 Hello, my name is out and I'm an associate director at the Miller Center for social entrepreneurship. That is Santa Clara University. So really excited to be here today and to have all of you join. Today we're going to be talking about how recoverable grants can be used to support social enterprises in the missing middle. So, you know, I always think of impact investing as a big tent word, and there is a spectrum of impact investing everything from philanthropy, the negative 100% return to the market rate returns on the other. And I've always felt over the last few years that the conversation in the impact investing field has really focused on the market rate return and concessionary returns. So are you trying to target 20% IRR or are you targeting something around, you know, three to five percent IRR. However, that debate has left out the whole other side of the spectrum. Everything from above pure philanthropy so above negative 100% ROI, all the way up to that return of capital point at 0% ROI and that really explored in much depth, at least explored in a way that I have learned much about. And so, you really feel like that that side of the spectrum between negative 99% ROI and 0% ROI have the tremendous potential to unlock capital and support social enterprises to scale. And so, you know, I won't pretend like this is a discovery that I made kind of sitting in an armchair or sitting in a session here at. You know, like, like all great inventions necessity was really the mother of invention here. And in this case the COVID crisis had provided that necessity for us. And so we were, we're seeing that that in this crisis there is a need for innovation and a need for for untraditional fund structures. And so today's explain a little bit about the genesis of this concept and how we piloted this concept through what we're calling the trust fund, which is a emergency facility that Miller center and with Ted at beneficial returns together. And so we're going to explain a little bit about the genesis of that fund house and some of the early results of that fund. And what we're going to do is it's for how a similar structure and how using recoverable brands and other kind of impact investing funds, can support on a price in the same middle and unlock capital for for a segment of social enterprises that has been overlooked by the impact investing community at large. So, that's enough of me at the moment. Looks like we have Catherine here Catherine I'm, I'm unaware. If it's our right with you Catherine I'm going to move you back to, I don't actually know how to do that. Let's just mute you for now. Thanks for joining us. I'm going to turn to introduction and have Ted and Monica introduce themselves. So, I'm going to start with you if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself. You know who you are and what representing and then a little bit about your involvement with the trust fund as well. Can I go to you. Why don't I introduce myself and then we'll go back to Maca afterwards and Alex you may find Ben in the participants, possibly, and we'll have to figure out how to unmute him if that's the case. My name is Ted Lovenson I'm the founder and CEO of an impact investing fund called beneficial returns. What we do is we borrow money from family foundations, donor advice funds and faith based communities. We pull that money, and we make long term equipment loans to social enterprises addressing poverty in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Investors include, I think it's four or possibly five graduates of the GSBI program at Santa Clara University, and historically our investors have earned a very low return 2% annually. We recently changed that model so that our participants are for investors now earn a, a 0% return through recoverable grants. We are running the trust fund, which, which is the subject that we're discussing today, an emergency loan fund from Miller Center grads over to you Mocha. Thanks to everyone. My name is Mocha and Guapo, and I am the founder and CEO of grassland Cameroon. Grassland Cameroon is a food storage, drying and distribution company based in Cameroon and West Central Africa. We source products, mostly food products, food staples from smallholder farmers that we support with input loans, training and farm monitoring services throughout the season, so that they can be more productive. Over the past four years, we've supported just over 1000 corn farmers who've seen their yields double from under two tons to almost five tons per hectare. And as a result, they've had their incomes triple over time. Thanks Mocha. That was a great introduction. And I have found Ben in the, in the chat here and David is just joined as well. Ben, if you check your chat, you probably should invite the invitation to join as a panelist. Would you unmute yourself and introduce yourself. Hi everyone. I'm David Wanjao, the CEO and founder of Diva Beats Green Energy, which is a social enterprise based in Kenya, where we distribute sort of products to the off-grid rural communities. And I'm very excited about this new opportunity about the cover of grants and here to share more about the new future for addressing the, you know, the missing middle gap for financing. Thank you David. Well, great. As Ben, hopefully you can find in your chat, I just invited you to join as a panelist. So let's go ahead and get started. Monk, I want to start with you. Like I said, you know, necessity was kind of the mother of invention here. I want to talk to the audience a little bit about how the COVID crisis was impacting you and what your capital needs were at the time in order to kind of keep the impact that you're having on track. Monk, can you hear me? Can anyone hear me? Ted, David? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. Monk, can you hear me? Ted, can you try and if Monk can hear you? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. I think I can hear everyone except Alex right now. Okay. Okay, so in that case, will you explain how COVID was affecting your business before you applied to the trust fund for a loan? So our business is a high inventory business, as you can imagine, because we push out asset based debt to farmers at the start of the season. So we actually have to buy a bunch of farm inputs like fertilizer, seeds and so forth. And then at the end of the season, we also have a huge demand for money because we're getting paid back in grain at harvest and then we buy the remainder of our farmers grain as well. So when COVID made its way to Cameroon, we had already purchased all of our farm inputs and at that time we were planning to distribute to twice as many farmers as we had the previous season. So we had all our cash or majority of our cash was already in our farm inventory. And we had started to see with the lockdowns that were implemented across the nation, we had started to see sales or demand for our product decline in the two main market segments that we serve. The severe industry and the animal feed industry. So we had a cash problem. And we weren't sure. In fact, we were positive that there was no way to easily convert the money that we had an inventory that is in the fertilizers and the seeds to cash because no one else who was serious about farming hadn't already purchased what they needed. And we weren't able to convert our existing inventory in actual products to sell into cash as well. So the trust fund was very timely because it gave us an opportunity when we applied to get cash as soon as we could. We could have probably tried to find money elsewhere but we had, we were facing three main challenges which would have made getting money from any other source really difficult. The first was that the stage of our business is still quite early. We hadn't had any institutional investor who would have been able to double down on their investment. Then our market, the market that we serve in Cameroon, unfortunately for various reasons is part of Francophone Africa that doesn't have a very strong investment ecosystem. And so potential investors don't necessarily have a lot of information or other partners that they can rely on for co-investing. And then third, our sector agriculture in Africa in general is very high risk because the bulk of farming is done by small holder farmers that are vulnerable and aren't known to respect contract agreements and production in general. The cost of production aren't as competitive as imports. So we had these challenges as well as the very urgent need for cash. Thanks, Monica. Not sure if you can hear me, so I'm going to give you the thumbs up. So Ted, let's turn to you. Let's turn to you Ted. So back back in February of this year you and I were both hearing a lot of stories like Monca's that urgent need for cash in order to keep their impact on track. And we both felt compelled that we needed to kind of do something here. But we also knew that a traditional debt fund was going to be inappropriate to serve in the needs of entrepreneurs like Monca. So I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about why innovation was necessary here and tell us a little bit about the structure that you came up with to kind of provide capital in a crisis like this. Absolutely. So, you know, in late February, it was clear to us that the virus was going to be far more damaging to social enterprises than we had previously thought. But, but we also didn't have any clarity around how long it would last. I would argue we still don't know that now. So, we knew that we needed to act quickly because a lot of these social enterprises, including ones that that might be as old as a decade were really at risk of going out of business very quickly. If they couldn't get access to capital, but it was also very clear to us that this was these were going to be very high risk loans. We were making emergency loans actually, you know, actually looking for borrowers that were in trouble. We knew that these borrowers would not be able to pay a high interest rate if we were able to make a loan to them. We also knew that they would require a very generous grace period. Many of the countries where these social enterprises operate were under very serious lockdowns. And so what became clear is that there was a desperate need for capital to keep these social enterprises alive. And there's no way that it would be able to pay investors a an appropriate return considering the risks they were taking. It was also clear that a company like beneficial returns wouldn't be able to earn. Even a modest amount of money for the for the effort involved in it. And yet simultaneously, it seemed that grants to these social enterprises weren't the solution, really for two reasons. One, it would be difficult to raise a large amount of grant money quickly. Two, it wasn't necessarily necessary. It was, you know, it would be possible that many of these social enterprises would recover and would be able to repay a loan. So a grant didn't seem like the right option either. That's why we partnered with Miller Center and in a matter of just a few weeks raised over $750,000 in the form of recoverable grants from about 10 impact investors. Use their donor advised funds or their family foundations to make these grants. And just to give you a little background, recoverable grants have existed since the 1960s. As far as the IRS is concerned, and as far as gap accounting is concerned, these are grants. Every donor advised funds sponsor in America Fidelity Charitable Schwab Charitable Vanguard Silicon Valley Community Foundation. They all are experienced making recoverable grants. And it's money out of the donors account, treated just like a grant counting towards the 5% distribution. If you're a family foundation, not to get too technical. And in the event that that money is repaid, it returns to the corpus of the foundation or the donor advised fund and needs to be given out in the following year. And so, by bringing in money in the form of recoverable grants. We were able to offer very low cost capital to our borrowers 2% annual interest rate with a six month payment holiday because our investors through their recoverable grants were the ones that are ultimately taking the risk of default. Since we started, we've lent, we've made loans to 11 borrowers totaling a little over $800,000. We were able to lend more money than we raised, because one of our borrowers has already repaid us permitting us to recycle that capital. And by working very closely with Miller Center and its network of mentors, we were able to very quickly approve transactions and get money out of the door. There was a while there where we were approving and funding one transaction per week that pays us slow down a little bit and we have enough capital to make one last loan. Alex you're on mute. Alex you're on mute. Can you hear me now. Great, thank you. So great summary, Ted, David I want to turn to you. You know, having received investment from the trust fund I'm wondering if you can comment on, you know, some of the house some of the innovations that the Ted mentioned have have manifested themselves kind of in your experience with the phone what are some of the differentiating factors. that allow trust fund to support you and what else were you seeing at the time. Yeah, so I think a lot of innovation has been put into place, developing the trust fund. And I feel that trust funds model is kind of, you know, a bridge between, you know, normal, you know, grants and no more debt. And one of the things that from my experience during the COVID-19 pandemic is that, you know, we had a lot of conversation with different investors and, you know, this, you know, the talks became a little bit slower. You know, this is because, you know, you know, everybody don't want, you know, nobody wants to risk investments during such times. But however, you know, you know, the trust fund, you know, coming in, we were able actually to have very small conversations. The conversation needed for the loans were very actually easy to develop. And that makes it easier for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially running social enterprises. And this is where a lot of, you know, gap happens because sometimes we may not have the right, you know, capacities we may not have a CFO in house. And, you know, also the, you know, I learned the documentation also limits a lot of smaller social enterprises to actually access. So it's transfer was a little bit different. And this is because the documentation needed was a little bit in a few documents. And I, you know, I would actually, you know, say that, you know, the innovation also was tired that they're actually looking for, you know, enterprises that have gone through the tax rate of program, which was through Miller Center DSP program. And that makes it easy because really this program, you know, these companies have been tested have been, you know, providing mentorship. And they only think they're lacking, you know, for all this capital. And, you know, so that process a little bit easier for us and became one of the sweet, you know, swift test process that we have gone through in funding. In fact, we were able to raise funds within a month, you know, like it was unbelievable as a team, and it was really came in very handy when we were almost, you know, you know, slowing down all our processes and and in having the transfer coming was able to stimulate a lot of other conversations that were pending with investors. So it actually, it actually, you know, acted as a boost and and gave a lot of other investors confidence to actually put money into us. And the other thing that was really interesting for us is that is the low interest that trust fund was asking for was like, you know, would they even make money from that. This is from the, you know, the vision where they want actually to create more impact than just normal returns. And that was a really cool thing for us at such in times of pandemic when everybody was running away from us. And, you know, through the cross front investments we have we have been able to actually stay afloat during that period for two months and that allowed, you know, more investment to actually have time to come in. And now we're very excited that we've been able to close more funds after the trust fund. So it was also not call it, you know, actually accelerated, you know, processes with other investors. So it was really timely one. And the other thing is that it's very odd when, you know, a lot of investors are looking for what do you call unicorn businesses models. And the scale up in several countries. And most often is that, you know, solid businesses, like diva bits, and, and other social enterprises, yet neglected, you know, they, you know, we are probably the zebras, you know, we, you know, we're probably be profitable operational scale and critical impact in our own way. And, you know, a lot of times a lot of bigger investors avoid it. So I found it really interesting that we can have a fund that actually supports, not the unicorns but also, you know, solid businesses that are actually doing a lot of impact in the community. And actually say that it was a very friendly, you know, conversation. So to me, I feel the trust fund is changing the way investment is being done, you know, a lot of times is that you actually feel investors, you know, you know, things they're asking for targets, you know, a lot of documentation for national models. And, you know, that we tend to shy away, you know, I think with us, trust fund we actually in a head to provide a cash projection of how we know we're anticipating our cash and where we're going to be having gaps. So it was a very friendly conversation and I love the process. And I also, you know, the key things I would actually say the process was very swift and, you know, and the people, the investors were really friendly to us. David, do you love the process or do you love the outcome? You can say both. David, I saw a lot of really great points there, you know, one, it's a type of capital that funds this, the zebra movement as you put it, it's such enterprises that are solid that are growing steadily but are in the unicorn hockey stick. To the fact that it was able to move quickly and, you know, provide limited diligence because of its part with the Miller Center and kind of the vetting that Miller Center is able to offer to its investment partners. And three, you know, the beneficial terms of the loan also allowed you to get leverage and signal to other investors that you worry of kind of a worthwhile cost supporting and so you're, you know, the trust funds investment was able to create leverage by catalyzing other investors as well. So, so thanks for, thanks for hitting on all those, those points. Ben, I want to turn to you and Ben welcome sorry, we had some difficulty getting you in this morning. So for everyone's edification then is a mentor with the Miller Center and also one of the funders of the investors into the trust fund. And so, so, you know, everything we've been talking about so far then makes a lot of sense from the entrepreneurs perspective right so of course, you know, low rates and moving quickly is good for them. But why would any investor in their right mind want to put money into a fund that is promising them a negative return. So, I guess my question to you is one, are you in your right mind to, you know, what, what aspect of your kind of investment portfolio did this represent and why did you decide to make the investment in trust. Yeah, and thank you, Alex. And first, can you hear me okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me give a little bit of background on myself just to set some context for the answer that question, Alex. So I spent my career as in the 1990s I was an advisor working with companies at an investment bank working with entrepreneurial companies, helping them grow and access capital and do mergers and acquisitions. So I was an advisor in the fundraising process. And then in around 2002, for about 14 years I became a principal investor so I started, I worked at a private equity firm as a partner helping invest in entrepreneurial companies that are trying to grow and build the business. And I did that for about a dozen years. And then I switched to just managing my family office and set up a foundation and focus a little more on philanthropy and my own private investing so I retired about six years ago from the private equity business. So my whole career was around profit seeking and investing. And then as I retired I shifted towards the philanthropic side. And when you think about the answer to your question, Alex, why this type of investing or vehicle and what the trust fund is doing, as Ted described it is so compelling. Is anyone who's interested in having an impact with whether if they're a foundation or a private investor, they're going to look at social entrepreneurship. If they're interested in supporting social entrepreneurs, they're going to be somewhere on the spectrum, right? They're going to be on the far left. I'll say the spectrum might be some of those purely seeking market rate returns with their capital. They're going to want to have an impact so they're going to focus the capital on social entrepreneurs and businesses that can have an impact and be self sustaining, but earn a market return. At the other end of the spectrum might be a pure grant, a philanthropic organization, a foundation, or a high net worth individual who wants to support social entrepreneurs with the idea that it's a grant and there's nothing coming back. And there, so on that end of the spectrum, you've got maximum impact and no return. On the other end, you've got a market return and you have some impact. What the trust fund and this type of investing allows is for both of those, anyone on either end or anywhere on that spectrum to improve impact. And so the ability to commit a dollar to a social entrepreneur and know that you're going to get something back, 94 cents, 80 cents, 60 cents, depending on the success ultimately of the entrepreneurs and the orientation of the fund. But let's say you get 80 cents back over a period of few years, it's your money losing event. But then you read best that 80 cents and you get 80% of that back so you get 64 cents back and you keep doing that over 10 years. Your dollar will have had twice as much impact because it will have been used by multiple social entrepreneurs. So you can take, if I'm in a mode of granting to have an impact, I can actually increase my impact through a trust fund by getting leverage on the dollar, allowing the dollar to be reinvested in multiple entrepreneurs over time. So with a finite amount or limited amount of foundation capital, I can actually double or triple the impact depending on what they're over time. So that's interesting to someone who's got a really an impact orientation and foundation as an alternative to a grant because it can have bigger impact. For someone who has a market rate of return goal, it actually allows them to, you know, if you think about the world of social entrepreneurs, which is large, the portion that actually will earn a market rate of return acceptable to someone who's used to venture investing or growth equity investing is going to be a small part of the universe. And they're going to have a limited amount of impact with that part of the universe. For that person, they're able to move a little bit towards higher impact and take, if they're willing to give up some of that return and move towards the grant side, but with knowing that they're not going to, that their capital is not going to, you know, is not being used entirely in the first social entrepreneurs. So they're also able to move towards a higher impact. So for both either end of the spectrum, on the one hand, you're able to put you're able to put your dollars to work at a higher with a multiplier effect that is interesting as a way to get to have more impact to touch more entrepreneurs. That's one aspect. The other aspect is it allows you to think about a broader risk profile. So to impact a broader set of social entrepreneurs with a broader set of business profiles and market risk profiles, because you're, you're not governed by the same risk requirements you would have if you were seeking a market return. So you can broaden your risk profile and have bigger impact. And then especially as we heard on the call today, in moments of crisis, that broadening of impact, it's nice and a normalized normal environment to be able to have impact on more, a broader set of entrepreneurs solving a broader set of problems, because your risk profile is not as you are able to take more risk than a market, someone seeking a market return in a moment of crisis or period of crisis that actually allows that that reduce risk profile allows you to have more impact on on entrepreneurs in a much lower friction, you know, higher velocity way than you could if you were absolutely trying to go through a full, trying to earn a market return and do the full market due diligence and really make sure you're trying to preserve or eliminate any risk of loss of capital. So for an investor, or for a philanthropist, it just allows you to do more, have more impact and put make your dollars work, have a have a bigger dollar impact but also serve a broader set of the social entrepreneur community. Absolutely. It does to me. Maybe, maybe it would be helpful for our participants for me to share very briefly, the economics for investors and the economics for the borrowers, and then also answer some of the chat questions. So our borrowers receive all of them receive loans at a 2% interest rate. They all have six months of grace period with no payments. And then we expect them to repay the loan over the following 18 months. So at the end of the term, they've repaid us in full at 2%. Our investors on the other hand are participating, knowing that they're not going to make any money and in fact, knowing that they're going to lose at least a little money. So beneficial returns charges and annual 2% management fee over a three year period. So best case scenario, all of the borrowers repay and our investors wind up losing 6%. Either way, not so shabby. If you can make, you know, make a grant that only amounts to 6% and manage to keep a lot of social enterprises alive. It's an incredibly efficient form of grant making. In the event that we do experience any loan losses, and considering the types of loans we're making in the environment that we're making, we do expect that that will happen. And then we're going to go out of business. In that case, all of our investors will share pro rata losses. So, to take an extreme example and Ben, I promise you this isn't going to happen. But if nobody pays us back, then our investors lose all of their money. But, but you know, we expect that the vast majority of the loans that we made will will be paid back in full. And consequently, we expect to be returning almost all of the money to our investors. Some of the questions that came up in the chat. I mentioned that from gap accounting, when you make a recoverable grant it's considered a grant. But the recipient considers it alone on their own books. And there's no reason why a recoverable grant couldn't include an interest rate return. But really, we're focused on the zero to negative 99% because there's, you know, as Ben said, there's this huge gap. Why is it that there's so many organizations that we think are deserving of a grant negative 100% return. And yet we don't look at anything between zero and negative 99. And then we just start looking to the positive column again. And there's so many things that we could accomplish if impact investors would open their minds to this idea of earning less than 0%. So many great organizations like Monca's and David's could be supported during emergency moments and smaller younger riskier social enterprises could be supported during normal times. So there's a huge, huge opportunity here to use recoverable grants for impact investors and I want to remind everyone. A successful impact investment or really a successful investment is not one that returns a high financial return. It's one that meets your expectations, whatever those might be. And so we're very fortunate that we found impact investors who their expectations are fast loans with deep impact to game changing social enterprises and getting most of their money back. And so by the since we were able to match find investors with that risk appetite and return appetite, we were able to make the trust fund work and there's no way we could have done what we did otherwise. So, thanks to that and I think a lot of questions that came in the chat. I think that's a good segue to, you know, what is next for either the trust fund as fund itself, or in your opinion, the future of kind of recoverable grants and impact investing space. What, what kind of market segment does this represent. I'll tell you what we're doing so we have used the same model to launch what's called the reciprocity fund, which is a fund making loans to social enterprises serving indigenous communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia and inherently high risk low dollar is difficult to identify and and lend to market. We are deep in discussions about launching trust fund 2.0, which will move us from an emergency loan fund to recovery grants, and this is how beneficial returns itself raises money from from our investor community. I think there's so much opportunity I could see this being applied to social enterprises serving refugees, which oftentimes are small and risky organizations. I could see this going into very challenging geographies. I would say Nicaragua and maybe the DRC today, there's just tremendous opportunity to be using this model to make to make loans to social enterprises, where it's just not reasonable to expect a financial return to the investors, or more importantly, where if you wanted to earn a financial return, you would have to avoid working with some of the most promising and exciting and interesting and high impact social enterprises. Investors really have great control over, over the outcomes that they see, right. If people are looking for market rate returns, guess what, you're going to get the market that we already have. So, the enterprises are about moving the market and doing using business to make things happen that otherwise wouldn't happen. And we need impact investors to adopt that same mentality, and to use finance to make things happen that otherwise wouldn't happen. Thanks Ted. And Maka, I want to turn to you from from your kind of experience as one of these entrepreneurs, how would more funding like, you know, trust fund but you know, impact investing supportive I recover with grants. What was that enable for you. And how is that compared to what you're currently seeing in the ecosystem. First of all, what the trust fund has done this year is incredible. I know that I had accidentally muted you before Alex I probably didn't hear what you said. I'm sorry about that. But for for us what it's done and the timeframe as David already said, not being bogged down by a ton of due diligence process was really a game changer because you need the money yesterday, and you need someone that actually, regardless of what the roadblocks are in in your financial structure or your political trading is willing to get get the money to you. So I'm looking forward to more of these sort of financing mechanisms I think that for us. The trust fund has probably been the first fund that is invested in us from the US. Or no, they partner they co invested with someone else. They're very few funds in our space completely outside of because of the historical ties that Francophone Africa has with France, and also just the levels of red tape that exists in the market that we're in. So I'm hoping that as more models emerge more innovative models and recoverable grant models emerge. We can actually benefit from that and scale our business to, you know, 5000 farmers processing more grain in our post harvest conditioning facility, and hopefully scale beyond this country. So it's really, it's really been a huge, huge, huge breath of fresh air, and also a good signal because thanks to what trust fund did with us now we're having conversations with IMP, because as David said a lot of investors are always going to be reluctant to be the first people to come in. And since they're so few in our space. Trust fund has really unlocked a lot of other people to come in to, to give us a seat at the table. And Ted, I actually want to see if you can expand upon a point that the Maka made there. You know, why have you been able to make loans in, you know, camera room from your, your desk in Portland. How did the, the relationship I guess with Miller Center in some of that diligence. So we could have done it without Miller Center just wouldn't have gone very well. But what we did it by limiting ourselves and by to Miller Center grads and by partnering with Miller Center, we were able to conduct a level of due diligence remotely that that we never could have done otherwise. And so, all of these social enterprises of course were vetted by Miller Center before they even went through their accelerator program. And then were observed and during during the acceleration process and Miller centers continue to, to follow up with these social enterprises afterwards. So they had a great deal of insight into which ones were the big which ones were the winners, which ones were were maybe less so which ones were the jokers. And so it was, it was extremely valuable for us to be able to reach out to the Miller Center staff and especially the mentors to get their insight into into the business model into the entrepreneurs themselves into what some businesses were lacking and to identify potential risks. And that helped us make certainly quick decisions and I also think that helped us make strong decisions. We'll find out soon as our borrowers are obliged to start repaying us, but that insight that we had is something rare for an impact investor to have access to. And I don't think we could have ever made these loans in a responsible way without having that network that we could tap. Thanks to David I want to go to you to know can you comment on on what what greater prevalence of this type of financial instrument would it would enable for you and how this differs from your previous experience. Yeah, sure. You know, in our line of business is solar distribution, we were using one special technology or innovation which is called as you go. And, you know, as you go it means that you have to pay the supplier first, and then you have to receive money over a period of time from the customers maybe you know in eight to 10 months. So, historically we have had a lot of challenge in terms of working capital needs. And despite, you know, each, each of the sale we're doing having very solid profits, but the profits comes with it. So the cash flow, you know, there's a cash flow gap at the, you know, because of our model. And, you know, it has been very hard, especially at our youthfulness or very early stage as an organization to actually be able to, you know, acquire, you know, serious debt, you know, most of the people actually need us to have certain collateral. And we didn't have collateral, you know, we didn't have, and especially it is even worse, you know, if you're actually dealing with Kenyan investors or even bonds, because they actually need a, you know, land title deed. You know, so it's really hard to actually, even when you have a solid business, to actually scale up that model. So with the availability of recoverable clients, it actually opens up so much potential in our business. You know, we're able to actually, you know, be able to have sufficient working capital to, you know, to address that gap between our payables and receivables. And that means we can be able to actually scale our businesses, you know, faster, and be able to maybe open a new network in different areas of distribution. So, you know, we can actually be able to, you know, go from where we actually current yet 16,000 rural households with solar products through our work to even probably reaching 100,000 rural households in the next three years. So, recoverable clients are actually not only, you know, catalyze other investments, but even as a company, you know, to catalyze that growth and easy scaling up. So, I would actually say that that is really needed actually at this time, you know, for growth. And, and it's actually a little bit easier, you know, despite the collateral, but it's the flexibility of terms like 18 months of repayment and totals up to around 24 months. So with the majority of our products, we actually expect the customer to pay within eight to 10 months. And that allows us, you know, allows us to have to have cash to actually even buy more products. So, um, yeah, we need these recoverable grants and this can actually help us scale up even in the most marginalized counties because now we are more de-risked, you know, and there's a factor of de-risk. Thanks, David. Really great points. Yeah, I want to go to you. You know, what, what do you think it means to be done? And in order to, I guess, popularize recoverable grants into impact funds like trust plan. How can this become a bigger thing in your mind? One of that is just communication and getting the story out there. It's really important to have organizations like Ted's that can be the facilitator and manager of this for, for a, a, a foundation or, or a private investor who's looking at social impact. So a credible, qualified organization that is the intermediary with the social entrepreneurs and, and, and has trust. But I think a lot of it's getting the story out there. There've been a fair amount of chat here around some really good points made on the chat side around, you know, the value to an entrepreneur or the value to even a philanthropist or investor of a recoverable grant versus a straight grant versus a loan or we didn't talk about equity. For an investor, it's nice to have this in the toolkit. It is, you have two and two social entrepreneurs with the same level of social impact in your mind. Then the recoverable grant is better than a straight grant for you as an investor because you can multiply, you can get the multiplier effect. So they have two social entrepreneurs, one that is you think super high impact and one that's a little less impact and you have limited money. You might want to do just a straight grant to the super high impact because that's what they are doing is so compelling to you as a philanthropist. So it's really valuable. I think for people who care about supporting social entrepreneurs to have it in the toolkit as one option, you know, for different situations. I was just made for an entrepreneur, they might prefer the recoverable grant because it helps build a credit history and has other value. So there's a lot of reasons that it for a, you know, someone with a foundation that that's where this support comes from for me to have it in the toolkit. So for across a range of circumstances or range of giving or financial support, you can pull it out to make that effective and to get more people interested in using that in the toolkit, articulating the value proposition and how it fits in that toolkit is valuable. And so the work that Ted does in that in getting out and seeing foundations and philanthropists is really important. I think having the Miller Center or other organizations that have that level of credibility and that profile globally is super compelling and makes it easier for a philanthropist to get involved in thinking about this. This type of security where it fits in their overall profile of supporting social entrepreneurs. So for me, it's a lot of communication and strong execution. I think the more proof points, the entrepreneurs we have here and more broadly, but the trust fund is working on impacting the more you can we can create case studies and show philanthropists and foundations, how this works and how effective it is and where it will fit in their toolkit. When it's better for the entrepreneur when it's not, when it's better for them, given their, you know, budgetary constraints as a foundation or or, or private philanthropist or investor. So, a lot of its communication and demonstrating proof points. That's great then. Thank you. There's a really excellent discussion going on in the chat and I hope you all have been following along. I want to, in the time they're left. Hit on some of the key points here so Ted, can you explain the difference here between our, how we're funding this with recoverable grants as opposed to loans and then writing off those loans. And in that potentially can also comment on, on the use of loan guarantees in the capital stack as well. Sure, sure. You know, I think the big point that I'd like to convey here is that investors have a tremendous amount of control, and, you know, their expectations for return will ultimately dictate which social enterprises are able to grow, and I think, you know, historically, there's been this big battle where social entrepreneurs say that they can't find access to capital they can't find capital to grow their enterprise, and investors say they can't find good enterprises to fund. Right. And I think that there needs to be an acknowledgement that a lot of the work being done on the ground by David by Monca and by all of their peers is incredibly challenging work that may never is unlikely to ever be very profitable, but that doesn't mean that it's not desperately needed. And here is a tremendous opportunity for impact investors to efficiently use their philanthropic capital, support social enterprises like Monca's and David's, and get almost all of their money back. There's, there are models that already exist. MCE social capital being a great example of how philanthropists can use their endowments to guarantee, guarantee loans, and then on an annual basis. In the case of MCE they have over 130 investors who've each guaranteed a million dollars. And every year, any losses that the portfolio experiences, each investor shares pro rata in those losses in the form of a donation. So that's a powerful way that you can use philanthropy as first loss guarantees, but also to spread the loss just as we've done with the trust fund, you know, if one if a single loan of ours winds up paying zero back to us and all the other borrowers paying full. Our investors will each receive over 85% of their money back. And so for a very small check, we, we, we will have made loans over $800,000 and loans to social enterprises keeping most of them open. And that's a key point for people to think about. We, we chose to model this with a 2% management fee that is paid by the investors. There's no reason why we couldn't have done this without a management fee and just charged our borrowers more. But under the circumstances of COVID, we thought that this was the right structure, trust fund 2.0, which will be making bounce back loans. We'll, we'll have a 5% interest rate that will be charging borrowers. We'll be looking for borrowers that have weathered COVID. And now with some capital will be able to bounce back and return to the stages that they were at in 2019. And we're expecting to raise substantially more money than we did for the emergency loan fund. But there are plenty of options available, beneficial returns. Our model lending to growing social enterprises during normal times has our investors receive. They received principal repaid to them one seventh of the principal every year over a seven year period. We don't charge a management fee and nor do they participate in any loan losses because we have our own balance sheet to protect them. So in that case investors are just told that they're lending us money at 0% and permitting us to make high impact loans in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Thanks then. So we are out of time. There's a lot of great questions in the chat that we unfortunately won't have time to get to but I would encourage you all to to get in touch. I'm posting in the chat the link to the trust funds website where you can learn more. I believed head your contact information. Just did there, if not, please be in touch via the episode platform. We're happy to talk about these things more. We are very passionate about about this mechanism and about recoverable grants in order to support social enterprises in the middle that are as David said, zebra has wrapped up in unicorns and I think this is a mechanism that they could unlock a lot of work for them. Thank you all for joining. Thank you all for for being interested. Please feel free to be in touch and engage in the conversation moving forward and also let me thank Ben, David, Monca and Ted for for participating and for all the great work that they do outside of the session as well so Thank you all. Please stay in touch.