A brief update from the Fund Manager -

This past year reminded me of the hard truth of doing this kind of work. Hard things like running refugee centers and rehab facilities, or like building businesses in poor economies, or farming through unpredictable climate change and inflationary periods. Hard places like war-ridden Ukraine, politically-unstable Latin America, spiritually-oppressed regions of Asia, and drought-stricken parts of Africa.

These parts of the world and these types of efforts depend on charity and understandably have limited, or none at all, access to investment capital and traditional financing. Two years ago we launched the Visible Fund as a means to fill that funding void and to prove that, despite the odds, sustainable transformation is still possible.

With just over $350,000 deployed across 15 investments in the fund, we are seeing sustainability unlocked in the form of business opportunities, real estate solutions, and farming initiatives that offer transformation in communities where we are investing in trusted leaders on the ground. These investments have filled a funding void and have prevented otherwise-missed opportunities and lost progress.

We’ve adopted the term Catalytic Capital to define this type of capital allocation. With the hybrid nature of most of these investments, we’ve been able to put dollars to work where it is obvious that the impact of each initiative fits our core missional purpose, while at the same time there is a demonstrable model for how the capital will recycle over time. While this model focuses on finding ways to recover the investment within a 10-year timeline, we had not anticipated how dramatically it would also unlock additional income. Already, we have seen a 3:1 ratio of funding generated for these initiatives as a result of the initial investment made. That means that for every $1 allocated by the Visible Fund, an additional $3 has been generated in the form of other charitable donations and business revenue combined. We’ve been able to use funding models such as revenue-based financing, recoverable grants, and basic amortization to catalyze this kind of value creation and it is now evident that this does indeed provide a desperately-needed way forward in this kind of work.

105 jobs are currently being sustained. 1275 people directly reached by these 15 investments. 60 critical partnerships are being fostered. 15 key local change-makers are being employed and empowered. $400,000 in local revenue is being generated. $775,000 in additional charitable donations has been given directly to these initiatives. These numbers are staggering considering that the average investment size across our currently portfolio is only $25,000 per investment.

This concept of Catalytic Capital is perhaps our biggest success to date in the Fund, and in the first two years we’ve laid the framework for our Catalysts and local leaders around the world to both dream bigger and generate the funding needed to fuel their work into the future. Thank you for believing in these leaders, for helping us design a better way forward, and for seed-funding this creative solution to creating lasting transformational around the globe.

Sincerely,

Brandon Weidman (Fund Manager)