This decade has featured an intense, overlapping series of health, environmental, geopolitical, and social crises that have destabilized people’s lives and the practice of philanthropy. These crises, and philanthropy’s difficulties responding to them, have drawn attention to a hard truth: philanthropy is ill-prepared to act decisively in this era of “polycrisis”—the term economist Adam Tooze has popularized to describe today’s overlapping crises,[1] The reasons are multifaceted, but one may be especially uncomfortable: the collaborative infrastructure philanthropy has built may be entangling, not empowering. Alongside formal funder collaboratives, funders operate in a myriad of tables, conferences, convenings, and learning communities. This infrastructure is built to last, but can be slow to move.
The Forever Costa Rica project finance for permanence (PFP) deal, which celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2025, demonstrates an alternative to more prevalent forms of philanthropic collaboration: namely, how discrete, time-limited co-investment can enable rapid, ambitious coordination. Forever Costa Rica funded the Central American nation’s protected area system in perpetuity and at least doubled the country’s marine reserve system. The deal raised $57 million from public and private sources to permanently protect over 5,000 square miles of sensitive terrestrial habitat and 1 million acres of critical marine habitat.[2]
What made this possible was the deal structure itself. Unlike traditional funder collaboratives that require ongoing coordination, PFPs use a single closing where all commitments become binding simultaneously. This created urgency, reduced individual risk, and enabled the partnership to raise $57 million and close the deal—then hand off implementation to a permanently funded nonprofit. As a result of this innovative structure, participating organizations, including the Linden Trust for Conservation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Costa Rica’s National System of Conservation Areas, and Redstone, were able to respond decisively to then-Costa Rican President Óscar Arias’s “peace with nature” call-to-action in 2007, in which he laid out his agenda for adding more protected areas, increasing forest cover, and “support[ing] a program that allows developing countries to exchange debt for environmental service.”
More than fifteen years later, Forever Costa Rica, the nonprofit created by the deal and funded in perpetuity via an independently managed endowment, continues to support the terrestrial and marine habitats protected by the PFP deal. In 2023, for example, Forever Costa Rica supported 61 protected areas and 54 projects, including projects to promote biodiversity, facilitate climate mitigation and adaptation, encourage community involvement and access, and strengthen systems to combat forest fires. Forever Costa Rica has also helped expand protected areas in Costa Rica, launching new funds for the effective and sustainable use of additional oceanic marine protected areas like Cocos Island National Park and the Bicentennial Marine Management Area.[3]
While formal funder coordination infrastructure has its place, PFPs offer important lessons—and in some cases, an alternative—for how to increase the scale and speed of funder collaborations to better tackle the crises affecting the world today. To unpack how, we begin with an overview of how PFPs aggregate capital from philanthropic, public, and private funders toward a shared, ambitious goal. We next examine opportunities where PFPs can effectively and speedily facilitate philanthropic collaboration outside conservation. And finally, we offer lessons from PFP deals for how to increase the scale and impact of philanthropic collaborations, from lighter-touch engagement to deal-making.
1. Through a PFP deal, funders can aggregate capital from philanthropic, private, and public funders toward a shared, ambitious goal
The Forever Costa Rica deal helped pioneer and illustrate the value of a PFP deal as a tool to aggregate public and private funding toward a shared, ambitious goal, as detailed in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article co-authored by a team including Redstone.
PFPs bring together social and private sector methods. On the social sector side, PFPs seek to achieve permanent conservation of an ecosystem, aiming to create a strong financial and organizational “foundation for conservation that is adaptive, resilient, and able to weather unforeseen events.”[4] On the private sector side, PFPs adapt Wall Street project finance methods that fund all the necessary components of a complex project (e.g., power plants, hospitals, manufacturing facilities) simultaneously at a single closing.[5]
PFP deals can be simplified into four primary steps:
The first is setting a single, measurable, unifying, and ambitious goal. In the Forever Costa Rica deal, the goal centered on achieving President Arias’s vision of Costa Rica becoming the first developing country to meet or exceed the UN’s protected areas target. This goal mobilized a coalition of the Costa Rican government, funders, NGOs, and private sector organizations to make President Arias’s vision a reality. It encouraged participants to focus on areas where their priorities overlapped rather than diverting effort towards those where their priorities diverged. It also provided parameters around which the lead NGO (The Nature Conservancy), funders, and project team could set program goals, engage key stakeholders (including local communities), and determine the ecological, financial, organizational, and political conditions necessary to achieve the overarching goal.[6]
The second is designing the deal structure, including a “single closing” when all commitments become binding simultaneously. Designing the deal structure may include mapping the legal and regulatory frameworks required to implement the project; drafting outcome-based financial plans; establishing a trust fund within a new or existing nonprofit; creating new government agencies or roles; and/or passing legislative commitments needed to achieve the goal.[7] The single closing is vital to the PFP formula. It reduces the risk for individual participants by ensuring that their commitments only become binding once the deal closes. It engenders a sense of urgency, as each commitment builds on the prior and pushes the deal closer to fruition. It helps participants leverage other funders toward their objectives. For example, a $5 million investment in Forever Costa Rica resulted in a leverage ratio of 10-to-1.[8] It is also an important motivator for government participation. Because the closing can be conditioned on participating governments hitting key milestones (e.g., passing legislation to permanently conserve a protected area), it incentivizes political leaders to follow through on their commitments.
The third is fundraising for the full cost upfront. Fundraising for perpetuity reduces the chance of the project being abandoned and eliminates the need for extensive future fundraising. To do so, participating organizations must first estimate what the full, in-perpetuity cost will be. For protected areas like those covered by the Costa Rica deal, this includes the cost of creating and consolidating protected areas, as well as the ongoing costs necessary to permanently secure the ecosystems (e.g., for implementation, for managing the endowment, for responding to natural disasters).[9] Of course, no financial plan can anticipate all future challenges, but PFP deals can create the financial and organizational conditions necessary to ensure the project is resilient and adaptable. From there, the lead NGO (e.g., The Nature Conservancy in Forever Costa Rica’s case), in partnership with a highly visible funder, begins fundraising for the effort. In the case of conservation PFPs, the host government typically provides the most funding. Philanthropic and private funding sources augment, and incentivize, governmental funding.[10]
The fourth is ongoing implementation with strong accountability. Once the deal has closed, ongoing funding is consolidated into one place. Typically, an endowment managed by an independent trust fund agency distributes funding to designated NGOs (e.g., Forever Costa Rica) contingent on continuing to hit key implementation milestones. The endowment has clear governance structures, financial requirements, and impact tracking responsibility. This structure ensures that funds are not drawn down prematurely and provides an ongoing incentive for the government and other actors to stick to their commitments, continue collaborating, and deliver on major milestones.
The endowment structure not only holds money but also creates a learning system. By conditioning funding on hitting implementation milestones, PFPs generate evidence about which approaches succeed. Unlike traditional multiyear grants where learning happens near or after grant completion when it is perhaps too late to redirect resources, PFP governance allows real-time adaptation. When milestone data suggests an approach is not working, the PFP partnership can adjust its approach and redirect resources without renegotiating funding commitments. This is crucial for the broader field: each PFP becomes a case study in which coordination mechanisms and implementation strategies actually deliver and which do not.
2. PFP-style dealmaking can aggregate capital outside conservation
PFP-style deal-making is an important approach for enabling coordination and aggregating capital in philanthropic systems to address the crises facing the world today. It has the advantage of creating clear success signals; aligning incentives from the outset rather than hoping alignment will emerge over time; and helping quickly raise capital toward ambitious objectives.
To date, PFPs have primarily, and successfully, been deployed in the conservation field. Based on our vantage point in the social sector, it strikes us that funders may be overlooking opportunities for PFP-style deals outside the conservation sector to speed up and scale promising projects necessary to combat the polycrisis.
So, when should funders consider PFP-style deals?
- When achieving scale requires numerous funders and/or types of funding
- When mobilizing near-term investment depends on long-term commitments
- When participants aim to catalyze additional public and/or private sector commitments
- When stable governance, oversight, impact tracking, and technical capacity are necessary for strategic focus and operational effectiveness
Let’s walk through three examples that meet the criteria above to illustrate where a PFP approach might prove beneficial outside the conservation context:
Organizing and implementing place-based initiatives (regarding, e.g., economic opportunity, housing affordability, or environmental justice): For place-based initiatives with bold goals (e.g., increase local job opportunities by 20%; make housing affordable for all; decarbonize our community by 2050) that require numerous funders and long-term commitments, a PFP-style deal could be an effective way to aggregate local public and private sector dollars; engage and gain the support and commitment of key stakeholders; create the governance and implementation structures necessary to achieve the goal (e.g., an endowment or loan-loss reserve); and maintain focus on a discrete, ambitious goal moving forward. For example, the Partnership for the Bay’s Future has rallied foundations and businesses behind solving the Bay Area’s interconnected housing, transportation, and economic opportunity challenges. The Partnership has launched a “challenge grants” program to support cities and counties “in catalyzing policy change to protect vulnerable tenants and preserve existing affordable housing subsidies.”[11] Selected cities and counties receive capacity building support and “preferential status when applying for flexible capital from the Partnership’s Investment Fund.”[12] The latter point is crucial because, as with PFPs, making private and philanthropic dollars contingent on achieving milestones incentivizes follow-through action and strategic focus.
Developing, launching, and scaling innovative technologies for social impact (e.g., green energy, education technology, women’s health innovations): Significant upfront investment and advance market commitments can help incentivize the development and rapid scaling of innovative technologies for social impact. A PFP model may be an effective way to rally philanthropic, government, and private sector organizations to raise sufficient funding at the outset to help nascent technologies reach the market and, with the help of advance market commitments, achieve scale. Through a single closing, the PFP approach can reduce the risk for individual organizations by ensuring their commitments only become binding once the fundraising target is reached, thereby ensuring that individual organizations are not committed to paying for incomplete projects while other organizations free ride. Take novel green energy technology, for example. A PFP approach could help secure advance market commitments for new products; protect individual funding sources if others back out; and thereby help promising technologies reach the market and achieve scale sooner.
Scaling and sustaining novel programs (e.g., eliminating textbook costs at community colleges, transforming and fortifying reproductive health clinics): For novel and ambitious programs, a PFP process could generate an ambitious and galvanizing goal; aggregate the philanthropic, public sector, and private sector funding commitments upfront to expand and sustain the program; and, through clear governance structures, maintain participating organizations’ focus. For example, building on the Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, which replaced costly textbooks with free OER materials at 38 community colleges, philanthropy could partner with state governments and community college systems through a PFP process to further scale the work.[13], [14], [15]
Likewise, a PFP model could help transform and fortify reproductive health clinics. As reproductive health clinics face federal and state backlash (e.g., in the form of funding cuts, misinformation, regulatory burden), many clinics face closure due in part to financial unsustainability. To prevent this outcome, and expand access to safe, inclusive reproductive healthcare, it may be necessary to rethink health clinics’ business models. A PFP process could be an effective way to rally the field, perhaps beginning in a few metro areas, behind the ambitious yet achievable goal of reshaping how reproductive health clinics are structured for sustainability. From there, a PFP deal could help aggregate the funding from public, private, and philanthropic sources necessary to do so at scale. With its focus on permanence, a PFP model can help participating organizations identify compelling goals for service delivery; shift to sustainable, long-term sources of funding; rise above short-term crisis response; and reduce the risk of future closure.
3. Lessons from PFP deals can help increase the pace and scale of funder collaborations to better respond to crises
While a valuable tool inside and outside conservation, PFPs are by no means right for every scenario. Even so, PFPs do offer valuable lessons for how to increase the pace and scale of funder collaborations, enabling philanthropy to achieve the scale necessary to impact the complex system dynamics contributing to the polycrisis shaping people’s lives and philanthropy today.
In our experience, generating coordination in philanthropy effectively requires two steps. While the first step is a prerequisite for the second in our experience, not all effective collaborations need to move from the first to the second step. In fact, we have found that it often makes sense for only a subset of closely aligned funders to move from light-touch, organic alignment to deal-making:
1. Alignment | Facilitate light-touch, organic alignment between foundations by helping them clarify common goals and share decision-making priorities: When philanthropies agree on a general direction (e.g., problem definition, a common strategic context defined by a few key indicators) and, crucially, understand each other’s priorities and processes, they can complement rather than duplicate one another’s funding decisions. While formal collaboration infrastructure (e.g., funder collaboratives, convenings, funders tables) can be helpful for building this coordination, lighter-touch approaches (e.g., sharing decision-making criteria and priorities, regularly touching base to share aligned investments when funds are not pooled) can also be effective and require fewer resources, enabling funders to maintain organizational autonomy while coordinating at the systems level through simple rules.
One way to understand this form of aligned individual decision-making is to think of murmuration, the process wherein flocks of birds move and react rapidly and in a coordinated manner through simple, shared rules rather than central control. Those simple rules enable flocks of 1,000 or 10,000 members to react rapidly and synchronously.[16]
By contrast, as philanthropic fields and collaboratives have grown, they have tended, in our experience, to slow down. This is in part because traditional funder collaboration infrastructure takes time to generate alignment among large groups of funders with diverse goals, grantmaking approaches, and sizes. Perhaps a speedier approach to generating alignment can be found through murmuration: Seeking to understand and cultivate a handful of aligned co-funders while sharing decision-making criteria, priorities, and problem definitions with a broader set of funders may help funders react more decisively and impactfully to evolving crises than trying to understand and align with a much larger set of funders through field-wide capacity for coordination.
2. Deal-making | Co-fund ambitious projects, initiatives, and/or solutions: As funders share information about their goals and strategies, and especially how they make decisions, it sometimes makes sense for a subset of funders to pursue co-funded deals or initiatives to achieve scale. Doing so requires close coordination on specific joint investments and has the advantage of leveraging additional funds toward shared, ambitious objectives. For example, with big bets philanthropy (e.g., the Audacious Project), funders agree on decision-making criteria and direct funds to a few select winners to implement and scale ambitious solutions. This approach has the benefit of encouraging innovation and helping novel approaches achieve scale quickly.[17] Not all deal-making is PFP-style deal-making, but that does not detract from its potential impact.
It is worth reiterating that not all funders need to pursue deal-making, and it is not appropriate in all instances. In fact, while understanding potential co-funders’ strategies and goals is a prerequisite for philanthropic deal-making, it often makes sense for only a subset of closely aligned funders to pursue co-funding ambitious projects, initiatives, and/or solutions. Note that by keeping alignment light-touch, we can free up time and capacity for the intensive coordination required for bounded, coordinated investment (i.e., deal-making). Years of experience have left us wary that more intensive efforts to coordinate on an ongoing basis, including some implementations of collective impact, can take too much time and money relative to their impact on social sector investments.
PFPs offer valuable lessons for how to accomplish each step and thereby speed up and increase philanthropy’s collective impact on the drivers of the economic, health, environmental, geopolitical, and other crises shaping our world today.
First, PFPs demonstrate how organizations understanding each other’s strategic goals lays the groundwork for collaboration. PFP deals succeed by focusing participating organizations on their overlapping priorities. This is where alignment comes in. Light-touch alignment can help lead organizations in a PFP prioritize outreach to those funders and organizations most likely to support a PFP deal on a given topic. While deals can and do emerge from formal funder collaboratives and funders tables, they do not need to do so; in fact, Forever Costa Rica emerged through less formal avenues, which likely helped speed up the decision-making process.
Second, PFPs illustrate the utility of shared goal-making for both alignment and deal-making. In the alignment context, taking the time to meet with closely aligned peer organizations to share priorities and, in cases where there is meaningful overlap in organizations’ objectives, craft shared goals can help peer organizations make complementary grant-making decisions and assess which grant-making approaches best advance those objectives and so deserve more funding. Likewise, for deal-making, aligning goals and decision-making criteria at the outset can provide clarity to prospective grantee partners and speed decision-making timelines. In both cases, but especially for deal-making, stating a bold, ambitious goal upfront is vital for exciting funders and other entities to participate. By contrast, less ambitious, less splashy goals and initiatives all too often struggle to secure funders’ attention and interest.
Third, PFPs show how placing a go/no-go deadline or single closing on a deal can engender a sense of urgency and reassure funders that they will not be left supporting a collaboration lacking the resources to succeed. We often observe collaborations, even lighter-touch ones, struggle to launch as funders hedge or delay. Many funders are reasonably hesitant to commit without firm pledges from others. A deadline (e.g., in the form of a single closing or go/no-go deadline) may be just the motivation funders need in these scenarios to decide one way or the other, secure in the knowledge that the collaboration will only move forward with firm commitments from others.
Fourth, PFPs highlight how aggregating sufficient funding at the outset to achieve goals can enable organizations to focus on effective implementation, not continued fundraising. By aggregating the funding upfront needed to achieve permanence, PFP deals obviate the need for ongoing fundraising, enable participating organizations to focus on achieving implementation objectives, and mitigate the risk of funder priorities shifting when the “next big thing” arrives, stealing attention. While not all deals need to strive for permanence, many deals, even time-limited ones, could benefit from estimating the full cost and raising that amount at the outset. Doing so can reduce the risk of half-finished projects and provide grantees the funding stability necessary to scale and sustain promising, innovative approaches.
Fifth, PFPs underscore the importance of right-sizing coordination and/or funding infrastructure. By consolidating funds into one endowment with clear governance and metrics, PFPs facilitate ongoing strategic focus and incentivize continued public, private, and philanthropic sector commitment. Crucially, this coordination and funding infrastructure facilitates a clear, concrete, and agreed-upon plan of action. It is that strategic clarity that both enables multiple simultaneous commitments and reduces the ongoing friction of close collaboration. By right-sizing coordination infrastructure, PFP deals thus free up participating organizations’ capacity to explore additional collaboration opportunities. Outside of a PFP, murmuration work to ensure individual institutional priorities are widely understood in a common picture of progress may be the right-sized level of collaboration among funders, enabling funders to act with confidence and speed to complement, not duplicate or undercut, their peers’ investments.
4. Conclusion
In an era of polycrisis like the present, timely, impactful, and scaled philanthropic collaboration is vital and necessary. PFPs offer one tool for organizing and scaling philanthropic collaborations, and lessons for other approaches to philanthropic collaborations.
While PFP deals like Forever Costa Rica require specific conditions to succeed, they likely have value outside of conservation. In scenarios that meet the four criteria introduced in section 2, PFPs may offer a valuable alternative to traditional funder collaborative structures, helping create a sense of urgency for fundraising, enabling long-term planning and aspirations, maintaining strategic focus, and galvanizing public and private sector co-investment.
More broadly, and as we have hopefully demonstrated in section 3, there are opportunities to increase the scale and pace of philanthropic collaboration by right-sizing coordination and acting on discrete deal-making opportunities. Impacting the systems contributing to today’s crises demands it.
[1] Kate Whiting and HyoJin Park, “This Is Why ‘Polycrisis’ Is a Useful Way of Looking at the World Right Now,” World Economic Forum, March 2023.
[2] Redstone Strategy Group, “Forever Costa Rica.”
[3] Forever Costa Rica Association, “2023 annual report.”
[4] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[5] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[6] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[7] “Conservation coalitions create enduring legacies,” Redstone Consulting, February 21, 2023.
[8] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[9] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[10] Larry Linden, Steve McCormick, Ivan Barkhorn, Roger Ullman, Guillermo Castilleja, Dan Winterson, and Lee Green: “A Big Deal for Conservation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2012.
[11] Partnership for the Bay’s Future, “Press Release: Partnership for the Bay’s Future Launches Challenge Grants Program,” 2022.
[12] Partnership for the Bay’s Future, “Press Release: Partnership for the Bay’s Future Launches Challenge Grants Program,” 2022.
[13] “Open Educational Resources Degree Initiative: Redstone Supported the Design and Launch of an Initiative to Eliminate Textbook Costs in Degree Programs at 38 Community Colleges,” Redstone Strategy.
[14] “Governor Polis Announces Zero Textbook Cost Challenge and 2025 Open Educational Resources (OER) Award Recipients,” Colorado Department of Higher Education, July 2025.
[15] Lilah Burke, “OER Embraced: As California’s Community Colleges Implement Degree Pathways with No Textbook Costs, What – if Anything – Can Be Gleaned from their Data?” Inside Higher Ed, September 2019.
[16] Jim Robbins, “The Wonder of Birds: What They Tell Us about Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future,” Spiegel & Grau, 2017: pg. 48.
[17] Big bets philanthropists may be natural funding sources for future PFPs outside the conservation space. Both rely on ambitious goals and large upfront funding and so may be ripe for collaboration.