What started with a positive outlook, with the covid restrictions fading more into the background, changed instantly with the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March last year. With great disbelief we watched the news reports, our thoughts being with the immense suffering of the people directly involved.
Besides the enormous impact it still has on the local population, this war led to high inflation, rising interest rates, high energy prices, and overall economic uncertainty felt by people across Europe and beyond. In addition, the climate crisis continues to greatly affect people worldwide, while more locally the agricultural crisis came to a head.
Navigating these crises, highlights the disbalance of the current system like never before. This has resulted in a growing awareness, need for change and an awakened sense of urgency. A need to restore the balance between give and take.
To tackle today’s most challenging problems, and transform our economy, we need a radically different approach. We need to pioneer and find (new) financial instruments that can serve the innovative businesses and models that offer solutions. This leads to a healthy project pipeline for TRMC and eagerness of like-minded parties to join forces and build partnerships. This has been a big part of our work, leading to a number of new investments and donations in the past year. In the core of our work lies the continuous exploration of finding the appropriate financial instrument for certain initiatives. Being one of the reasons why we actively look for partnerships in a search for blended finance.
With the goal of bringing more focus into our field of work, we created a Theory of Change for donations. Committing ourselves to the transition to a healthy ecosystem, in which people and nature live together in harmony.
Aiming for a healthy ecosystem for the generations to come, we made a donation to De Nationale DenkTank. This annual thinktank consists of a multidisciplinary team of twenty highly talented PhD or Master students, who this year worked on visionary and practical solutions for biodiversity loss. We believe that the challenges we face require an inclusive approach, tapping into a wide range of perspectives and talents.
With a loan we supported Wilder Land. A Dutch start-up that produces tea that helps the biodiversity and creates an extra revenue stream for farmers. By creating a revenue model around Dutch herbs that are often regarded as weeds, Wilder Land ensures continued investment in biodiversity by farmers. Showing that economy and nature can go hand in hand.
Triodos Regenerative Money Centre reached its 2022 targets in terms of number of investments and donations as well as in terms of the innovative nature of the initiatives supported. The inflow of donation money exceeded expectations last year. Besides our continuous investment and donation activities we were able to formulate more clearly what Regenerative Money can contribute to today’s challenges, and where it is important for our common understanding of the role of money in today’s society. In order to make even more impact, we started working on the simplification of our organisational set-up last year. Allowing us to work more efficiently.
On a final note, we were able to become more visible within the wider Triodos community and beyond. TRMC has become a more permanent partner in events organized by the bank, resulting in a growing number of funded projects and an increase in the number of donations.