Hey Johannes, thanks for posting this! Always nice to see what FP are working on climate-wise. I’ve got a couple of questions:
Where do you get your 2x figure multiplier from out of interest?
Where can we stay up to date on the work of TerraPraxis? Their website doesn’t seem too up-to-date and I’m really curious to see how they scale up/what they deliver in the coming months and years.
In terms of your future plans re. investing globally—have you got any promising orgs in developing countries that FP is considering funding?
Re 1: This is a conservative guess (something like 90% confidence that it is at least 2x as impactful, possibly quite a bit more than that). We hope to more analysis on this once we have more data (e.g. the fund running longer).
But here are some more of the underlying data and observations:
a. Our 250k grant to TerraPraxis grant was the first major (>50k) philanthropic grant to this org (incl. its predecessor, Energy for Humanity) and put it the org significantly more on the map, then being able to crowd in 1 million in funding shortly thereafter. TerraPraxis has also stressed that the initial grant gave them the ability to be way more intentional about their pursuits, so we see this as an example of trajectory-shaping grantmaking that will, over time, have a really large multiplier. There were other similar opportunities with large multipliers.
b. In our conversations, charities often stress the importance of funding stability / predictability, something a fund can provide but individual donors cannot as easily (this then leads to less cost-effective ways of using money, such as using part-time consultants rather than staffing up full-time staff when there is no trajectory certainty). So, there is multiplier here from deploying capital more effectively, with more planning certainty.
c. There were several instances of time-sensitive opportunities, such as after the Biden victory or—more surprisingly to many (and therefore less prepared for) the Democrats winning Georgia—where there were acute funding needs that required fast decisions (we did not take up all of those instances, sometimes others acted first but we would have if they hadn’t, etc.). So, there’s something here both in terms of some times being particularly important (and timing matters), but also about not overfilling funding gaps.
Re 2: Many events that they are linking to on their website are free-to-attend (https://www.terrapraxis.org/upcoming-events). We will also update our TerraPraxis analysis in time (though this is not imminent).
Re 3: We are not at the level of identifying orgs yet, we are earlier than that. This is more of an example of the kinds of things we are looking at, right now we are scoping out what seems best to go deeper on and this example—finding orgs that prevent carbon lock-in in emerging economies—appears a fairly promising angle. But the first thing to understand there before recommending orgs would be to identify localities where climate mitigation + overcoming energy poverty are not in conflict, but ideally synergistic (e.g. in geographies where renewable resources are very promising).
Hey Johannes, thanks for posting this! Always nice to see what FP are working on climate-wise. I’ve got a couple of questions:
Where do you get your 2x figure multiplier from out of interest?
Where can we stay up to date on the work of TerraPraxis? Their website doesn’t seem too up-to-date and I’m really curious to see how they scale up/what they deliver in the coming months and years.
In terms of your future plans re. investing globally—have you got any promising orgs in developing countries that FP is considering funding?
Hi James,
thanks for the questions!
Re 1:
This is a conservative guess (something like 90% confidence that it is at least 2x as impactful, possibly quite a bit more than that). We hope to more analysis on this once we have more data (e.g. the fund running longer).
But here are some more of the underlying data and observations:
a. Our 250k grant to TerraPraxis grant was the first major (>50k) philanthropic grant to this org (incl. its predecessor, Energy for Humanity) and put it the org significantly more on the map, then being able to crowd in 1 million in funding shortly thereafter. TerraPraxis has also stressed that the initial grant gave them the ability to be way more intentional about their pursuits, so we see this as an example of trajectory-shaping grantmaking that will, over time, have a really large multiplier. There were other similar opportunities with large multipliers.
b. In our conversations, charities often stress the importance of funding stability / predictability, something a fund can provide but individual donors cannot as easily (this then leads to less cost-effective ways of using money, such as using part-time consultants rather than staffing up full-time staff when there is no trajectory certainty). So, there is multiplier here from deploying capital more effectively, with more planning certainty.
c. There were several instances of time-sensitive opportunities, such as after the Biden victory or—more surprisingly to many (and therefore less prepared for) the Democrats winning Georgia—where there were acute funding needs that required fast decisions (we did not take up all of those instances, sometimes others acted first but we would have if they hadn’t, etc.). So, there’s something here both in terms of some times being particularly important (and timing matters), but also about not overfilling funding gaps.
Re 2:
Many events that they are linking to on their website are free-to-attend (https://www.terrapraxis.org/upcoming-events). We will also update our TerraPraxis analysis in time (though this is not imminent).
Re 3:
We are not at the level of identifying orgs yet, we are earlier than that. This is more of an example of the kinds of things we are looking at, right now we are scoping out what seems best to go deeper on and this example—finding orgs that prevent carbon lock-in in emerging economies—appears a fairly promising angle. But the first thing to understand there before recommending orgs would be to identify localities where climate mitigation + overcoming energy poverty are not in conflict, but ideally synergistic (e.g. in geographies where renewable resources are very promising).