Halcyon Advisers

IRS filings for non-profits are due in one more month (May 15)!! E-filing is mandatory! Let us know if we can help!!

The East Denver Food Hub is creating a sustainable and equitable local food ecosystem in the city of Denver. In addition to the aggregation and distribution of local food, EDFH educates the public on the value of supporting and investing in local farms. In short, they work to demystify food supply chains, address food insecurity, support the viability of local agriculture, and develop community wealth-building initiatives to promote economic justice in their communities.

Last October, Halcyon supported EDFH on a successful loan application from Denver’s Economic Development & Opportunity program. These funds have allowed EDFH to expand and create the East Denver Food Soveriegnty Initiative, working with the city to address Denver’s food deserts. EDFH will create community-owned grocery stores in Denver’s historically low-income neighborhoods where normal grocery store chains and fresh produce do not exist.

Halcyon is helping EDFH prepare for fundraising once again on this big important project. Perhaps they can be a model for addressing America’s food desert challenge. If you know of any organizations that would be interested in funding this kind of project, please let us know! Furthermore, if you need help with the financial modeling required for small business loans or grant applications, please let us know!!

https://www.eastdenverfoodhub.com/

East Denver Food Hub Bringing fresh food to our community and championing the viability of local farmers.We are building a movement. Join us.   About East Denver Food Hub Co-founded in 2020 by David Demerling and Roberto Meza, East Denver Food Hub is a social enterprise building a model for local food aggregation and d...

The US Government’s Child Care and Development Fund has a $9bn budget to subsidize eligible low-income families’ access to child care. However, 85% of eligible families are unable to claim the subsidy because the child care providers either struggle with the application process, the payments are slow/unreliable, or renewal deadlines/errors convolute the process.

Pie for Providers is a small non-profit that has built software to streamline and automate child care subsidy management, saving providers up to 100 hours/month. A dashboard allows providers to see their subsidy revenue streams, alerts them to errors and potential revenue loss, and streamlines the application process. Each state costs about $50k to develop the software to open, but they are working hard to secure grant funding to open new states and are actively encouraging engineers to volunteer their time helping them develop their code on Github.

Halcyon helps P4P manage their bookkeeping and budgeting process so that none of the precious grant funding gets wasted and every dollar helps a family.

https://www.pieforproviders.com/

Pie for Providers Claim more child care subsidy funding with less time and hassle. Sign Up  / Inscripción 85% of eligible children in the United States do not claim government subsidy funding.  This means child care providers - small, women-owned businesses - do not get paid for their work and families struggle t...

The National Science Foundation is America's Seed Fund for tech startups. With an $8bn annual budget, the NSF funds over 25% of federally-funded research in American universities and funds all types of non-medical science particularly in "high-risk, high pay-off" research. The NSF receives about 40,000 applications per year and funds about 10,000 of them with an average grant of $200,000 annually for 3 years. Without the NSF, it is highly questionable whether or not I would be using a "smartphone" to type to you on the "internet" under the "LED lights" of my living room.

Symbrosia has one of the coolest projects in the most ideal location (Kona) that I have had a chance to work on. They research and grow red seaweed that when sprinkled into livestock feed, can reduce methane production by 90%. For the record, cows produce as much greenhouse gas as the European Union and it is estimated that methane will have 80x the global warming effect of CO2 over the next 20 years. Who knew there was such an elegant solution to stop cows from farting??

Halcyon has assisted several social entrepreneurs with the financial aspects of NSF applications, including Symbrosia. In 2020, they were awarded a $256k grant from the NSF and are eligible for another $1mil in phase II funding!

So, friends, despite the constant barrage of headlines that make you want to stay in bed all day, there are millions of hardworking people in US government, the private sector, and non-profits working to make this planet better. Happy 4th!

Let us know if you have grant applications we can help with and check out Symbrosia! https://symbrosia.co/

Symbrosia | Reducing Livestock Methane with Seaweed Symbrosia is a CleanTech startup reducing methane emissions with the world’s mightiest seaweed.

I want to share this project just in case it inspires someone.

Dr. Omolara Fatiregun recently finished her PhD from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School’s Social Innovation and Change Initiative where she built Thrive!. Before launching Thrive!, Omolara earned an A.B. in Sociology and African American Studies from Harvard College and an M.P.P. from Georgetown. Before returning to graduate school, Omolara served as Deputy Director overseeing research, evaluation, and performance improvement in DC’s juvenile justice agency to ensure that court-involved youth had access to high-quality education, workforce development, and behavioral health programs.

Thrive! is one of the most ambitious projects by one of the most impressive people I have had the opportunity to work with. Through her research, Omolara has identified 80+ measures that have been scientifically proven to mitigate disparities like nurse home visiting programs, after school programs, reductions in school policing, etc. She has imbedded these measures into software that audits local governments or school districts, to ensure equity-centered budgets and improve outcomes in vulnerable populations.

Omolara believes that local government spending is the greatest lever to improve cycles of poverty among Black people in America and simple changes within budgets can break those cycles of poverty rather than perpetuating them. Omolara alone can conduct 4-6 government audits per year. No money is wasted as most government agencies are required to be audited in any case if receipts exceed a certain amount. The nation’s largest regional education agency in LA County,among others, which serves 1.1 million students is currently testing the software. From a social return on investment perspective, I simply have not come across another project that can potentially improve the lives of so many people with so little outside investment needed.

Halycon is working with Omolara as a fractional CFO. This primarily involves helping to procure funding for stage 2 of Thrive!, acting as an advisor, bookkeeper, and tax preparation. With the next round of funding, we need to hire the salespeople and additional auditors to win government auditing contracts and help improve the lives of 8.5 million minority children living in poverty in the USA.

https://www.equitywillthrive.com/

We have been proud to work with Movers & Shakers. They have created an incredible augmented reality app (Kinfolk) that combines history and technology to write Black and Brown narratives into American curricula. Our work was to help model the investment and that it would take to get them into K-12 classrooms. They recently received a $1.8mil grant from the Mellon Foundation to scale our augmented reality archive Kinfolk into a national platform!!!!!! Yeah!!!!

As much as Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved Black people in this country, it is a celebration of Black resilience and resistance. Our new Kinfolk Juneteenth curriculum is an opportunity to educate the next generation using augmented reality technology on your phone! Y’all check it out today. (Link in bio.) ✊🏿

Happy Juneteenth! Happy Father’s Day!

We exclusively work as a financial adviser for non-profits and social entrepreneurs battling for a more equitable future. Every conversation we have, every model we build, termsheet we analyze, grant writing, and even our bookkeeping/tax prep, is aimed to increase social return on investment. Our services are fractional and we understand that every dollar needs a social return, so efficiency is at the core of our work. We work directly with organizations but also with governments, accelerators, foundations, corporate donors as a financial accelerator. Please let us know if we can help!

https://halcyonadvisers.com/

Halcyon Advisers updated their website address.