Our Funding Services

Resolution Fund is not a fund in the usual sense of the word.  Communities come to us because they want to become the sort of place that attracts investors, and because they want to attract the type of investor who will help them enhance the public good.    Through us, such restorative investors and redevelopers find the safest and most profitable project opportunities worldwide. 

Our innovative model is necessary due to the diversity of project types, sizes, and locations.  We help communities fund all kinds of projects, from individual historic building renewal/reuse, to stream restoration, to the renovation of infrastructure.  Our investors normally wish to be directly involved in the project, rather than simply pooling their money with other investors to address a portfolio of projects.  Investors range from individual retirees looking to buy and restore property in "paradise" for their retirement, to institutional investors looking to apply their funds to the revitalization of a region's or nation's communities.

[That said, there is a need for a standard investment fund model.  It would most likely to address infrastructure needs: these often run in the billions, and do not normally offer the personal involvement aspect of other restorable assets.  Experienced fund management companies that would like to put together a family or restoration/revitalization funds are invited to partner with us to create such a product. The focus could be worldwide, or any specific country/region.  Please contact us to discuss a partnership.]

Resolution Fund's Training & Matchmaking Services:

Creating and funding renewal partnerships.

Our name says it all:

• "Resolution" refers to our program.  These classes train public and private leaders to create policies and implement strategies based on the Renewal Capacity Program.  This program combines the 3 Rules of Renewal with the strategy you need to put them to work in your community. If properly implemented and adequately funded (which we can also help with), the Renewal Capacity Program should lead to rapid, resilient, renewal.  

• "Fund" refers to our matchmaking.  This service helps public and private leaders form renewal partnerships with investors and redevelopers from outside of your area, thus enabling both implementation and funding.  Funding sources invest through us, not in us.  We do not manage a pool of money, as with a typical fund: we "manage" a pool of investors.

We help bring the right cities/regions together with the right redevelopers/investors around the right projects at the right time.  Such matchmaking can best be done by an intermediary who knows two things:

• Which cities/regions are effectively implementing the Rules of Renewal in their policies and strategy?

  • This helps assure private redevelopers that their investments will be enhanced by appropriate incentives, and their activities will be nurtured in a supportive environment.

  • It helps ensure that "re" projects won't suffer expensive delays caused by lingering "de"-oriented building codes, legislation, or bureaucracy.

  • It helps ensure that renewal projects won't be sabotaged by lack of public support, or by poor integration/sequencing with other projects, plans, or programs.

• Which redevelopers/investors understand the Rules of Renewal and are committed to applying them?

  • This helps assure public agencies that their community/regional goals will be respected.

  • It helps ensure that their long-lasting, irreplaceable, or otherwise valuable assets will be renewed, or at least not destroyed.

  • It helps ensure that all their stakeholders--government, business, academic, and non-profit/citizen--will be effectively engaged.

  • It helps ensure that all three of their environments--natural, built, and socioeconomic--will be considered in decisions.

Thus, the best intermediary would be a firm that provides policy training to cities/regions, and that provides strategy training to redevelopers/investors...all based on the 3 Rules of Renewal. Such a firm would have early and intimate knowledge of cities/regions’ renewal initiatives.  It would also be intimately familiar with the goals, capabilities, and resources of redevelopers/investors.  Resolution Fund is that company.

Resolution Fund derives its revenues from being both the trainer and the intermediary. We charge tuition for workshops for the private sector. Some form of remuneration—possibly a simple finder’s fee, depending on local regulations—will also ensue from matchmaking the public and private partners. [Note: while “fund” is in the name, Resolution Fund will not actually manage or disburse funds. “Fund” is there so potential clients know that we can provide both of the revitalization enablers they seek: the technique, and the money/partners to make it happen.]

More about Renewal Partnerships

One of the most powerful global trends in redevelopment these days is public-private partnerships (P3, or PPP). Many of these are in excess of a billion dollars: Los Angeles currently has two in excess of $2 billion each.  Private sector players seek increased ROI and enhanced safety, usually conflicting goals.  Policies based on the Rules of Renewal will transform a city or region into a more supportive and efficient setting for redevelopers and real estate investors, helping to create a "culture of renewal".  Thus both ROI and safety are enhanced simultaneously.
 

What's driving this trend?  Public partners seek sufficient financial and technical resources to tackle large-scale renewal projects.  Private partners seek large-scale opportunities with enhanced return on investment (ROI) and enhanced security.  RP3s combine the public sector's ability to assemble large, contiguous properties for redevelopment with the private sector's ability to fund and implement that redevelopment.

However, the P3 industry has a serious problem: the term is used to describe such a broad spectrum of funding and implementation vehicles—some very good, others very bad—that communities are increasingly confused as to whether or not they should do one. Some programs that are called P3s are actually coerced privatization. Over the past decade or two, the public reaction to them has often been intense to the point of military intervention to quell massive protests. Other programs going by the same name create “love fests” of productive public-private collaboration that no one wants to end; one that I know of is entering its third decade.

There are three fundamental problems: 1) P3s that are not P3s, but are simple privatization; 2) P3s that are corruptly or incompetently design and run; and 3) the systemic problem of failing to distinguish between P3s based on new development (sprawl) and those based on restorative development. Regarding this last: there’s often great controversy when P3 is used to build a new road through a pristine rainforest or that floods communities in a beautiful valley with a new dam. On the other hand, using a P3 to renovate existing public infrastructure—or that redevelops a blighted part of a community—is work that’s usually appreciated by all.

Resolution Fund, LLC—as well as Storm Cunningham's new book—will promote a new term that resolves this confusion: renewal partnership.  The future of renewal is public-private partnerships: the public sector simply doesn’t have the resources to tackle the $100 trillion global restoration deficit. But, a basic set of rules must be established for the public and private sector to ensure that this new generation of P3s serves the public good while rewarding the private sector partners for their risk.

Resolution Fund LLC will thus be the first to brand this emerging new category of P3, based on pioneering work done in places ranging from Bilbao to North Charleston. We will provide a complete pre-packed “renewal partnership” service the trains the public sectors, trains the private sector, and puts the two together in the right place and the right time with the right tools.

The 3 Rules of Renewal work in the same way as a filter on a socially-responsible investment (SRI) fund; in this case, they help a community ensure that the money they raise for their economic renewal will renew them environmentally and socially as well. The policies the book advocates will—if properly implemented and combined with funding from appropriate sources—lead to rapid, resilient, regional renewal. Policies based on the Rules of Renewal will also transform a city or region into a more supportive and efficient setting for redevelopers and real estate investors. This helps resolve the ongoing funding challenge, by continually making the place more attractive to investment.

Eventually, large institutional investors will realize that the 3 Rules of Renewal also work as a filter for them, helping them find safer, more productive homes for their real estate investments.  When that happens, things will really kick into high gear, as this will bring vast amounts of patient capital to bear on the $100 trillion global renewal market.