What Is the Future of Public/Private Partnerships and Why Do They Remain Important?

Video Transcript

I really enjoy working with clients who want to make a difference. It’s really the ethic of impact council practice. Many of us here at Avisen get to collaborate with our clients in doing so. As a former elected official myself and having worked in the White House and trying to make a change happen quickly, the government actually works really well at making a scale of impact, but speed is not really the strength of the public sector. That’s the strength of the private sector. I really think that there are solutions and experimentation that happens in the private sector, nonprofits, benefit corporations to conventional new startup LLC structures across the board that can try out new things and can have a deep impact. For me, also the deployment of capital is really critical.

We can’t always just write a blank check or an open check from taxpayer funds. There are challenges to doing so, and I’ve always said let’s deploy private capital to solve big challenges as fast as we can. In some cases, we work to structure small public funds as guarantees or risk mitigation strategies, for instance, to make solar more accessible to low and moderate-income customers, and residence homeowners. You couldn’t just do that by spending public dollars or utility dollars. But we can’t always get institutional investors to invest in markets that they don’t quite understand. This helps us expand access and go faster than we might be able to do just relying entirely on public action.