January 2026

The past year has been a difficult one for non-profit organizations, especially those with federally funded projects. Croatan’s Lab for Impact Finance came into being in early 2025, and our first anniversary gives us an opportunity to reflect while looking forward.  

The Lab was created to develop and test innovative financial mechanisms and tools to unlock non-extractive capital that serves communities. The Lab’s work builds on Croatan Institute’s rigorous research and analysis, advancing a total portfolio activation (TPA) model. TPA is both a framework and a set of analytical tools to help mission-driven investors understand specific impact opportunities that can be pursued across all asset classes in their portfolios. 

The Lab also provides space for Croatan Institute to actualize research findings into new projects, through pilots and collaborations with frontline communities. On-the-ground work deepens connections between mission-aligned capital and place-based practitioners. Our convenings continue to foster the sharing of new ideas by bringing leaders together to build transformative finance, social equity, and ecological resilience. 

Core to our work in 2025 was a virtual listening tour: taking time to dialogue with existing partners, start new conversations with potential partners, and identify areas for possible collaboration as well as gaps where we could step in. We found there were needs in areas such as research and mapping; investor education; and convening fragmented voices in the crowded field of social justice. The tour helped the Lab refine its own goals going forward.   

Daily news can be overwhelming, full of evidence of forces and developments that seem bent on pulling us apart: a politics of enmity and revenge, AI, climate change, fear about scarce resources, and growing inequality that gives the impression of a zero-sum game. Ours and many others’ research demonstrate repeatedly that we have enough for everyone if we turn the ship away from extractivism.    

Our year-long listening tour kept us grounded in the reality that many, many organizations and individuals (some of whom we have the honor to partner with) continue to deliver astonishing impact, and that together we are moving forward — having perhaps been slowed but not stopped in our vision for a resilient society and a regenerative economy. We remain committed to help build this movement, and we enter 2026 refreshed by having (re)connected with allies both existing and potential.

In 2026, expect to see exhilarating developments from projects we’re stewarding, including new field-building research on nature-based solutions, the development of a financial mechanism to address major gaps in our place-based work in the South, and critical virtual Croatan Conversations plus in-person events that strengthen impact finance communities.