Lake Superior coastline
From supporting teams that pioneer sustainable technologies to influencing policy on a global scale, the Great Lakes Protection Fund manages a portfolio of ambitious efforts to protect and restore one of the world’s most vital natural resources—the Great Lakes.
Join us as we discuss the organization’s origins, its vision for the future, and its impact strategy with David Rankin, the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Protection Fund.
Q: Why was the Great Lakes Protection Fund created and what is its primary mission?
In the late 1980s when the economy was struggling, the Great Lakes Protection Fund was founded to address the declining health of our ecosystem. We needed to do things no one had done before and do them on a vast scale. Recognizing the lack of a source for innovative ideas to improve our shared natural resources, the region’s governors acted.
They had already made agreements to manage water and control toxins, but they needed a collaborative platform to launch new, innovative, problem-solving strategies.
This resulted in the creation of the Fund—a private corporation designed to identify, develop and foster new ideas to protect and restore the ecological health of 20% of the world’s fresh water.
Q: What makes the Great Lakes Protection Fund unique?
In addition to our unique origin story, our corporate form is distinct.
We are not a government agency, philanthropic organization, or charitable foundation. Rather, we are an endowed, private, not-for-profit corporation; created by and accountable to seven governors. This structure provides us with almost complete latitude in terms of how we deliver against our mission—protecting and restoring the ecological health of the Great Lakes.
We provide grants, offer loans, engage in equity deals, do venture investing, and can form or acquire companies. We do whatever it takes to be the source of innovation the governors need to do their shared work better.
Q: What happens when the Great Lakes Protection Fund gets it right? How is the region better off with healthier lakes?
When we get it right, everybody wins. It’s not just this region that wins–our communities win, our states win, the country wins, the continent wins and the global economy wins. This region is remarkable; it boasts the world’s third largest economy with a gross domestic product of $6 trillion.
This region is a powerhouse because of three factors:
- Its natural infrastructure: One-fifth of the world’s freshwater is here, which is a significant asset.
- The people: The region’s ability to generate such wealth is due to its human capital. With the world’s highest concentration of high-level research universities, we create new intellectual property and have a highly trained workforce, making this region extraordinarily productive.
- Our leadership legacy: This region has a strong history of invention and creativity, leading to a culture where we simply get things done.
Ensuring our natural infrastructure complements our people and our legacy is vital. We need to continuously seek new technologies, new approaches, and new management schemes that we can operationalize to take care of the foundation of our economy—a healthy Great Lakes ecosystem. Healthy communities and a healthy economy depend on a healthy ecosystem.
Q: What is the Great Lakes Protection Fund doing to put the region on the path to healthier Great Lakes?
Our strategy is to deploy a $20-25 million portfolio of catalytic innovation projects designed to reduce pollution, restore natural hydrology, and reconnect surface and groundwater in this region.
We fund team-based initiatives that take concrete action and unlock massive change. The change we seek is measured in orders of magnitude, not percentages—we look to make things ten, a hundred or a thousand times better. Collaborative teams are essential for driving significant change because we’re leaning into things that nobody has tried before.
We need collaborators that each are addressing a piece of that problem–or more importantly, a piece of that solution. We’re creating a first draft of history—building practices that everyone will adopt in 10 to 15 years. We seek projects that push systems over tipping points and create organic growth. We’re aiming to make new markets, drive significant policy changes, and create social circumstances where the new normal is expected and supported.
Q: The Great Lakes Protection Fund just released its updated impact strategy for 2024-2028. What are its key features and how did you identify where to act on that strategy?
The spaces that we expect to invest in heavily over the next five years fall under three related domains:
- Reimagining how we manage water in urban settings
- Restoring water health in working landscapes
- Ensuring that our economic activity in the region leads to better ecosystem outcomes
We identified these areas by applying our unique approach to innovation to the problems in the basin and identifying places that are most likely to succeed. We did that through various workshops and by talking with experts about where they think there’s the best chance to make a big difference.
Q: How does the Great Lakes Protection Fund identify and support projects with the potential for widespread impact?
It begins with what we know through experience. We have a refined idea of what works and we look for those signals in new projects. We also ask a lot of questions.
The first question we address when approaching projects is: How will the Great Lakes improve, and by how much? Over what period of time? That stops about 90% of the conversations because that can be a little intimidating for some. For other people–the right people–they light up. When we have a good match between people and ideas, we work with them to build a pragmatic plan to achieve those ambitious goals. Lastly, we financially support that team in the right way—through grants, loans or other means.
Q: How does the Great Lakes Protection Fund measure the impact of its initiatives?
It begins with that first question—what impact do we expect? We intentionally develop plans to monitor our progress against those intentions and determine if we had the success we expected. We must be confident that our portfolio of actions is producing significant and important results.
The tough part is combining diverse metrics, such as 1,500 miles of restored rivers, a 90% reduction in invasive species, over 66 million acres of sustainably managed forest, and 39 million devices reducing mercury emissions. They’re all important, but we can’t simply add them up like an income statement.
Q: What is an example of a key accomplishment or positive impact that the Great Lakes Protection Fund and its teams have achieved in terms of protecting and preserving the Great Lakes?
One signature accomplishment was creating the field and the industry around treating ballast water in ocean-going vessels. When we began investigating the problem, it was a mystery to the world how all these invasive species were getting into the Great Lakes. Scientists suspected it had something to do with shipping. From there, we began talking with the shipping industry, academics, policymakers and engineering firms, who collaborated to install a working treatment system on a vessel within a year.
In the span of that year, a system was installed where half the tanks were treated, half the tanks weren’t, allowing us to observe the difference. We were able to remove 90-95% of the invasive species from the treated tanks with the very first technology we tried.
Our goal was to demonstrate how easily a big problem could be solved, not just for the couple hundred vessels entering the Great Lakes, but the 30,000 vessels that are in motion all over the planet, all the time.
This work exemplifies the catalytic impact we strive to continue making. It reached the attention of those who manage the risk for shipping industries, prompting them to change their requirements—shifting the risk of invasive species impacts back to the industry. As a result, the industry sought new rules, and the experts we funded were the only ones who could provide the necessary answers. While we didn’t directly fund the rulemaking, we helped catalyze the creation of global ballast water standards. Those standards, combined with the prototypes our teams built, launched a $17 billion industry that builds the systems needed to keep our waterways free of invasive species.
Run the clock ahead a few years and the Lakes see a new invader every six years or so, in contrast to when we began our work and new invaders were identified every six weeks.
Q: What message would you like to convey about the importance of investing in the protection and preservation of the Great Lakes?
This region holds 20% of the world’s fresh water, a precious global resource, and is the foundation for one of the globe’s largest economic engines. These bodies of water are why so many people live in this region.
We have been blessed with great riches in this region and we need to take the opportunity to continue leading water stewardship globally. We have an important resource and, therefore, a responsibility to protect and restore that precious resource.
Q: What opportunities are there to get involved with the Great Lakes Protection Fund?
We welcome conversations with individuals who look beyond traditional silos and bring valuable insights from fields such as various types of engineering, finance, business, science, policy, and others. We are particularly interested in creative polymaths and risk-takers who can offer new perspectives, are ready to implement ambitious strategies, and can help us see our work differently and better.
If you’d like to discuss a project idea, email us at startaconversation@glpf.org. For more information on what we do at Great Lakes Protection Fund, see our impact page.