Every year, promising solutions to environmental and social challenges stall before reaching their full potential.
A mine waste solution that works in pilot but can't find its next round. A wildfire mitigation approach that proves itself, then loses momentum when a grant cycle ends. A plastic pollution project that's ready to scale, but scaling was never part of the funding plan.
These aren't necessarily failures of the work. They're failures of the funding systems and models underneath them. Philanthropy is exceptional at sparking innovation; it's just not built to carry a solution all the way to self-sufficiency. And the people closest to these problems are rarely equipped, or resourced, to build the financial architecture that would get them there.
Grant funding is built around a calendar, not a solution's actual growth curve. That mismatch shows up in predictable ways:
None of this is a knock on philanthropy — it remains the best tool we have for taking a risk on an unproven idea. The gap is what comes after: turning a proven idea into a self-sustaining enterprise. That takes a different kind of capital, structured for the long haul rather than the length of a grant cycle.
RESOLVE has spent decades stepping into the middle of the world's hardest problems — the ones where progress is stuck and nobody else wants to touch it. Along the way, we learned that some of our best solutions needed something philanthropy alone couldn't give them: a path to standing on their own.
A new innovative and catalytic investment approach is being initiated in conjunction with Earth Recovery Partners (ERP). ERP brings 35+ years of practitioner experience in environmental markets, finance, development and enterprise execution. This is the exact sort of discipline that grant-funded projects usually lack. Where RESOLVE brings deep field relationships and a track record of taking on intractable problems, ERP brings the business and capital experience: structuring capital stacks, building investor-ready models, and knowing which of today's blended-finance tools, including mission-aligned investment, impact capital, and outcome-based payments, actually fits a given venture's stage and risk profile.
ERP's team has stood in the shoes of the entrepreneurs and project leads they now advise — building environmental ventures from the ground up, funding and acquiring companies and assets, securing financing, and understanding enterprise values and next-stage options and strategies. This is not a theoretical framework applied from the outside, but is the result from lessons learned by doing the work.
The team at RESOLVE Enterprises believes that the real staying power comes when an idea can carry a financial commitment, when investors, not just donors, have a reason to stay in for the long run. That shift changes everything about how an enterprise or project is built: it must generate value, not just impact, and it has to be structured so capital keeps flowing back in rather than needing to be re-raised from zero at every stage. Our combined teams are built to manage that evolution deliberately, moving a solution from grant-funded pilot to investment-ready enterprise without losing the mission along the way.
That's the blend at the heart of this model: RESOLVE's philanthropic instincts — patience, mission discipline, a willingness to back what hasn't been proven yet — paired with ERP's enterprise and investment experience, including a focus on return expectations, financial structuring, and accountability to capital. Neither discipline alone gets a good idea to lasting scale. Together, they do.
RESOLVE Enterprises is how we build that path together — deliberately and at scale.
We design, launch, and scale enterprises and funding platforms that solve social and environmental problems, using capital structured for the long haul rather than the length of a grant cycle: mission-related investments, impact capital, blended finance, and other purpose-driven financing tools.
Just as important as the capital itself is who holds the leverage. Too often, grant dependency leaves project leaders answering to decision-makers far removed from the realities on the ground. We're building a model that shifts that balance, giving the entrepreneurs and organizations closest to a problem more control over their own path forward, while giving foundations and mission-aligned investors a way to sustain their impact long after a single grant ends.
RESOLVE Enterprises is already off and running. We are vetting and assembling enterprises that fit the mission and investment criteria, and have identified Nightjar, Regeneration, and the Catalytic Fund for Nature as our first three enterprises seeking catalytic investments. We are also engaging with catalytic investors interested in exploring mission-related investments in enterprises that have evolved beyond the grant stage.
RESOLVE Enterprises will keep identifying high-impact ideas, whether from inside RESOLVE's own initiatives, ERP’s extensive pipeline, or our partners and entrepreneurs across the field, and building the right-sized financial structure underneath each one.
We're at the start of this next chapter, and we're looking for the right partners to build it with us: entrepreneurs with solutions that deserve staying power, and foundations and investors ready to fund the space between a good pilot and a lasting enterprise.
Learn more and see how you can build with us at resolve.ngo/enterprises.
At RESOLVE, we’re here to tackle the toughest global challenges. The ones nobody else wants to touch. Where people are in conflict and planet problems are stuck. We’re here to unstick them. It’s not easy. It takes grit and ingenuity. And finding and working with the right partners. But we’re not called RESOLVE for nothing.
