What if the conditions around an enterprise matter as much as the enterprise itself? Place Finance Lab is exploring how finance, ownership and governance can be designed around the needs of a place, in service of resilient regional food economies.
Many regenerative food and land-based enterprises struggle because conventional finance is poorly matched to their needs. The problem is rarely merit or commitment.
Place Finance Lab has emerged to take this challenge head on. It asks: how might finance, ownership and governance be designed around the realities of places, communities and ecosystems, rather than asking those projects to fit existing financial models?
The Lab sees itself as a catalyst, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, communities and practitioners to collaboratively design new approaches to financing regional food systems.
Unlike many initiatives that focus solely on raising capital, Place Finance Lab treats ownership, governance and finance as interconnected design questions.
Its work explores how outcome-based finance, patient capital, collaborative ownership structures and stewardship-based governance can enable regional infrastructure, food systems enterprises and landscape regeneration to flourish.
The Lab is applying these same principles to itself, exploring how it too might be steward-owned and governed to ensure that, over the long term, it stays rooted in place and shares its tools and learning openly across Europe.
Place Finance Lab illustrates an important shift within the wider ecosystem.
It starts with the needs of a place, before choosing a legal structure or financial instrument, and asks:
- What kind of ownership would best serve this?
- What governance would help it endure?
- What forms of capital would allow it to flourish?
- What investment terms would fit its capacity?
Although still at an early stage, the Lab is already convening regional food system leaders, philanthropies, impact investors and organisations working on stewardship and collaborative ownership around practical challenges in the South West of England.
Its ambition goes beyond funding projects, it wants to build the conditions in which better projects, and better forms of ownership, can emerge.
- System change often requires designing the ecosystem, not only individual organisations.
- Ownership, governance and finance become more powerful when considered together from the outset.
- Place-based challenges often require collaborative rather than purely transactional approaches.
- Convening and experimentation can be as important as legal innovation in enabling new organisational forms.