Transition Accelerator - Trawalla Group

Transition Accelerator is an initiative of the Trawalla Group designed to expand the scope of profitable investment in climate solutions by providing catalytic capital to high impact projects.

• Investor: Transition Accelerator/Trawalla Group
• Source of finance: Philanthropy & impact investment
• Financial instrument: Loans (recoverable and non-recoverable), Equity
• Sector: Philanthropy & impact investment
• Geography: Australia & Asia Pacific Region

The Transition Accelerator is a not for profit which seeks to expand the scope for profitable investment in climate solutions by providing catalytic capital to overcome barriers to investment.

The organisation works with Foundations, Private Ancillary Funds, and philanthropists to provide concessionary debt, concessionary equity, ‘first loss’ capital and grants into high impact projects in order to crowd in commercial capital.

The Transition Accelerator is an initiative of the Trawalla Group, the family office of Alan and Carol Schwartz. The group invests in private equity, commercial real estate, venture capital, and has co-established and seeded several successful investment management businesses – including Qualitas, Armitage Associates and Wollemi Capital.

The Group also manages the Trawalla Foundation, which works to support a vision for the future of Australia that prioritises gender equality, creativity, sustainability and social justice.

A proportion of the Foundation’s corpus in invested in social and environmental impact investments, including funds, social impact bonds and venture capital. Examples include:

• Social Ventures Australia Diversified Impact Fund
• Murray-Darling Basin Balanced Water Fund
• Applied
• Synergis Fund

The Transition Accelerator is finalising its pilot project. The pilot is a nature-based carbon project in Western Australia. The project delivers significant benefits of sequestering carbon, restoring an important biodiversity corridor as well as providing social and economic benefits to traditional owners in the form of land ownership, revenue sharing, employment and preservation of cultural sites.

For the pilot, we have created a structure that allows all capital providers to deliver on the purpose of their capital. For commercial providers, the concessional capital increases their return to above the required hurdle rate.

The concessional capital is taking the form of a syndicated interest-free loan from Private Ancillary Funds to the project. The structure of the project allows the Private Ancillary Funds to claim a credit of approximately 10% (representing the difference between the commercial rate and the rate provided). The credit allows their philanthropic corpus to grow at a faster rate than if they did not provide the loan and continued to invest in market. As such, the benefit to concessional capital providers is:

1. Increased corpus growth;
2. Crowding in of commercial capital to amplify impact;
3. Significant and measurable impact that aligns to their granting purpose; and
4. Investing in a commercially run project, with clear metrics to achieve impact.

The Transition Accelerator is looking for philanthropic investors to both support the Accelerator, or by investing concessionary capital into impactful projects alongside the Accelerator.

The Transition Accelerator are seeking contributions of $250K or above (Contact Executive Director Monique Andrew for more information).

Final Insights

High impact philanthropy can blend concessional, philanthropic and commercial capital to play an important catalytic role in blended finance solutions that will support our transition to a net zero carbon future.

Blended finance structures are complex and expensive to structure, so creating structures that can be replicated is important to delivering impact at scale.

Join the Blended Finance for Climate Initiative

You are welcome to send new case studies, links to current blended finance opportunities, or event invitations you would like to share with the network to [email protected]

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