What are the best ways to build models and structures that support broader and deeper deployment of catalytic capital? This is the question that underpinned the Fostering Solutions and Infrastructure workstream of the Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3), an investment, learning, and market development initiative to promote greater and more effective use of catalytic capital, and enable a more just, equitable, and resilient world.
This workstream set out to fund a range of innovations in the catalytic capital investing ecosystem—including new vehicles, platforms, campaigns and tools—that sought to mitigate key challenges for catalytic capital investors and by so doing facilitate the flow of catalytic capital to underserved needs. The work represented here, which speaks to different efforts underway among various market actors, illustrates the breadth of activities that could help to strengthen the sector. In this piece, we provide an overview of the work supported, as well as some key lessons we have drawn from the portfolio for C3 and the broader field.
Strengthening catalytic capital deployment practices
The work of numerous FSI grantees demonstrates how we can strengthen our approaches and practices in deploying catalytic capital, embodying the core aspiration to respond to demand-side needs and impact, and flex capital supply accordingly, not the other way around.
Five key areas of innovation and advancement stand out from the work of the portfolio:
1. Deeply understanding investee needs and priorities, and responding accordingly
Invest Appalachia (IA) is a collaborative impact investment platform serving the Central Appalachia region of the United States, a region with a long history of chronic underinvestment. It has taken a deeply participatory approach to design and deployment, centering community voices and needs with a Community Advisory Council (CAC) drawn from diverse sectors across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. This allowed IA to avoid a “one-size-fits-all” approach, and instead develop a nuanced understanding of how different people, places and situations required different support. The CAC has also evolved to play a greater role in pipeline development, with IA staff developing a Project Assessment tool that CAC members are piloting to systematically scan for potential investments while also building up data on the regional ecosystem.
The resulting portfolio demonstrates remarkable responsiveness in matching financial tools to actual community needs. Solutions ranged from $10,000 technical assistance grants for business planning to $250,000 credit enhancements for grocery store development in food deserts, from zero-interest bridge loans for solar tax credit financing to recoverable grants that could be recycled through multiple rounds of housing development. With 86% of projects located in rural or economically distressed counties, 42% led by women, and 28% led by BIPOC entrepreneurs, the portfolio also reflects the CAC’s emphasis on equity and community ownership.
2. Adopting an equity lens
Rhia Ventures’ HEART framework demonstrates how catalytic capital principles are fundamentally strengthened by an explicit equity lens, which helps identify where capital gaps exist. Using an equity lens reveals how “gender, race, class, and other identities create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination,” resulting in the exclusion of entire population segments from both capital access and care delivery. It also helps pinpoint the specific market failures that catalytic capital is designed to address.
In this way, the equity lens becomes core to effective catalytic capital deployment, not an add-on consideration—for instance, the HEART framework’s requirement for stratified data to reveal where and how people have been underserved leads to more comprehensive market intelligence and better risk assessment than traditional approaches. This clarity helps catalytic capital accurately target underserved market segments, ensuring that those who suffered from the gaps actually benefit from the solutions.
3. Aligning investment parameters and process with impact intent
The Pacific Community Ventures (PCV) Oakland Restorative Loan Fund embodies catalytic capital by aligning every key element with its impact goal of dismantling systemic barriers for BIPOC entrepreneurs. It begins with a design centered on zero-interest, no-fee terms and the geographic targeting of Oakland’s lowest-income, highest-BIPOC census tracts. This approach continues with distinctive community-centered implementation, including multilingual outreach in six languages beyond English, as well as trust-based engagement through in-person listening sessions with entrepreneurs and community partners. This end-to-end approach helps ensure that capital truly reaches and benefits entrepreneurs who have been systematically excluded from traditional financing, resulting in superior measured impact outcomes compared to the overall portfolio.
PCV has also published the Oakland Fund Playbook to help other organizations learn from this model, and is already working with partners on a potential replication of the Fund in southern California.
4. Understanding and serving investees more holistically
Kois Invest’s Dignity in Labour Platform takes a holistic view of its borrowers—informal workers in India—as complex individuals facing interconnected challenges beyond just access to credit. Rather than seeing e-rickshaw drivers, migrants, artisans, and other target users simply as loan recipients, the Platform recognizes they lack formal documentation, bank accounts, knowledge of government schemes, and ongoing support, which leads to them being unable to access a range of social protection schemes that are intended to benefit them.
Therefore, in addition to providing fit-for-purpose products (including migration loans, skilling loans and asset financing), the Platform will help users obtain documentation, open bank accounts and access the social protection schemes to which they are entitled. This responds to a spectrum of challenges related to financial exclusion and addresses systemic barriers that perpetuate that exclusion, rather than treating symptoms through credit alone. There would also likely be benefits for borrowers’ overall financial resilience, and indirectly mitigate credit risk across the Platform lending portfolio: a real win-win.
5. Starting with demand-side empowerment
In some situations, it makes sense to take a step back and start not with turning on the tap of capital supply, but with engaging the demand side so that they are empowered to access the finance that they need.
Agora Partnerships’ WeCount project illustrates how information gaps and asymmetries in fragmented markets create structural barriers to capital access that require demand-side interventions before traditional financing can function. Banks typically develop products based on existing client insights, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where potentially viable borrowers—particularly women-led SMEs with low formalization levels—remain invisible. Varying evaluation standards across institutions, entrepreneurs’ limited familiarity with digital data collection tools, and geographic fragmentation across these markets in Central America and Mexico compound this problem.
The WeCount approach demonstrates how the appropriate first step in these situations could be capacity building with the demand side, in addition to investing in developing AI-based digital tools for MSME data capture and analysis. Building capacity and foundational digital data then enables further moves—data exchange between MSMEs and partners, creating peer networks, and developing portable digital identities—that will support the sustainable financial inclusion of this historically excluded client segment.
Entrepreneurs also often face fundamental knowledge gaps that create systemic barriers to optimal capital allocation. Village Capital’s research reveals that most entrepreneurs only consider a narrow range of funding options while remaining unaware of the wider spectrum that includes redeemable equity, revenue-based financing, convertible grants, and forgivable loans. This limited awareness creates access inequality where only those with privileged networks understand diverse funding options, contributing to stark statistics: less than 2% of startups receive venture capital, with 85% going to male-led ventures and less than 3% to entrepreneurs of color in the US. Without comprehensive knowledge, entrepreneurs often pursue mismatched capital structures, seeking equity when a debt product would be more suitable, and miss opportunities for non-dilutive financing that better aligns with their intentions and likely trajectory.
Village Capital’s Capital Explorer tool addresses this by democratizing access to comprehensive information about financing options, enabling entrepreneurs to make better decisions about capital structures in line with their business models, cash flows, and growth needs. When entrepreneurs understand their options—from supply chain financing for working capital needs to employee ownership trusts for mission-aligned exits—they help to drive market demand for innovative financing solutions and are able to have more productive conversations with capital providers about suitability.
Mobilizing Investors and Institutions
Alongside these efforts to improve the deployment of capital to the communities that most need it, the portfolio also features several grants that have innovated on engaging and mobilizing investors and financial institutions through new vehicles and partnerships.
One example is Opportunity International’s Climate Collateral SPV, an innovative credit vehicle enabling consistent lending across smallholder farmer communities implementing regenerative agriculture practices. It places with participating financial institutions long-term (e.g., 5-year) deposits which are pledged as up to 40% collateral for new eligible agriculture loans, essentially providing funded credit risk support for these loans. As inadequate collateral as well as particular risk factors in agriculture are key barriers to finance for smallholders, this has the potential to unlock significantly greater lending by institutions to this segment, especially as it is coupled with technical assistance for farmer support and lender capacity building. A senior debt layer has now also been added to the structure, as this was sought after by many institutions, particularly smaller ones with weaker access to capital markets.
Another is Total Impact Capital’s Impact Notes Facility, a simplified debt product that exposes investors to a diversified range of pre-diligenced high-impact funds while allowing them to allocate their proceeds to specific SDGs—this can then provide a consistent source of affordable senior debt to vehicles with a proven track record of impact and financial sustainability. While fundraising for the Facility has not been without its challenges, it has now closed at $2.6 million raised from 12 investors. Interestingly, Total has ranged beyond the group of larger and better-known catalytic capital investors to engage a wider range of investors: faith-based groups, family offices, DAFs and even institutional impact set-asides. One key lesson has been on the critical role of wealth advisors in this market, who can present intractable barriers even where principals are keen, and could equally become powerful evangelists if they are brought onside.
Yet another approach can be seen in the work of the National Advisory Board for Impact Investment (NABII) Zambia in collaboration with the Bank of Zambia, the central bank, to develop a ZMW 5 billion (USD 175 million) credit risk guarantee scheme to support lending to SMEs in the agricultural value chain, a deeply underserved sector in the country and across the continent. Dubbed the Small Business Growth Initiative (SBGI), the initiative will also provide capacity-building support to help participating local financial institutions better serve local SMEs. There is also the potential for complementary regulatory changes in the future to further incentivize financial institutions to serve this historically overlooked segment of the market. This partnership is anchored in the Bank of Zambia’s firmly stated commitment to financial inclusion, and enabled by recent legislation that allows the Bank to set up dedicated SPVs (a capability that was exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic period), laying the foundations for operationalization of initiatives such as the SBGI.
Finally, two grants in the portfolio formed part of wider campaigns to stimulate investor interest in new areas of need. One was to the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG) in conjunction with its National Partners in Colombia and Türkiye, to develop roadmaps and stimulate investor interest in social housing and place-based investing, respectively. The other was to the Impact Investing Institute in the United Kingdom, to produce a guide on how catalytic capital can best support a just transition globally, in support of a wider program of work at the Institute called the Just Transition Finance Challenge. These efforts can be seen as initial steps in much longer journeys, and they underscore the importance of supporting not only work that can bear fruit in the near term, but also early work in nascent areas that will need to be developed over time.
Key Lessons
1. Data, knowledge, outreach and engagement can all help to rebalance power towards investees. While catalytic capital is a supply-side concept, it is animated by the desire to meet the needs of the demand side, especially those who have historically been marginalized. Numerous grants in this portfolio have reflected the value of work that supports the empowerment of investees in various ways, from providing ways for them to see and leverage their own enterprise data, to helping them understand which financing options really are right for them, to ensuring that products and processes successfully reach, engage and seek input from communities that have been sidelined by the mainstream market.
2. Collaborations and partnerships unlock new opportunities. Some of this is reflected in innovative partnerships with existing financial institutions already in the market, using new data platforms or credit risk support to enable them to push further into underserved needs. Notably, it could also take the form of groundbreaking partnerships with state agencies such as central banks to drive ambitious change at a national level, where the right enabling conditions are in place—particularly in the emerging markets environment, local stakeholders and capital sources are more important than ever.
3. Innovation sets out to solve particular market challenges but often runs into new ones. One aspect of this is how new investor propositions relate to established portfolio categories, such as asset class and theme. An innovative vehicle might fall between or overlap with multiple asset classes, or represent an impact theme that does not precisely align with an investor’s defined focus. Another is the problem of being effectively locked out of established markets because the barriers presented to new entrants without track record, as exemplified by the typical reaction of wealth advisors to innovative products such as the Total Impact Notes.
4. Progress is unpredictable, and breakthroughs can happen in unexpected places. Many of these grants seek to enable more transformative and systemic change, which is inherently unpredictable in terms of where and when change will occur, if at all. This needs to be factored into design and management, as well as into funders’ expectations. However, unexpected breakthroughs can also occur: the grantee in Türkiye began working with an investor on a place-based investment as a result of the grant, but in a different region from the one initially targeted by the grant.
5. The base of catalytic capital investors is still limited relative to the need from these partners and the field more broadly, and constrains the potential of new vehicles and platforms. With this portfolio of grants, C3 supported parts of larger projects that were already underway or in advanced stages of planning. Some of these required additional funding as well as investment capital, both of which could be challenging to secure. All this underscores the need to bring more investors to the table and support those already participating, so that they can both grow their own efforts and influence other, newer actors. Without this, it will be incredibly slow and difficult to build a more robust sector and, more importantly, move the needle on the urgent challenges we face.
As such, C3 has been redoubling its efforts to build and strengthen the catalytic capital investor community of practice, building on the strong momentum and networks developed in recent years. This ranges from fostering connection, learning and capacity building for newer participants, to deal pipeline sharing and collaborative efforts to build critical market infrastructure. C3 will facilitate some of this directly while continuing to partner with established global and regional networks to support their own investor and ecosystem communities.
We invite all catalytic capital investors to consider the various ways they can contribute to these and other initiatives, thereby broadening and deepening the pool of capital available for vital catalytic capital projects. In this moment of change and challenge for the world, there is a greater need and urgency than ever for catalytic capital to step up and play its role.
End note:
The Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) initiative was established in 2019 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network and the Rockefeller Foundation, and joined in 2025 by Blue Haven Initiative, Builders Vision, Ceniarth, the Ford Foundation, The Lemelson Foundation, Small Foundation, the Sorenson Impact Foundation, the Soros Economic Development Fund, the Surdna Foundation and Walton Family Foundation.
Fostering Solutions and Infrastructure for Catalytic Capital
What are the best ways to build models and structures that support broader and deeper deployment of catalytic capital? This is the question that underpinned the Fostering Solutions and Infrastructure workstream of the Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3), an investment, learning, and market development initiative to promote greater and more effective use of catalytic capital, and enable a more just, equitable, and resilient world.
This workstream set out to fund a range of innovations in the catalytic capital investing ecosystem—including new vehicles, platforms, campaigns and tools—that sought to mitigate key challenges for catalytic capital investors and by so doing facilitate the flow of catalytic capital to underserved needs. The work represented here, which speaks to different efforts underway among various market actors, illustrates the breadth of activities that could help to strengthen the sector. In this piece, we provide an overview of the work supported, as well as some key lessons we have drawn from the portfolio for C3 and the broader field.
Strengthening catalytic capital deployment practices
The work of numerous FSI grantees demonstrates how we can strengthen our approaches and practices in deploying catalytic capital, embodying the core aspiration to respond to demand-side needs and impact, and flex capital supply accordingly, not the other way around.
Five key areas of innovation and advancement stand out from the work of the portfolio:
1. Deeply understanding investee needs and priorities, and responding accordingly
Invest Appalachia (IA) is a collaborative impact investment platform serving the Central Appalachia region of the United States, a region with a long history of chronic underinvestment. It has taken a deeply participatory approach to design and deployment, centering community voices and needs with a Community Advisory Council (CAC) drawn from diverse sectors across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. This allowed IA to avoid a “one-size-fits-all” approach, and instead develop a nuanced understanding of how different people, places and situations required different support. The CAC has also evolved to play a greater role in pipeline development, with IA staff developing a Project Assessment tool that CAC members are piloting to systematically scan for potential investments while also building up data on the regional ecosystem.
The resulting portfolio demonstrates remarkable responsiveness in matching financial tools to actual community needs. Solutions ranged from $10,000 technical assistance grants for business planning to $250,000 credit enhancements for grocery store development in food deserts, from zero-interest bridge loans for solar tax credit financing to recoverable grants that could be recycled through multiple rounds of housing development. With 86% of projects located in rural or economically distressed counties, 42% led by women, and 28% led by BIPOC entrepreneurs, the portfolio also reflects the CAC’s emphasis on equity and community ownership.
2. Adopting an equity lens
Rhia Ventures’ HEART framework demonstrates how catalytic capital principles are fundamentally strengthened by an explicit equity lens, which helps identify where capital gaps exist. Using an equity lens reveals how “gender, race, class, and other identities create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination,” resulting in the exclusion of entire population segments from both capital access and care delivery. It also helps pinpoint the specific market failures that catalytic capital is designed to address.
In this way, the equity lens becomes core to effective catalytic capital deployment, not an add-on consideration—for instance, the HEART framework’s requirement for stratified data to reveal where and how people have been underserved leads to more comprehensive market intelligence and better risk assessment than traditional approaches. This clarity helps catalytic capital accurately target underserved market segments, ensuring that those who suffered from the gaps actually benefit from the solutions.
3. Aligning investment parameters and process with impact intent
The Pacific Community Ventures (PCV) Oakland Restorative Loan Fund embodies catalytic capital by aligning every key element with its impact goal of dismantling systemic barriers for BIPOC entrepreneurs. It begins with a design centered on zero-interest, no-fee terms and the geographic targeting of Oakland’s lowest-income, highest-BIPOC census tracts. This approach continues with distinctive community-centered implementation, including multilingual outreach in six languages beyond English, as well as trust-based engagement through in-person listening sessions with entrepreneurs and community partners. This end-to-end approach helps ensure that capital truly reaches and benefits entrepreneurs who have been systematically excluded from traditional financing, resulting in superior measured impact outcomes compared to the overall portfolio.
PCV has also published the Oakland Fund Playbook to help other organizations learn from this model, and is already working with partners on a potential replication of the Fund in southern California.
4. Understanding and serving investees more holistically
Kois Invest’s Dignity in Labour Platform takes a holistic view of its borrowers—informal workers in India—as complex individuals facing interconnected challenges beyond just access to credit. Rather than seeing e-rickshaw drivers, migrants, artisans, and other target users simply as loan recipients, the Platform recognizes they lack formal documentation, bank accounts, knowledge of government schemes, and ongoing support, which leads to them being unable to access a range of social protection schemes that are intended to benefit them.
Therefore, in addition to providing fit-for-purpose products (including migration loans, skilling loans and asset financing), the Platform will help users obtain documentation, open bank accounts and access the social protection schemes to which they are entitled. This responds to a spectrum of challenges related to financial exclusion and addresses systemic barriers that perpetuate that exclusion, rather than treating symptoms through credit alone. There would also likely be benefits for borrowers’ overall financial resilience, and indirectly mitigate credit risk across the Platform lending portfolio: a real win-win.
5. Starting with demand-side empowerment
In some situations, it makes sense to take a step back and start not with turning on the tap of capital supply, but with engaging the demand side so that they are empowered to access the finance that they need.
Agora Partnerships’ WeCount project illustrates how information gaps and asymmetries in fragmented markets create structural barriers to capital access that require demand-side interventions before traditional financing can function. Banks typically develop products based on existing client insights, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where potentially viable borrowers—particularly women-led SMEs with low formalization levels—remain invisible. Varying evaluation standards across institutions, entrepreneurs’ limited familiarity with digital data collection tools, and geographic fragmentation across these markets in Central America and Mexico compound this problem.
The WeCount approach demonstrates how the appropriate first step in these situations could be capacity building with the demand side, in addition to investing in developing AI-based digital tools for MSME data capture and analysis. Building capacity and foundational digital data then enables further moves—data exchange between MSMEs and partners, creating peer networks, and developing portable digital identities—that will support the sustainable financial inclusion of this historically excluded client segment.
Entrepreneurs also often face fundamental knowledge gaps that create systemic barriers to optimal capital allocation. Village Capital’s research reveals that most entrepreneurs only consider a narrow range of funding options while remaining unaware of the wider spectrum that includes redeemable equity, revenue-based financing, convertible grants, and forgivable loans. This limited awareness creates access inequality where only those with privileged networks understand diverse funding options, contributing to stark statistics: less than 2% of startups receive venture capital, with 85% going to male-led ventures and less than 3% to entrepreneurs of color in the US. Without comprehensive knowledge, entrepreneurs often pursue mismatched capital structures, seeking equity when a debt product would be more suitable, and miss opportunities for non-dilutive financing that better aligns with their intentions and likely trajectory.
Village Capital’s Capital Explorer tool addresses this by democratizing access to comprehensive information about financing options, enabling entrepreneurs to make better decisions about capital structures in line with their business models, cash flows, and growth needs. When entrepreneurs understand their options—from supply chain financing for working capital needs to employee ownership trusts for mission-aligned exits—they help to drive market demand for innovative financing solutions and are able to have more productive conversations with capital providers about suitability.
Mobilizing Investors and Institutions
Alongside these efforts to improve the deployment of capital to the communities that most need it, the portfolio also features several grants that have innovated on engaging and mobilizing investors and financial institutions through new vehicles and partnerships.
One example is Opportunity International’s Climate Collateral SPV, an innovative credit vehicle enabling consistent lending across smallholder farmer communities implementing regenerative agriculture practices. It places with participating financial institutions long-term (e.g., 5-year) deposits which are pledged as up to 40% collateral for new eligible agriculture loans, essentially providing funded credit risk support for these loans. As inadequate collateral as well as particular risk factors in agriculture are key barriers to finance for smallholders, this has the potential to unlock significantly greater lending by institutions to this segment, especially as it is coupled with technical assistance for farmer support and lender capacity building. A senior debt layer has now also been added to the structure, as this was sought after by many institutions, particularly smaller ones with weaker access to capital markets.
Another is Total Impact Capital’s Impact Notes Facility, a simplified debt product that exposes investors to a diversified range of pre-diligenced high-impact funds while allowing them to allocate their proceeds to specific SDGs—this can then provide a consistent source of affordable senior debt to vehicles with a proven track record of impact and financial sustainability. While fundraising for the Facility has not been without its challenges, it has now closed at $2.6 million raised from 12 investors. Interestingly, Total has ranged beyond the group of larger and better-known catalytic capital investors to engage a wider range of investors: faith-based groups, family offices, DAFs and even institutional impact set-asides. One key lesson has been on the critical role of wealth advisors in this market, who can present intractable barriers even where principals are keen, and could equally become powerful evangelists if they are brought onside.
Yet another approach can be seen in the work of the National Advisory Board for Impact Investment (NABII) Zambia in collaboration with the Bank of Zambia, the central bank, to develop a ZMW 5 billion (USD 175 million) credit risk guarantee scheme to support lending to SMEs in the agricultural value chain, a deeply underserved sector in the country and across the continent. Dubbed the Small Business Growth Initiative (SBGI), the initiative will also provide capacity-building support to help participating local financial institutions better serve local SMEs. There is also the potential for complementary regulatory changes in the future to further incentivize financial institutions to serve this historically overlooked segment of the market. This partnership is anchored in the Bank of Zambia’s firmly stated commitment to financial inclusion, and enabled by recent legislation that allows the Bank to set up dedicated SPVs (a capability that was exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic period), laying the foundations for operationalization of initiatives such as the SBGI.
Finally, two grants in the portfolio formed part of wider campaigns to stimulate investor interest in new areas of need. One was to the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG) in conjunction with its National Partners in Colombia and Türkiye, to develop roadmaps and stimulate investor interest in social housing and place-based investing, respectively. The other was to the Impact Investing Institute in the United Kingdom, to produce a guide on how catalytic capital can best support a just transition globally, in support of a wider program of work at the Institute called the Just Transition Finance Challenge. These efforts can be seen as initial steps in much longer journeys, and they underscore the importance of supporting not only work that can bear fruit in the near term, but also early work in nascent areas that will need to be developed over time.
Key Lessons
1. Data, knowledge, outreach and engagement can all help to rebalance power towards investees. While catalytic capital is a supply-side concept, it is animated by the desire to meet the needs of the demand side, especially those who have historically been marginalized. Numerous grants in this portfolio have reflected the value of work that supports the empowerment of investees in various ways, from providing ways for them to see and leverage their own enterprise data, to helping them understand which financing options really are right for them, to ensuring that products and processes successfully reach, engage and seek input from communities that have been sidelined by the mainstream market.
2. Collaborations and partnerships unlock new opportunities. Some of this is reflected in innovative partnerships with existing financial institutions already in the market, using new data platforms or credit risk support to enable them to push further into underserved needs. Notably, it could also take the form of groundbreaking partnerships with state agencies such as central banks to drive ambitious change at a national level, where the right enabling conditions are in place—particularly in the emerging markets environment, local stakeholders and capital sources are more important than ever.
3. Innovation sets out to solve particular market challenges but often runs into new ones. One aspect of this is how new investor propositions relate to established portfolio categories, such as asset class and theme. An innovative vehicle might fall between or overlap with multiple asset classes, or represent an impact theme that does not precisely align with an investor’s defined focus. Another is the problem of being effectively locked out of established markets because the barriers presented to new entrants without track record, as exemplified by the typical reaction of wealth advisors to innovative products such as the Total Impact Notes.
4. Progress is unpredictable, and breakthroughs can happen in unexpected places. Many of these grants seek to enable more transformative and systemic change, which is inherently unpredictable in terms of where and when change will occur, if at all. This needs to be factored into design and management, as well as into funders’ expectations. However, unexpected breakthroughs can also occur: the grantee in Türkiye began working with an investor on a place-based investment as a result of the grant, but in a different region from the one initially targeted by the grant.
5. The base of catalytic capital investors is still limited relative to the need from these partners and the field more broadly, and constrains the potential of new vehicles and platforms. With this portfolio of grants, C3 supported parts of larger projects that were already underway or in advanced stages of planning. Some of these required additional funding as well as investment capital, both of which could be challenging to secure. All this underscores the need to bring more investors to the table and support those already participating, so that they can both grow their own efforts and influence other, newer actors. Without this, it will be incredibly slow and difficult to build a more robust sector and, more importantly, move the needle on the urgent challenges we face.
As such, C3 has been redoubling its efforts to build and strengthen the catalytic capital investor community of practice, building on the strong momentum and networks developed in recent years. This ranges from fostering connection, learning and capacity building for newer participants, to deal pipeline sharing and collaborative efforts to build critical market infrastructure. C3 will facilitate some of this directly while continuing to partner with established global and regional networks to support their own investor and ecosystem communities.
We invite all catalytic capital investors to consider the various ways they can contribute to these and other initiatives, thereby broadening and deepening the pool of capital available for vital catalytic capital projects. In this moment of change and challenge for the world, there is a greater need and urgency than ever for catalytic capital to step up and play its role.
End note:
The Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) initiative was established in 2019 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network and the Rockefeller Foundation, and joined in 2025 by Blue Haven Initiative, Builders Vision, Ceniarth, the Ford Foundation, The Lemelson Foundation, Small Foundation, the Sorenson Impact Foundation, the Soros Economic Development Fund, the Surdna Foundation and Walton Family Foundation.
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