This is what LIFT is all about, so if you don’t know, you better find out.
Complement your landscape action plan with a finance strategy and supercharge transformation.
Every action plan is only as good as its implementation, and implementation requires financial resources, aka investment. That investment can, and should, come from a wide variety of sources, both local and distant, with a wide range of reasons for investing in your landscape. LIFT is a process for helping you and your colleagues/partners in your landscape initiative develop a strategy for mobilizing these investments, so you can have confidence your action plan will make an impact.
First, you need a landscape action plan
We can’t proceed with LIFT without a shared vision of a sustainable landscape and plan for what needs to happen to make it so. If you don’t have one of these yet, don’t worry! There are lots of resources available to help you, and many of the leading organizations involved with LIFT would be happy to help. Go here, here, and here for resources, or contact us.
Coordinate the investments in your action plan
If you have an action plan, have you thought about how the different activities effect one another? If not, now is the perfect time to do so. We want to consider how different activities interact across both space and time.
For example, enabling investments like entrepreneurial capacity, land tenure clarity, and basic infrastructure are often needed before asset investments can be made to start-up or scale-up social enterprises. Sometimes it is enough for these investments to be simultaneous. But we need to think about what is needed when in order to have a feasible plan for mobilizing the resources needed.
Designate specific finance strategy leadership
If you’re looking deeply into LIFT, you are probably already leading the finance strategy development within your landscape initiative (whether you like it or not). A critical early step is to make sure that there is leadership buy-in and shared capacity for developing a finance strategy within the landscape initiative. Someone or group needs to be responsible for advancing the LIFT process. We refer to this group as the Landscape Investment Facilitator. Throughout the LIFT site and the lessons in our Help Center, we assume that we’re working with this person or group.
Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay
