Creating a Partnership with the Future: The Intergenerational Finance (IGF) Framework
Meet Hank Patton, an organic farmer and beekeeper with a life-long interest in outdoor education, who founded the Bridgehouse Voluntary School (private) and Sacajawea Living Lab (public) in Portland, Oregon, and co-founded the Little White Salmon Biodiversity Reserve with Gifford Pinchot III and friends in 1994, a learning watershed of ancient forest and agricultural lands dedicated to hands-on curiosity-driven stewardship learning and what he likes to call “the testable hypothesis of sustaining culture.”
Hank’s interest in the failure of markets to value externalized costs, or capture profitable life cycle system opportunities, led him to develop his thesis of Intergenerational Finance (IGF), a bond-funded and science-based transactional framework for the rapid profitable retirement and replacement of infrastructure that harms the future.
The Proposed Intergenerational Finance (IGA) Operating System was
First introduced to the general public at the OSU College of Business with Amory Lovins in 2005,
Subject of a 5-day International IGF Business Seminar at Esalen Institute,
Subject of a regional IGF Symposium hosted by Portland State University,
Offered as a series of tutorials for business and thought leaders in the gardens and forest of the Little White Salmon Biodiversity Reserve in the Columbia River Gorge.
A Note from Hank:
As Susan knows well, I’ve had a long interest in the vast untapped market for "intergenerational services," meaning standard measurable outcomes delivered to future generations by the rapid early retirement of "brown" assets and replacing these with "green" AKA life cycle clean, regenerative, radically efficient integrated living systems.
Vetted standardization of metrics for the co-benefits that result from such a "brown-green swap" (beyond only carbon) would permit the securitization ($300M+ deal size) and resale of these outcomes in secondary markets.
Over 100 measurable first order services currently are without a transactional framework, but could, through global financial markets, deliver sufficient adjunct revenue streams to overcome the so-called "green premium," making RAPID retirement and redevelopment of carbon assets more profitable than building or operating them.
Project investment would target not fragments but rather whole local community ecosystem partnerships, with stewardship of biodiversity and justice outcomes by design the central new foundation.
One word summary the kids use when asked, "What are you doing here?" - BETTERING