Jeff Cyr
…is expanding Indigenous intermediary capacity for climate and housing projects across RAVEN Outcomes Funds.
“Climate adaptation is showing up in absolutely everything we do – but we don’t necessarily call it climate work.” Instead, Jeff Cyr is focused on the purpose and impact of RAVEN Outcomes Funds — like installing thousands of ground-source heat pumps to lower home energy costs on reserve. Or building a geothermal heated-and-cooled health facility as part of a larger contract to treat diabetes in the local community. At every step, Cyr is designing RAVEN’s projects to create high-level jobs for Indigenous people in the green economy.
RAVEN’s community-driven outcomes contracts (CDOCs) are unique in that rather than starting with a solution being imposed from government or funders, the work begins with an Indigenous community identifying a challenge they want to address, and looking for partners to carry it out. If the community need is a fit with a government funding priority, RAVEN leverages private and philanthropic capital to deliver the outcome (for example, for on-reserve clean energy retrofits), with the investment returned to investors by the government on successful completion of the work.
Unlike traditional investments, these community-driven contracts require more lead time and intermediary work to help the community develop its preferred approach and solution; formalize the partnership with government and investors; and ensure the contract is delivered in a way that creates measurable benefits for local workers, businesses, and beneficiaries. This part of the work – local capacity-building around project management, government relations, financial management – is where foundation grants are most beneficial to RAVEN’s work. “The more you spend on lead development and design, the more resilient the project is” says Cyr. To address that need for pre-deployment readiness, RAVEN is developing in-house Community Solutions Teams that can move into a community on a temporary basis, helping local partners build capacity to carry the project out. These roles are difficult to fund through the investment side – which must by fiat run as “lean” as possible – but essential to the project’s success, and leave long-term capacity in the community.
When it comes to RAVEN’s impact on national climate goals, Cyr argues that energy reduction through home retrofits and adaptation can have a bigger impact than new clean energy builds on GHG reductions – and often at a much lower cost. Looking ahead to RAVEN’s growth in the coming years, Cyr is asking foundation partners to think big with him, and invest and grant at scale to reach the level of impact he knows RAVEN can achieve.
Dedicated funding can supercharge RAVEN’s impact:
“What does RAVEN really need from individual foundations? $10 million in investments plus about a million a year in granting. And with that $10 million investment, and $1 million of granting capital, then you've supercharged the system. You've supercharged the intermediaries. And what happens is that it allows folks like the big banks to come along and say: I really want to drop $20 million +. The foundation’s investment unlocks the more traditional capital players, which we need it to do. So the investment capital and the granting capital work together.
Many private foundations’ climate investments are focused on traditional climate plays. And I would step back from that and say: is that where you need to be? If you've got BlackRock and Brookfield dumping $2 billion or $8 billion into green energy, what is your $200 million gonna do? You need to go to the margins – where things are not getting done and systems change needs to take place – to support that work. For me, this is the role of philanthropy: to play that niche catalytic role to invest where others can't.”
Why getting the work done is more important than how it’s branded:
“Two or three years ago, I could see the winds of change coming about how people would look disfavourably at both ESG (Environmental and Social Governance) and climate-driven strategies. So you don't need to brand it as that. What we do is concentrate on: what's the thing that we are actually doing? And the thing that we are doing is ground source heat pumps and home retrofits on reserve, in Indigenous communities and residential housing. And we are starting to scale that significantly. It's now leading to solar, to air-source heat pumps, and other adaptive technologies. I think you can talk climate without saying “climate.” And you can do justice without doing “justice”, if you know what I mean.”
Adaptation and conservation is as important as new clean energy builds.
“The broad environmental funder ecosystem looks at Indigenous and climate and sees mass energy generation as the key thing: build a solar farm, have a PVC big battery on a Nation, etc. But I think there is a massive middle section of our economy, where adaptation and retrofits makes good economic sense, like: flip a switch, and you get a 50% to 60% reduction in energy use in that house. Then what happens to the power utility in Alberta, Quebec and Manitoba, who are facing rolling brownouts? We are drawing less out of the grid: then they can either sell it or have better grid resiliency. And it's a better sell, and frankly it’s faster to deploy.”
The power of building local capacity with Community Solutions Teams:
“For us, capacity is on a project by project basis, it's not like a permanent ongoing capacity. That's why I call it Community Solutions Teams where we drop in specialists for a few months on specific project issue areas. So with more granting support I could have four or five specialists on staff. I could drop them into communities to transmit knowledge and skills, cover bandwidth gaps, and make sure that the local community is ready, and do all the value additionality that we would normally do with a business. So we help them get there, and we help them understand different sorts of financing and roles to operate. And so the philanthropic dollars play a unique and key role.
This kind of intermediation also allows innovation – especially for equity-deserving groups. When you put the power of decision-making into an intermediary who holds the relationships, you get innovation. We’re able to innovate at Raven because we're holding the decision-making on projects.”
On the importance of having clear intentions in funding:
“My advice to funders would be: don't fund a mile wide and an inch deep. Don't do that. It doesn't really create change, systems change. What you need to do is, unfortunately, pick some winners and focus. Folks who have shown capacity, who've shown their ability to adapt and change, and especially because you invest in people, always people; you look for leadership that can do it.
It's all about intentionality. So whether you're granting or you're investing, you need to be asking, what's my intention? Because that's the thing that'll guide you in hard times and good times, right? And if your intention is to build a robust ecosystem, let's say it's Indigenous, you're going to pick one or two organizations and concentrate on building them up. Use your networks, use your relationships, let it bring in other capital – not just yours – but anchor them down and help them out. Intention and focus is critical to it.”
“When we first received granting funding from McConnell, they were very good about bringing in their network, and opening opportunities that came to them that wouldn't come to us. ‘We’ll help you get there – if it's going to take an extra $20,000 a year to do what you need, we can help.’
The other way foundations can support outside of granting is from the policy perspective. So we're always trying to crack the doors on policy. If you can come in together, super reinforcing, saying the same bloody thing to government agencies and ministers it helps. Government is notorious for saying they’re interested and not moving ahead, but sometimes when you have others who they're accountable to, it changes the game a bit. So that’s a reputational role that foundations can play. I think they need to acknowledge that they're going to play that role, publicly speak about: “this is what we're doing and why. And, and really put some energy behind it. You won't see the results in year one, but by year two and three, you're going to see all kinds of things emerging on it.
“This work is not a short game. It's a long game.”
And I think in the current geopolitical context, we need to be planning long-term. The climate crisis doesn't go away because someone says, ‘we don't want to talk about it anymore.’”
On how funders can support the ecosystem, beyond granting:
The role of foundation in creating the “power of three” for impact investing:
“It's little things that add up, what I refer to as the ‘Power of Three.’ So when a new idea comes, let's say you’re receiving the idea and you have the money to invest. You hear it from the proponent, then you have someone on your staff who actually does the research and stuff and they give you the pitch. And then you hear about it from another outside source who you trust. So now you've got three and now you're feeling confident to make a decision. So what's happening subtly in the foundation space is you can use your power of relationships and networks to bring those three in. It brings in other funders.”
“I would say to foundations that the Raven Impact Foundation needs to build an endowment.
Fundamentally we need a bit of a wealth transfer and it doesn't have to be huge. Let's say it's $10-30 million. It doesn't have to be a huge amount, but once it's there, you earn money on money, you've got the security to have teams in place to support while you raise the funds on the private investing side — that's a dream state scenario.”