Capital in Practice: CO

CO_ is a steward-owned, systemic investing collective working at the meeting point of climate change and poverty. Across a $35m Latin American fund, a $60m global portfolio and a philanthropic foundation, it finances cooperatives, commons, ventures and community-held land in places conventional finance has decided are too slow, too hard to standardise and too unfamiliar to bother with. Its first investment, $200,000 into a workshop outside Mexico City, became the largest biogas business in the world. Beneath all of it sit years of systems research, participatory design, community-building and the slow work of listening to a landscape, none of which any fee structure would ever pay for. The different funds are only part of what CO_ does, and the least unusual part.

In the Putumayo, deep in the Colombian Amazon, a community harvests açaí as it has done for generations. The palm rises among the forest canopy, its small dark fruits gathered by hand and carried through a landscape shaped by deep knowledge of the forest. For years the forest around them belonged to organised crime. Then, for reasons of its own, the violence moved elsewhere. What remained was not relief so much as uncertainty. The structures that had controlled the region disappeared, but so did many of the systems around them: the routes to market, the commercial relationships and the infrastructure needed to turn a harvest into a livelihood. The community was left with the forest, the knowledge and a question: when a landscape has been organised around fear, what comes next?

There was no quick answer. It took almost twenty years. Today that same community exports açaí to markets around the world.

Tania Rodriguez Riestra, co-founder and CEO of CO_, and her colleagues are now financing the next chapter of that story: somewhere between half a million and a million dollars, structured as a loan. What makes the loan remarkable is not its size but its willingness to wait. Repayments are timed to the harvest. If this were coffee, the structure would be different, because coffee ripens differently; if it were cacao, different again. The loan bends around the realities of the land rather than asking the land to bend around the abstractions of finance.

It sounds like a technical detail. It is a quiet inversion of power. Most finance begins with the institution: capital arrives already shaped, carrying assumptions about time, growth, repayment and risk, and the borrower is expected to adapt. Here, the logic is reversed. The financial structure is designed around the realities of the place, rather than asking the place to conform to the needs of finance. This small decision contains much of what makes CO_ unusual.

Tania was the first person I wanted to speak with for this series because her work offers a glimpse of what capital might become in a time of profound uncertainty. CO_ operates at a scale that matters, but what makes it unusual is not simply the size of its funds. It is the imagination and depth of purpose behind them: the belief that investment can participate in repairing the systems that sustain life rather than simply extracting value from them.

In conversation, Tania has a particular kind of presence. She listens with the same attentiveness she brings to landscapes and communities. She is unhurried, precise and constantly connecting things that conventional finance tends to separate. Through the window behind her is a world of vivid green, a living landscape full of the questions at the heart of her work. I came to the conversation wanting to understand what it takes to invest in that kind of complexity: what happens when capital is asked not only to generate returns, but to become part of a larger process of regeneration.

On paper, CO_ looks like an investment organisation. There is a $35 million Latin American fund investing directly in around fifteen businesses. There is a $60 million global portfolio investing in other fund managers. Alongside it sits a philanthropic foundation providing early-stage grants, much of it to women-led cooperatives. Their first investment was $200,000 into a small company outside Mexico City building biodigesters that turn cow manure into clean cooking fuel. That company is now the largest biogas business in the world, working across India, Africa and Latin America.

Listing the funds, however, only gives part of the picture. In the model CO_ draws of its own work, investing is one element among several, held between two things most investors would rarely place alongside it: on one side, the slow work of shifting how people think; on the other, the governance that determines who holds power over what. Research, collaboration and learning run between them. Money moves through the whole structure, but it is not the thing the structure is organised around. “None of these parts can work by itself,” Tania says.

In practice, this means CO_ spends years doing things that look nothing like investing. The NGO came first and still runs: systems analysis, systems maps, accelerator programmes supporting three or four hundred entrepreneurs a year. When they decided to move from their first fund into food and biodiversity, they did not begin by writing an investment thesis. They spent eighteen months interviewing more than two hundred practitioners. Those people were then asked whether they wanted to stay: to join the monthly calls, to become part of what came next.

The research became a community and the investment strategy emerged from those relationships rather than from analysts working alone. No conventional fund can easily pay for this kind of work. Fee structures are not designed for patient listening, so philanthropy makes it possible. Tania describes that enabling infrastructure as essential rather than peripheral.

It also means the method starts with listening. Twenty-five years ago in Oaxaca, aged nineteen, she spent a year and a half turning desert into oasis with a friend, a grant from the Kellogg Foundation and about twenty volunteers living communally. What she remembers is not the technique but the participatory design sessions, the long work of understanding what the community actually wanted. She has carried that approach ever since: begin with a collective vision, get people listening to one another, and do it not only through the intellect but through the body, because that is what allows it to hold.

“Even when there is no capital available for what emerges,” she says, “the collective seeing of it changes things.”

The place in Oaxaca still exists. She is careful not to claim it as her achievement; it endured because others kept tending it after she left. For her, that is the real lesson. Restoration and regeneration are rarely the work of extraordinary individuals. They are the work of ordinary persistence, shared across a community.

The same patience shapes how CO_ decides whether to invest anywhere. The first questions are not financial; they begin with the place itself. What is happening to the rivers, the soil and the living systems that everything else depends on? How might climate change reshape this landscape over the coming decades? Tania has watched investment models forecast agricultural production with confidence while barely acknowledging the changing hydrology beneath them. “Without water,” she says, “every spreadsheet is fiction.”

The second question is social. Who is already here? Which relationships exist? Which communities are already organising themselves? Is there something living that capital can strengthen without trying to control? If the answer is no, or if the work would require years of relationship-building that nobody is prepared to undertake, then the answer is often not to invest at all. Sometimes restraint is the most regenerative financial decision available.

This is one reason Tania thinks in twenty-year horizons. Forests, rivers, soils and communities regenerate according to biological time rather than financial time.

“Nature’s capacity for recovery is astonishing,” she says, “but only if we stop demanding it perform on quarterly reporting cycles.”

She is clear that this is not something you can take on authority. “You come to trust it by doing it.”

Beneath all of this lies another layer, what CO_ calls schemas: assumptions so familiar that they have become invisible. One is that concentration creates legitimacy, that bigger and more centralised institutions are naturally more credible. Tania traces this back through European history, to the taxation of land and the gradual dismantling of the commons. CO_ deliberately invests in the opposite: cooperatives, commons and collective ownership, which means arguing with several centuries of accumulated assumptions about where power and value sit.

Another is that the economy and the living world are separate domains, and that what is unpriced is unreal. A standing forest becomes valuable when it becomes timber, cropland or a carbon credit. Everything alive beyond those categories is treated as an externality, as though life were happening somewhere beyond the balance sheet.

The third is that extraction is simply how economies work, with circularity available as an add-on rather than a deeper shift in how value is created. In a linear economy, value is often created by taking something from somewhere: a forest, a community, a landscape or a workforce. The damage or depletion created along the way is treated as someone else’s problem.

Circularity can help address some of those consequences, but CO_ is asking a more fundamental question: what would happen if the economy was designed not around extraction and repair, but around the ability of living systems to renew themselves?

Her portfolio is an attempt to make those assumptions look less inevitable than they feel. So is the loan written around the açaí harvest. So is the fund whose returns she describes with the deliberately unglamorous word “appropriate”. So, at the furthest edge of the work, is an exploration of what it might mean for whales to have representation in decisions affecting the oceans they live in.

I ask her what she would say to a room of people deciding where capital goes, and she does not talk about instruments. “The barrier is not technical,” she says. “It is a question of mind.”

We invest in farms, she explains, which are complex by nature, using linear tools and expecting linear outcomes. Then, when those systems fail to behave in predictable ways, we conclude that regeneration does not work.

“A complex problem will not yield to a simplistic mind,” she says. What is required is a tolerance for not knowing, which is uncomfortable in finance and in most other places.

She lives on a biodynamic farm and her family eats from it. This is not a separate life from the investor one, kept for weekends. It is what allows her to tell, quickly, which solutions will take root in a place and which are only convincing on paper.

That discernment has older roots. She grew up wealthy in Mexico City, and much of her childhood care came from a woman from an Indigenous community whose life ran along entirely different lines from the one Tania was being raised into.

Knowing both worlds, rather than knowing one and reading about the other, is what taught her to notice when a proposal is describing a landscape it has never really visited. It also left her with a question about what wealth actually is, one she has never stopped asking. Because she does not think wealth means what the word is usually taken to mean. “Being wealthy is far more than what sits in a bank account,” she says. “It is connection, relationship, curiosity about other people.” It is also, she believes, the things that thick walls and gates tend to cost you.

She considers the richness of her own relationships her greatest privilege. Beyond what her family needs, she directs the rest towards restoring landscapes and communities.

“That,” she says, “is where I become truly wealthy.”

Which leaves a question for anyone reading this with capital to place. Not where should it go, which is the easy version, but what would it take to become the kind of investor a place like the Putumayo could actually use. Patience, mostly. A willingness to be changed by what you fund. And something harder: the nerve to look at the same scope she does, not one company but the living systems it sits within, not one decision but the century of assumptions underneath it. The work asks you to hold more at once than most investing is designed to hold, and that, rather than the money, is usually the harder thing to find.