelligence underpinning capital deployment decisions; • Coordinating different forms of capital as deployed by different types of stakeholders; and • Identifying and mobilizing the types of... See more

New approaches to impact investing E.g., impact-first investing, place-based impact investing, place-based transition funds, and bioregional financing facilities. • Community-based investment approaches E.g., financing community development, community wealth building. • Capital deployment approaches related to systemic investing E.g., “system-level... See more