Building Financial Backbones: Lessons from the Strategic Capital Facilitation Community

Since the update of our strategic vision in 2023, Prime has been on the journey to evolve our systemic strategy. Led by our Impact team, the question we are constantly asking ourselves is:

How might we partner with backbone organizations, e.g., organizations doing deep organizing work in local systems or contexts, in systems that are critical for climate action to provide the capital orchestration layer, while coordinating with other stakeholder actions, including other capital providers, in the same systems?

As catalytic investors, we aim to understand how different capital is flowing currently and use our resources strategically to fill capital gaps with the goal of meeting a given system's needs on the ground. Prime’s experience of designing and building innovative catalytic capital solutions and companion programming allows us to explore creative structures and instruments to match the financing need, be it catalytic venture capital, development capital, insurance for direct investment, or even innovating on how to best support existing fund managers. The capital orchestration function is a natural and critical, even if difficult, extension of our practice to make sure we are working with system stakeholders as a coherent whole and to create ripple effects through our investment practice.

One concrete example of this work coming to life is through Claudia Leon and Alban Yau’s involvement in the Strategic Capital Facilitation community of practice, convened by the great minds at the TransCap Initiative. We have learnt so much through our engagement with other peers and pioneers in the community. The collective learnings, hypotheses, and open questions from that group are synthesized in TransCap Initiative’s latest publication: Financial Backbones: Capital Orchestration for System Transformation.

There are many more operational and design questions to be explored internally as we continue to formalize our systemic role. We are so grateful for our impact team, and particularly for our systems expert, Alban Yau, for helping our team explore and implement these concepts.

Take a look and let us know what resonates with you, and share your experience in capital orchestration with Claudia Leon at claudia.leon@primecoalition.org.