Draft v2 — 30 Aug 2026. Content and structure for review. Visual design still to come from Jen. Figures marked TK need Iva to confirm before launch.
Our Work
What we were asked for, what we did, and what came of it.
Four engagements across the three pillars. Where an outcome is still in progress we say so — a case study that only reports finished wins is not much of a record.
Non-profit consulting
Rebuilding a $10M raise from the evidence up
Global Forest Generation — Andean forest conservation across 16 partners in 6 countries
01The challenge
GFG was seeking $10 million and networking hard. But its deck asked for the number without justifying it or showing how the money would be spent, and it never explained how the organization governs a dozen regional partners and moves funds to them — which is the first thing an institutional funder vets. A review of everything in the shared drive confirmed no strategic plan and no financial roadmap existed.
02Our approach
We put a senior partner on the account weekly and rebuilt the raise from the evidence up. The Investment Case Briefing defines two deliverables built off one set of numbers — a due-diligence-grade prospectus and a matched pitch deck in which no slide carries a figure the prospectus cannot trace. It sets out the four questions every reviewer at this level asks, supplies a use-of-funds structure, and names exactly what the finance team must produce. We also recommended reconciling the social-return figure already circulating in GFG materials: a defensible $1:$4 is worth more than an inflated $1:$12.
03The outcome
The raise now has a documented structure and a named blocker list rather than a number on a slide. Alongside it we built and launched the funder engine for New York Climate Week: 16 individually tailored letters into the London network, a mapped New York shortlist worked directly by our partners, and a two-way invitation exchange with a funder-only network — reaching exactly the audience the pipeline had been starved of. The raise is in progress; what is complete is the case for it.
Philanthropic advising
A giving strategy for $11 billion in endowments
A network of North American Jewish federations
01The challenge
The federation network held roughly $11 billion in endowments and an aging donor base whose children and grandchildren gave differently — more directly, more personally, and often somewhere else entirely. Endowment scale is not the same thing as a philanthropic strategy, and a generation was arriving that the existing machinery was not built to hold.
02Our approach
We designed a Family Philanthropy Initiative across the network: donor education, multigenerational giving structures, and a route for families to move from writing an annual check to designing philanthropy of their own. The work was built to run inside federations rather than beside them.
03The outcome
The initiative ran across the federation system, and a $1 million social-venture fund was launched alongside it — a blended for-profit and non-profit vehicle created to back what a grant alone could not reach. It remains the clearest example of what we mean by structure: the strategy and the instrument designed together.
Impact businesses
Telling a client they had asked for the wrong thing
21CC Education — blue-collar skills training across India and the Netherlands
01The challenge
21CC came to us looking for customers. They wanted introductions into logistics — freight and warehousing operators who might buy training at scale.
02Our approach
Rather than guess from impressions, we ran their profile against our entire contact base — both the partner network and the subscriber list — and sorted every match into three buckets: investors, foundations, and logistics buyers. Then we read the result honestly instead of selling into it.
03The outcome
We told them their opening was capital, not customers. The logistics bucket was thin and we said so plainly — our network is built around impact and philanthropy, not freight. The investor bucket was not: a genuine cluster of emerging-market and workforce-focused funds whose mandates matched the India-and-Netherlands skilling story, with three named funds to open with and warm introductions we could broker directly. A client who arrives asking for the wrong thing is better served by being told.
Cytokind holds distribution for clinically established narrowband-UVB phototherapy and a thesis that its usefulness reaches past skin disease into systemic inflammatory conditions. A clinical thesis is not a business until someone runs it — and the evidence base it would need was scattered across a literature nobody had assembled.
02Our approach
This is our venture studio model, and the distinction matters: we do not advise from the outside, we operate. IKA supplies the company's general manager. The work has run from the research program through regulatory strategy to the commercial funnel, with the same people accountable for all three.
03The outcome
A peer-reviewed manuscript on ultraviolet exposure and mortality is with its co-authors ahead of submission. The relevant research network has been mapped outward from the citation graph rather than assembled by cold search — putting the company one degree from the field's principal investigators, with a trial investigator already agreed. The physician-facing pipeline runs and is measured weekly. This is the pillar where our own capital and time are committed, not only our advice.
TK — Iva to add two closed engagements with final outcomes, and to confirm which clients may be named.
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