In Doing

Catalysing Conscious Wealth

We are in a time of deep societal transition and disruption and as an (impact) investor you may struggle to decide where to focus your attention. While it remains incredibly important to invest in narrow solutions like ‘renewable energy’, ‘climate tech’ and ‘social housing’, we are sensing that a more systemic approach is needed. Based on our experience of investing across a wide range of themes through a systems lens, Wire Group is exploring how ‘place-based’ financing can create a more coherent answer to the multiple challenges we are facing.

The invitation

In this time of upheaval we need to invest in resilient ecosystems and communities. We are prototyping what this looks like in three European bioregions. We are looking for philanthropists and investors to co-create place-based financing facilities. Will you join us?

Our intuition is that we can create pockets of resilience when a wide range of changemakers in a given place work together to regenerate the soil, bring back biodiversity, reconnect farms to forks, value water as the source of life and create vibrant self-reliant communities. The good news is that this work is already being done in many places, whether we call them bioregions, landscapes or ‘gebieden’ (in Dutch). And we see it as our role to help enable the financing flows that can support these changemakers.

Together with Bioregional Weaving Labs and Commonland, we have founded the ResiliAnce Partnership (from Resilience finAnce) to prototype these new forms of financing, initially in three regions in Europe:

Living Delta (NL): A network of bioregions in a densely populated country where a growing cohort of pioneers are demonstrating that agriculture, housing and nature don’t need to compete for space but can co-exist to create resilient ecosystems and communities.
Orne Watershed (FR): A protypical rural region facing economic decline, an ageing population and accelerating biodiversity loss where an entrepreneurial group of changemakers are showing that these trends can be reversed.
Altiplano Estepario (SP): A region in South-East Spain living with existential challenges around drought, desertification and collapsing communities where regenerative agriculture may hold the key to long-term thriving.

If we want to properly enable these changemakers we need to explore new ways of investing, beyond traditional private equity and venture capital models. By being ‘on the ground’ with the pioneers that are pursuing systems change and immersing ourselves in the challenges they face, together we will co-create the new models of value exchange and investment that this time of transition requires.

To get there we need a group of philanthropists and investors that share our intuition and are willing to go on a journey. In this journey we will need to be flexible and sensitive to the needs of the changemakers and the ‘webs of trust’ that have been built carefully over time. We need to think about how our finance can be truly regenerative rather than extractive. And along the way we may face somewhat uncomfortable questions like ‘what is my role as a funder?’ or ‘how do we address the power dynamic between funder and recipient?’ or ‘what is the real meaning of intergenerational wealth?’.