Empty Nesters on a Green Global Trek

Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint a single event, a single decision, a single day when the big picture gets impacted. Not this time. In the most recent blog entry on our bamboo adventure “we’ve been Mitched”, we explained that CO2 Bambu was comatose, if not dead, as a result of our Canadian investors just pulling out inexplicably at the last minute. But in a fortuitous turn of events, Peta saved the day.

In our 9/26 entry “Nica Times article…” we posted a front page article in tiny “Nica Times”, the local English language newspaper. Well, thanks to the gods of internet and google searches, somehow, this article made its way onto the desk of a Swiss foundation, which invests in worthy projects in a handful of countries. In Latin America, they invest in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Their definition of success for their investments comes down to poverty eradication through job creation. As the Exec Director of this fund prepared her trip to Nicaragua, she somehow read the Nica Times article on CO2 Bambu and asked to meet. This coming on the heals of our getting Mitched, we rose to the occasion and gave her and her team a comprehensive briefing on our bamboo activities — the reforestation effort, the low cost housing initiative, the high tech applications we are developping in cooperation with Germany’s BASF’ US subsidiary.

Yesterday, we were notified that the Swiss Investment Committee had reviewed the investment opportunity we presented them and wanted to pursue further some form of relationship, providing us in the meantime the much needed cash to fund the next few months while we build housing models and close in on some strategic contracts for low cost housing.

So, if two weeks ago we were “Mitched” (Hurricane level devastation), this time, in honor of our new investor and her social impact vision, I’ll coin a new phrase: we’ve been “Bintoued” (Exec Director’s first name).

Definition: To be bintoued (past tense) — to be saved at the last minute from having to shut down a socially impactful initiative. Mostly used in Central America. Spanish version: “ser bintouido”.

It will be remembered that in its moment of need, CO2 Bambu was saved by three women – Peta (who pushed for and organized a PR effort), Nicole Rodgers (the intern at Nica Times who wrote the article on us) and Bintou, the investor who surfaced after reading the article.