WWF Panda Labs
The What: World Wildlife Panda Labs is a pillar in the global innovation community at the World Wildlife Fund that is uniquely positioned to become a key player in the conservation tech space and towards driving community-led venture development. Building on the existing efforts of the Panda Labs community and the larger “Innovation Wave” at WWF, Futureproof worked with WWF PandaLabs to develop community building models and funding and ecosystem building strategies for innovation partnerships, stemming from the Panda Labs FY21 strategic plan.
We partnered with the Panda Labs community of conservation practitioners across 10+ offices working to build capacity and finance for conservation tech.
Giving the power to the community, we explored how we might best create innovative financing methods for scaling conservation and supporting a community driven change, to enable strong participation, engagement, and value creation, in a way that helps the Panda Labs teams to apply the Panda Labs Methodology and Cycle to develop innovative solutions to ‘wicked’ conservation problems.”
The How: Our work focused on conducting market research and identifying best practice conservation funding models, and peer-driven and community building frameworks, and co-designing a series of facilitation and method exercises on how to build non-traditional funding models in conservation, and systems for peer learning that drive peer-driven change, that can be incorporated in Panda Labs Offices offices globally and locally.
To conclude our work, we hosted an interactive session focused on unlocking the Panda Labs collective creativity and resources, to explore non-traditional funding. The session introduced peer-driven methodologies to identify and unlock new opportunities for fundraising for innovation.
We hosted a ‘Deep Dive’ session on Peer Driven Change and Non-Traditional Fundraising for Innovation. Representatives from Panda Labs in Kenya, Pakistan and Romania joined, as well as some new faces from the team in Myanmar/Nepal. The session introduced approaches and tools that can be used to drive and support ‘peer driven change’ and engage teams to ‘go deeper,’ such as Problem Trees to map out the underlying components of problems, and a Troika format to stimulate quick uncovery of problems and brainstorming of solutions in small teams. In the end, small teams of 3-4 people supported each other to identify potential new solutions for individual / specific challenges around fundraising for innovation.
The Why: To meet our global conservation targets and SDG goals, we must support and back climate tech development and cross-sector partnerships. The nature conservation funding gap is still too large and estimated to be US$ 600-800 billion per year. However, this financing gap for conservation amounts to less than 1% of private-sector annual investments globally. We have a unique opportunity here to broker new private-public partnerships to unlock greater private capital for a regenerative nature-based economy and equip conservation organizations with the know-how to navigate this emerging landscape.
Our Results: Our work resulted in building the Pand Labs’ Community’s awareness and resilience against structural and internal barriers to fundraising for innovation, creating the conditions to learn from best practices and fellow peers in the room about non-traditional tactics for achieving their fundraising goals and short- and longer-term actions the Panda Labs’ could implement in their fundraising works immediately.
