The Funds for Place Lab
Designing capital structures that serve patient, regenerative growth in emerging secondary and tertiary cities and underserved university towns.
Reimagining Capital for Places That Matter
Most capital ignores the places that matter most.
Across Africa and the Global South, thousands of secondary cities and university towns are brimming with latent potential—yet underserved by traditional finance models. These places need more than funding. They need capital that understands place: patient, regenerative, and deeply rooted in long-term value creation.
The Funds for Place Lab exists to meet that need.
What is the Funds for Place Lab?
The Lab is a catalytic research and design platform focused on:
- Prototyping capital structures tailored for place-based transformation
- Bridging investors and practitioners around shared values of long-term stewardship
- Researching models of regenerative finance that honor local rhythms, relationships, and realities
- Building tools and funds that unlock growth in overlooked geographies
The Lab is a catalytic research and design platform focused on:
Why Place-Based Capital?
Conventional capital favors speed, scale, and extraction. But transformative cities are built on patience, permanence, and purpose.
Secondary cities—where land is available, communities are cohesive, and legacies can be forged—offer unique opportunities for investment with spiritual, social, and economic return. Yet they require new financial imaginations: blended capital stacks, long-horizon funds, cooperative models, and risk-tolerant philanthropic infrastructure.
This is what the Lab is here to design.
What We Do
Research & Insight Development
– Landscape mapping of undercapitalized geographies
– Case studies on regenerative investment practices
– Publications and briefings for ecosystem stakeholders
Capital Architecture Prototyping
– Design and stress-test place-based fund models
– Convene multi-disciplinary sprints with investors, city shapers, and practitioners
Collaborative Fund Creation
– Support the co-creation of new fund vehicles
– Explore public-private-philanthropic capital blends
– Host annual convenings and funder roundtables
Field Partnerships
– Work with anchor projects in real cities (e.g. Ogbomoso, Makurdi, Tamale, Gulu)
– Pilot community-owned and values-aligned financing tools
Who We Work With
- Mission-aligned funders & family offices
- Redemptive builders and city shapers
- Local institutions and cooperative movements
- Think tanks, policy designers, and movement catalysts
- Global south universities and development labs
Join the Movement
Whether you’re a funder rethinking your portfolio, a builder seeking aligned capital, or a policymaker exploring alternatives to extractive development models, the Funds for Place Lab offers a home for experimentation, insight, and implementation.
A Different Future is Fundable
We believe in the long game.
We believe places can flourish without being gentrified.
We believe that what capital does to a place is as important as what it builds.
The Funds for Place Lab is where that belief becomes blueprint.