NOW Activities and Services

NOW Partners Foundation supports farmers and leaders in industry, land use, finance, civil society and government to develop and implement their unique version of Regenerative Value Creation as a core driver of success.

Regenerative Value Creation integrates their positive impact with their financial and overall economic success. Unlike traditional business models that view sustainability as a cost, Regenerative Value Creation demonstrates how positive impact on people and nature can drive business success and economic growth.

NOW focuses on key levers for systemic change to develop and implement regenerative forms of Leadership, Industry, Land Use and Finance.

Regenerative Leadership

Our purpose is to catalyze understanding and action for Regenerative Value Creation that translates positive impact on people and planet into the economic success for farmers and entrepreneurs, companies and countries. In our experience, regenerative innovation and sustained success require pragmatic inspiration and an innovative mindset, deep reflection and trustful dialogue to empower the insight and courage for decisive action. We design programs and events accordingly to empower leaders in agriculture, industry, finance, civil society and government to develop and implement concrete solutions. After successfully delivering over 30 years of cutting edge initiatives, below are a few of our current activities.

Future Economy Forum

The Future Economy Forum is a multi-sector global platform for action towards a new economic mainstream based on Regenerative Value Creation that fully integrates economic development and business success with the regeneration of people and planet, to address humanity’s most pressing challenges and opportunities.

The Forum, which NOW Partners Foundation co-founded and serves as secretariat, convenes and supports a global community of senior leaders from agriculture, industry, finance, civil society and government whose inspired and pragmatic approaches, concrete implementations and joint initiatives point the way to this new economy.

The Future Economy Forum offers an interactive mosaic of action-oriented events, solutions initiatives, executive programs, media products and innovation labs. The Forum’s activities include extensive programmatic initiatives at and in between the United Nations’ Summits on Climate and other key challenges.

Find details on our UN Climate COP27, COP28 and COP29 activities, that had very concrete outcomes.

Leadership Programs for Companies

Over the past decades, we have developed and delivered many leadership programs that help leaders innovate and implement concrete solutions for Regenerative Value Creation to integrate positive impact with economic success. Here three examples:

Danone – Empowering the Top 200 in Regenerative Value Creation
Over the coming years, NOW Partners Foundation and the International Institute for Management Development are offering the premier leadership program for Danone’s top 200 leaders. It ranges from their personal and interpersonal development as regenerative leaders and their understanding of system challenges and opportunities to the development and implementation of concrete business solutions that generate regenerative value for all stakeholders.  

Triodos Bank – Visionary Leadership Program
For Europe’s leading sustainability bank and investment fund group, with the CEO and board we co-created a two year leadership, strategy and culture development program for its top team members from across Europe. The program served to refine the leaders’ and bank’s purpose, re-envision the global financial system and its strategy, business models and culture. It integrated deep nature and diverse communities immersion, coaching, top expert engagement with hands-on work initiatives.

MBAs in Regenerative Leadership and Management
Already 20 years ago, NOW’s partners developed the USA’s first fully accredited MBA in Sustainable Management at the Presidio School of Management, San Francisco that we co-founded with other business leaders. The program innovated the full integration sustainability and leadership development into every single MBA class, including finance and supply chain management. Since then we contributed to the development and delivery of a number of MBA program. Currently with Global Academy we are developing an executive program private and public sector leaders in land-use and related industries, see here.

Regenerative Industry

NOW’s senior partners have been owners and leaders of international corporations, innovative enterprises, financial and public sector institutions. They support leaders in diverse industries as peers who understand the challenges of navigating emerging risks and future business opportunities. NOW works with companies to detect and interpret the signals of emerging change and to build robust and adaptive strategies. Jointly with corporate partners, we innovate the business models that generate superior returns because they are resilient in a volatile future and create regenerative value.

Scenario Planning
While we cannot know the future, scenario planning offers the next best thing: the ability to test your strategy against plausible, divergent futures that you and the experts we invite help you to decipher. NOW’s bespoke scenario planning journeys equip your team with the capacities to envision and identify potential futures, stress-test existing approaches and innovate solutions that are based on a deeper understanding of key challenges and opportunities.

Regenerative Intelligence Board
NOW Partners Foundation will combine its managing partners with members of its extensive global network of experienced entrepreneurs and world-leading experts to serve as your advisers and sounding board on the specific challenges and opportunities you face in a particular moment to consider your strategy and culture, your innovations and product developments, your HR or communication opportunities and challenges. We call these temporary groups ‘The Board You Can’t Afford,’ to hire on an ongoing basis. We can help you to assemble them as needed to serve as your dynamically evolving Board of Advisors.

Philips: Spreading Innovation and Action to 80,000 team members
We helped Philips to develop and concretize their 2025 vision that unifies their business objectives with the health of people and planet. It invites its 80,000 employees to live their personal purpose and empowers its 50,000 suppliers to move towards Regenerative Value Creation. It is aligned with Philips’ goal to serve 3 billion people as a sustainable healthcare innovation leader.

Natura & Co: Vision and Strategy for Regenerative Value Creation
We supported Natura, one of the world’s leading beauty groups that is also an outstanding example of Regenerative Value Creation to develop its 2030 Vision. It integrates resilient economic success with positive impact on its people, social- and ecosystems. This unifying vision is foundational for the group’s core strategy, culture transformation, innovation, value chain, brand, marketing, finance and wider system engagement.

Advisory Services for Regenerative Value Creation:
In addition to supporting companies with such programs, we also offer bespoke Advisory Services within and across diverse business functions and industries.

Regenerative Agriculture and Land Use

Regenerative forms of agriculture, forestry and related industries are key to resolving many of our greatest challenges: poverty, food and water insecurity, biodiversity loss and climate change, health challenges of farmers and consumers, diminishing farming incomes, failing rural economic development and lacking opportunities especially for rural youth. These lead to forced internal and international migration and the resulting suffering and political polarization that threatens democracies. The polycrisis is systemic. And so are its solutions that NOW works towards.

Therefore NOW Partners Foundation supports the wide-scaling of the world’s most successful agroecological solutions. They have already been implemented at scale, increasing yields and farmer incomes, strengthening rural economies and opportunities while also reviving soils and biodiversity, regreening desserts and fallow lands. They also increase food security. Reversing agriculture’s current status as one of the biggest contributors to climate change, these methods massively absorb carbon. This supports the climate and the soil’s water holding capacity, reducing the negative impacts of floods and droughts.

NOW’s Initiatives:

Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming (APCNF)
Because APCNF’s agro-ecological innovation approach helped farmers to achieve all of these outcomes under challenging circumstances, it grew in only 8 years to 1 million farmers. It is ready to expand in a next step to 10 million farmers in India. Key stakeholders in over 50 countries want to adapt APCNF to their contexts. With its team of international partners and partner organizations, NOW is enabling that international expansion into Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. Find details about our work with APCNF here.

SEKEM and Economy of Love Carbon Credits
Sekem does not only manage its own farms in Egypt, including properties that regreen the desert. It also supports thousands of other Egyptian farmers to introduce innovative agriculture, agroforestry and energy transition opportunities. Beyond that its regenerative companies in sectors such as food, apparel, toys and pharmaceuticals provide added value to these agro-ecological farming products.

Together with its training and education arm that includes with 3,000 students the MENA region’s largest sustainable development university. Collectively, these successful ventures demonstrate how to integrate the regenerations of people and society, nature and the climate with the economic success of farmers and local economies.

GLOBAL ACADEMY
Global Academy is a partnership initiative that NOW is co-founding with some of the world’s most successful agroecology approaches. It offers in one virtual action library information, education and training and contributes to the implementation, financing and policy initiatives that help to create a new mainstream of land use. Find here the first examples of how Global Academy will present information. Additional services will be released as we raise additional funding.

Regenerative Finance

Many studies have shown that companies who behave more responsibly to people and the planet tend to outperform peers who focus strictly on the bottom line without considering their wider impact. Still, we have not yet seen the massive shift of capital towards regenerative practices that is required to transform our economies. In order to catalyze this shift, we create investable regenerative assets, connect investors with highly interesting regenerative opportunities, and help transform the investment logic of financial institutions, aligning it with the new economic realities.

NOW Partners Foundation co-innovates solutions that help to finance the transition from our current mainstream to agroecological and regenerative forms of agriculture.

Economy of Love Global Whole System Carbon Credits
The Egyptian Biodynamic Association, the Egyptian government and stock exchange, banks and companies, the UN and the World Bank, Sekem helped to launch the Economy of Love Whole System Carbon Credits, which provide farmers with additional income and fair compensations for the ecosystem service they provide for all of us and that all of us can get involved in: Find details here about Sekem and here about the Economy of Love Whole System Carbon Credits

Economy of Love (EoL) Whole System Carbon Credits High Quality, High Integrity Carbon Credits sequester carbon while improving biodiversity, soil & human health, food & water security and the socio-economic conditions of smallholder farmers. The EoL Carbon Credit program presents a market based solution to solving the climate crisis and supporting farmers’ livelihoods. Shifting away from highly subsidized and large emission operations, EoL offers a model in which small holder farmers become financially independent and food secure, while achieving game changing, climate positive results.

Economy of Love Global
Economy of Love’s model has demonstrated such success in Egypt, that Economy of Love Global was founded to offer and scale the Economy of Love standard and carbon credit systems to agricultural communities globally. With pilots underway in Asia, Africa and South America, Economy of Love Global works internationally to fairly compensate small holder farmers for the essential ecosystem services they provide. Learn more about Economy of Love Global here.