Revolving fund

Revolving fund impacts

We think our revolving fund is rather wonderful, and possibly much more powerful than is immediately obvious. We knew it would mean that donated money would be used again and again, but even we were surprised by what we discovered when we constructed our Impact Calculator to enable donors to track what their donations have achieved over time.

For example, if you donated $100 to the Tulgeen solar project in late 2013, by today your donation has paid for project costs totalling…

The charts below show how much your donation has grown so far via the revolving fund if you donated $100 to any of our projects.

Direct and indirect loan repayments from all projects

In the chart below we’ve shown all the direct AND indirect loan repayments from Tulgeen in red. Similarly, all direct and indirect repayments from Gawler are in orange, those from Beechworth in yellow, etc. We’ve also shown the new donations (in grey) that helped fund each project.

Unfortunately there aren’t enough clearly distinguishable colours for each of our completed projects to be a different colour in the above chart. The bars at or near the bottom of each column indicate direct or indirect loan repayments from the earliest projects, and if the same colour appears higher up the column, that indicates repayments from a later project.

Finally, below are graphic representations of the general revolving fund concept.

How Quick Win climate project donations revolve

Some early projects have already finished repaying their loans out of the money saved on operating costs, but they will continue reducing carbon emissions for many years, and the later projects which they helped fund are now making repayments into the funding pool.

How Quick Win climate projects become self-funding

Assumptions: Each project costs $20,000, there is one new project every 3 months, and loan repayments from each project are $1,000/quarter. This would mean the 20th project would be funded by $19,000 in loan repayments and would need only $1,000 in new donations, and the 21st project would be funded entirely by loan repayments.

In practice the cost of projects and the time required to complete them varies, but the general principle applies. Now that we have numerous completed projects, the loan repayments we receive each quarter are a significant help with funding newer projects, and the new donations to each new project are growing the overall pool of money that is revolving.