We're building a Smarter Quicker Leaner LIFT

The Landscape Investment and Finance Toolkit has the potential to help thousands of landscapes and tens of thousands of social entrepreneurs and enterprises get access to the finance they need to achieve their regenerative visions. To make that possible, we intend to build a software tool, analytical engine, set of business model blueprints, and support features that work together to deliver on the transformative potential of LIFT.

Join us.

Our expert team is ready to use lean impact strategies to build, test, and refine a cutting edge software suite, leverage our global networks to recruit hundreds of new landscape users, and catalyze more than 200 million USD in new landscape finance through the use of LIFT.

We are looking for visionary philanthropic capital partners who are excited to build the tool that will power transformative social enterprise development.

Million Sought

Year Timeline

Million Catalyzed

The difference between 1.0 and 2.0

Offline versus Connected

LIFT 1.0 is a set of PDFs and spreadsheets. This prototype works well enough when a team is guided by an expert through the process, and allows the group to collect data and store it. But LIFT 2.0 will allow LIFT users to easily and securely share this information with collaborators and share the ability to edit or add data, improving collaboration. LIFT 2.0 will allow users to connect their info with other data sets, tools and processes, like GIS, modeling tools, investor databases, and more.

Data Islands versus a Data Rich Commons

LIFT 1.0 provides tools that collect highly valuable data from multi-stakeholder platforms about business opportunities that support a landscapes’ sustainability objectives. But it doesn’t aggregate the data provided by LIFT users, or generate any additional metadata or analysis. This is a major opportunity we intend to capitalize on with LIFT 2.0. LIFT 2.0 will add value to aggregated user data by combining it with global data sets, artificial intelligence, and advanced analyses to generate useful knowledge products, advice, shortcuts, templates, recommendations and connections. This added value will be shared back to LIFT Users as a dividend of participation, generating a virtuous cycle of more data creating more value for the entire LIFT Community.

Expert-Driven versus User-Driven

LIFT 1.0 requires experts to provide fairly intensive support to members of the multi-stakeholder landscape platform to work well. The support needs range from organizing stakeholder meetings, training on key finance concepts, co-designing business plans, and connecting entrepreneurs to potential investors. To get to scale, LIFT 2.0 will be designed using UX/UI best practice, to ensure that users can quickly and easily understand how to use the tool to solve their landscape’s finance and investment challenges. LIFT 2.0 will feature at-your-fingertips support and learning content as well—taking a page from some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world—to reduce the need for and improve the effectiveness of experts.

Static versus Iterative and Open

LIFT 1.0 can’t be quickly updated for current users, as all changes are changes to PDF documents that many users have downloaded, read, and sent to others. We can’t push updates to the tools out to users: we need them to come back to us to get the latest version. With LIFT 2.0, all the lessons we learn from our users that allow us to make improvements to the tool can be shared as tool updates directly with all users. And because LIFT 2.0 will be open-source, anyone in the world who wants to help landscape initiatives access more capital for regenerative enterprise can contribute improvements to the tool that can benefit everyone.

LIFT 2.0 will be built for web 3.0.

Decentralized & Open-Source

Thousands of users will trust LIFT with sensitive information. To keep that information secure, and to ensure that no one, not even the founders and creators of LIFT, can walk off with it and leave communities in the lurch, or use it without their permission, we will build LIFT 2.0 to take advantage of the latest advances in decentralized computing, blockchain, and open-source development.

This commitment to decentralized data control reflects a central pillar of LIFT's values (and value): social entrepreneurs build truly regenerative economies only when they are firmly grounded in place, and when their efforts generate value that stays in that place.

Linked to major global initiatives tackling landscape challenges

Built for One Thousand Landscapes

The One Thousand Landscapes for One Billion People (1KL) initiative is a new partnership to transform landscapes being developed by a consortium of partners. It's combining major new efforts to create and launch funds and other blended finance mechanisms tailored to landscape challenges with a digital platform that will knit together all the strands of work and data that go into thriving local multi-stakeholder partnerships for landscape management. 1KL is poised to take landscape initiatives to a whole new level: and LIFT 2.0 will be critical to that effort.

PRaise for LIFT 1.0

“LIFT is a great resource to introduce new concepts and facilitate discussions with landscape practitioners. Moreover, the exercises and worksheets have been very accessible and practical for use in workshop settings."