Our Focus Areas
Merton Capital Partners’ direct investment model harnesses the power of philanthropy to drive scaled, measurable impact in five important areas: Workforce Housing, Broadband Access, Clean Water Infrastructure, Green Energy, and Ocean Health. Within these contexts, opportunities exist to use philanthropy to significantly improve the lives of millions of people, decrease inequity, and restore ecological systems.
Workforce Housing with Philanthropy
Building developers require government grants for affordable housing projects to be viable, but there are not enough governmental tax credits to meet current needs. Unfortunately, this means that for every 250-unit of affordable housing that is constructed in any city in America, there are another 20 that do not get built.
This is where actively managed philanthropy can step in. $150mm in philanthropy (which will be returned to donors) plus debt, can fund approximately 1,000 units of affordable housing — with 30% of units being allocated to the most vulnerable (such as veterans, aged poor, or victims of domestic violence).
By using blended finance, philanthropy can build new units with their affordability guaranteed in perpetuity.
Broadband Access
The digital divide between households with broadband internet and those who lack it is compounding our national poverty gap, as educational and professional opportunities evade some of society’s most needy. By investing philanthropic dollars in partnership with the private sector, Merton can significantly expand and expedite high-speed broadband access in underserved areas. Improved connectivity will bolster and catalyze the economic and educational health of entire regions by delivering digital impact at scale.
Clean Water Infrastructure
To address the issue that 21 million Americans live without clean water, as well as the continued pollution of rivers and waterways, Merton is creating philanthropic investment vehicles that will purchase and upgrade the most distressed 5,000 private water utilities in the US.
This investment will create a new path to renovate the degraded and continuously deteriorating US. water infrastructure, which in turn addresses social and environmental challenges exacerbated by unclean water supplies — including children’s health, rural poverty, and racial injustice.
Green Energy
The largest clean energy companies have solar farms ready to be built that can’t be started because the cost of development is marginally too high. Philanthropic capital can green-light these projects. By replicating these we can add renewable energy at scale to the nation’s energy grid.
Investments toward increasing the percentage of renewable energy in the power supply actively help mitigate the effects of climate change, the effects of which are particularly devastating for already marginalized communities.
Ocean Health
Philanthropic capital can be invested in partnership with the largest wastewater companies to increase water treatment capacity across South Florida. This can achieve zero emissions of untreated wastewater into the ocean.
Stopping this flow of untreated wastewater would allow a gradual but astonishing recovery of the coastal ecosystem, including the return of the Florida reef to a level of health not seen in a generation. The coastal ecosystem regeneration, especially with mangroves and seagrass can absorb carbon 10 to 35 times more quickly than tropical rainforests, would provide additional tangible and significant climate benefits.