Why an “Eco-Endowment”

The Eco-endowment seeks to perform valuable agricultural research and environmental regeneration while at the same time earning competitive returns which are uncorrelated with other financial assets as part of an overall endowment strategy.

In the early 2000’s David Sweson, Yale’s endowment manager, radically increased funding in the VC space by innovating the asset allocation strategy at Yale which became popular with most university endowments, and dramatically increased venture capital funding in the US ecosystem by adding it to the strategy which many universities copied.

In the time since two major innovations have taken place

• Decentralized crypto currencies and smart contracts
• The concept of triple bottom line investing and eco-markets like carbon credits

The Eco-endowment seeks to benchmark, document and demonstrate a regeneration indexed endowment asset for use in an asset allocation portfolio along side traditional donor or fund managed investments like 

• Stocks Bonds and traditional investments
• Innovator investments like VC and early stage startups
• Peer to peer financial products like crypto currencies
• Social Impact companies, and B Corps

In addition to public market assets with transparent ecological returns, we seek to demonstrate novel peer to peer and triple bottom line strategies which can be utilized by NGO endowments.

An Eco-Endowment regenerative asset has the following characteristics 

• Has future agricultural or land or natural value streams (for example annual nut harvest from walnut trees, and 30-60 years later a lump sum hardwood value).
• Performs one or multiple environmental and social objectives (for example carbon fixing, soil regeneration, ecosystem protection, biodiversity preservation, species extinction, food supply resilience, climate adaptation, disaster resilience).
• Is tokenizable in non traditional markets and suitable for use by a non profit endowment with long term asset strategy

In particular we seek endowment investments that have research value or ecosystem resilience value. 

• Ex. Performs important research or measurement or technological innovation which can be open sourced, scaled or replicated.
• Involves simple methods which can be utilized at small scale, or globally, especially which can provide climate adaptation strategies for human food systems, or strategic eco-preservation.
• Involves hydro, solar, geothermal or other off the grid /distributed power.
• Is of relatively low maintenance and labor requirement and has minimal inputs (such as fertilizers or pesticides) which come from outside the bio-region / ecosystem.

Why this asset class:

• Demographic trends make many asset classes undesirable due to lack of growth, fiscal insolvency and inflation risk in major world economies 
• We face unprecedented geo-political risk patterns which endowments may wish to hedge
• We face major environmental challenges as developing countries begin to consume in western lifestyle patterns
• Desirable asset classes such as AI and crypto and electric transportation are very carbon intensive, and resource intensive
• We have a specific project which requires a long term endowment which may need to exist longer than most asset strategies**
• We wish to automate the program using DAO type tooling and AI automation
• We want to share our learning and tools with others to scale this idea
• There is an unprecedented cohort of donors retiring in western countries, who we believe may be interested

** The “legacy project” requires a long term endowment to perform services such as data storage and retention, and letter delivery long into the future and requires unorthodox asset allocation strategies.  This endowment will consist of a basket of traditional banking and investment assets, cryptocurrency assets, social impact, and regenerative agriculture investments including a “research eco-endowment” described here. 

Minimum Charitable Family Office Need Profile

• There is a large cohort of wealthy persons that
  • Do not have their own family office, or wish to spend the overhead
  • Are skeptical of donations to traditional donor destinations like hospitals and university endowments that suffer from cost disease
  • Thus, have a lot of money in donor advised funds or other similar vehicles that requires them to donate to 501c3
  • Possess a skepticism of the rigor, systems thinking and metrics orientation of the traditional NGO sector 
  • Lack the time and sector expertise to allocate that capital carefully along their program priorities, or hold NGOs accountable to deliverables and to unlock follow-ons
  • Thus have a lot of money on the sidelines despite their desire to make moves