Our Mission
Prime Coalition is a nonprofit organization on a mission to unlock catalytic capital and change the future of climate finance.
We envision a world in which humanity thrives, without the threat of climate change.
We are facing an intergenerational, global crisis.
A baby born in 2020 will face seven times more extreme climate events in their lifetime than a baby born at the dawn of the industrial revolution. A six-year-old in 2020 will experience twice as many cyclones, twice as many wildfires, four times as many crop failures, and five times as many droughts than a six-year-old in 1800. Young people living in areas prone to extreme weather or without infrastructure will experience these traumas the worst.
Since Prime Coalition’s founding in 2014, a groundswell of support has advanced climate solutions, but the possibility of averting catastrophic harm seems to be slipping away. As daunting as it is, we see hope in community and our collective power to catalyze change: every organization, every nation, and every citizen has a role to play in imagining and building the roads to a future where people, planet, and progress live in harmony.
Prime is proud to be a part of an intergenerational movement that prioritizes impact.
Prime centers on collective, long-term thinking in this global movement by supporting people, programs, and innovations that can help spark, deepen, or accelerate emerging climate solutions that have strong potential to transform our world in the decades ahead. In the spirit of additionality, we seek to fill gaps or enable outcomes that are unlikely without our catalytic support.
The Prime family, which includes Prime Coalition and its affiliated organizations, aggregates and channels catalytic capital toward deeply impactful climate ventures and projects that we believe have the power to create significant, long-lasting change and that might struggle to raise sufficient support without us — such as when the time horizon to retire technology risk is too long for traditional investors.
Catalytic capital enables deep impact that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without it, by absorbing risks that finance-first investors can’t — or won’t — take on. Since 2014, Prime has facilitated investments with over 250 philanthropic entities and mobilized over $300MM for climate innovation.
We are relentlessly serious about impact.
Capital comes with structural power and privilege. Prime carries our privilege by relentlessly prioritizing public good for people and the planet. Our thinking around additionality is constantly evolving to meet the needs that are most unmet. We seek to support high-potential entrepreneurs and projects within sectors that are most overlooked.
To get better at assessing impact, Prime created CRANE, a publicly available assessment tool. We're also fostering a collaborative community, Project Frame, dedicated to improving assessment of new technologies’ potential for deep impact.
We help to develop innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing climate challenges, but in an unjust world, it is crucial that we do so in a just and equitable way. For this reason, justice is becoming a key part of our organizational DNA, influencing the ways we think about and work to achieve impact.
In structuring charitable investments, funds in the Prime family look at the diversity of leadership in portfolio companies and examine how their products and services might affect the communities where physical infrastructure is located. We are also committed to building a diverse team where each person feels they belong. But we have a lot of work to do, and we're committed to doing it even when it’s hard.