When our world is polarized and our politics fractured, progress seems difficult. Despite this, we see opportunity for progress. We see an emerging consensus on the value of protecting nature, the need to accelerate the energy transition, the essential role of communities (especially Indigenous communities) in natural resource development, and the need to focus on the health and economic needs of rural and urban communities. Our work is tuned to these opportunities. Over the past decade, we recognized the changing issue landscape and stakeholder dynamics and adapted. As always, partnership and collaboration are at the center of our work. We built initiatives and embraced strategies based on innovation and self-sufficiency. We work with partners who understand today’s issues and have a long-term view; together we build solutions for the future. Our entrepreneurial culture embraces new ideas and helps scale them. In 2025, we also made difficult choices to sunset some of our work and invest in new areas that are growing rapidly.

Fifteen years ago, we helped design and launch the Public Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA), a compelling initiative that attracted the world’s leading technology companies and NGOs to address human rights and development challenges in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Starting in 2012, we helped technology companies bring conflict-free minerals into their supply chains. Today we’re transitioning out of our role as PPA secretariat to focus on new, high-impact opportunities to help advance nature and community-positive mineral development.

A decade ago, we published a groundbreaking analysis to support protecting or managing half of the terrestrial realm for the good of people and the planet; today we’re targeting what we call the “conservation imperatives,” the 1.2% of the earth’s surface that will get us the greatest bang for dollars spent on biodiversity protection. We’re partnering with natural resource development companies and global brands to bring this initiative to life, through the Quick Response Fund for Nature and a new initiative called Nature Lift. We're going beyond traditional fundraising models, with efforts like OnlyEndangereds, an OnlyFans account with good-humored animal courting and mating content (visit OnlyEndangereds, if you dare).

Building initiatives that generate revenue to directly support nature and people is critical to sustaining our work and increasing our impact. We launched a conservation technology company, Nightjar, that’s producing the world’s most advanced, AI-driven conservation camera – TrailGuard. And we turned our Salmon Gold initiative into a new company, Regeneration, to recover metals from waste and restore land degraded by past mining. Both are organized as social enterprises, so we can put profits to good use, with much of the work taking place in rural communities depending on natural resources.

Through our HealthGrid initiative, we are bringing clean power and digital connectivity to off-grid health facilities and testing revenue-generating approaches that will support system maintenance and sustainability. We are seeking investments to help scale this work, so people in some of the most remote communities in Africa can receive better healthcare.

Our work today fills policy and market gaps and brings together unlikely partners – like placer miners in Alaska and the Yukon supporting jewelry companies, mining companies working closely with First Nations and technology companies, global brands working closely with reuse entrepreneurs, and engineering and telecoms firms partnering with rural health clinics – but often falls outside of traditional funding strategies. We appreciate the communities, NGOs, companies, funders, and other partners who have invested in us. Local partnerships focused on the common good help build consensus and can often be scaled globally – even in a fractured world.

Begin again,
Stephen D'Esposito