Our loans are always non-extractive, designed to make sure that the returns that come back to BRED as a lender never exceed the wealth generated for the borrower and their community.
Traditional finance is designed to be extractive—always maximizing profits, no matter the human or environmental costs.
Non-extractive finance flips this power relationship, making sure that a borrower will never be worse off after working with us than before working with us. In every loan, we make sure that it is structurally impossible for us to benefit more than the workers and communities behind the project we are financing.
In practice, this means first and foremost that we use a lending framework, developed by Seed Commons, that calibrates loan repayment schedules and amounts to project profitability. But it also means that we view a loan as a relationship, not a transaction. We invest in the success of the projects in our lending portfolio with high-touch technical assistance, based in trust, cooperation, and ongoing education.