Jennifer Morris: Sustainable Finance Models

So this fund specifically is not necessarily a revenue generating fund in the sense that it's trying to make a profit. It's trying to make sure that it has sufficient resources to continue providing resources to those communities upstream so that they won't deforest recognizing there's an opportunity cost to preserve the forest. So it's not necessarily a profit model. It's really about sustainable financing and the revenue. So the funding that's going into that is coming from, from the Chinese government. There's a percentage of money from the dam companies that is also going into there. Because remember, this is not about CSR for them. This is about ensuring that siltation and sedimentation into the water stops because it's much more expensive for them to try to fit or to clean up the dam than it is for them to stop deforestation. So this is all about enlightened cities. They recognize this is critical, so they're putting money into that fund. Marriott's putting money into the fund again because they're using a lot of water from this area and then CI is raising its own resources to put into that fund. So that's the whole model. But to your general question, we look at cost benefits across the whole organization. So depending on what we're trying to do as a nonprofit, we're trying to create mechanisms that will be sustainable. And a key part of our work that I didn't mention is our work related to setting up trust funds and endowment funds. Because we recognize that short term grants will probably lead to short term success. So ensuring longevity and creating endowment funds which can be invested in capital markets and instead of using the principal, we just use the interest that's earned every year on that. So we're doing that all over the world. We have $100 million fund that was financed by the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation specifically for creating trust funds for 10 different projects all over the world.