Croatan Institute

Croatan Institute is an independent institute for advanced social and environmental research and engagement. With initial funding from foundations, sustainable investment groups, civil society, and community development organizations, the Institute’s activities address some of the most complex sustainability challenges of our time, often in close partnership with practitioners in the field and movements for social and environmental change.  

The Institute’s initial projects concentrate on the nexus of finance and sustainability. Our engagements conceptualize fossil-free pathways for a more resilient future and develop new models of impact investing, new approaches to engagement with corporations on social and environmental issues, and new forms of sustainable investment in underserved communities, clean energy infrastructure, and alternative economic paradigms. 

The Institute’s team includes a group of committed, interdisciplinary experts, researchers, and critics working on issues such as climate change and energy, environmental and social impact investing, food and agriculture, inequality, institutional accountability, international development, land use, labor and social equity, public health, social history and theory, resilient community development, sustainable and responsible investment, transportation, and water.  

Launched publicly on Earth Day in 2014 in the Research Triangle of North Carolina with an extended team based in Boston and New York, Croatan Institute was initially incubated at Tellus Institute, the Boston-based sustainability think tank where several of the founding team members and advisers remain affiliated.  The Institute is governed by a board of concerned citizens and environmental entrepreneurs and counseled by a Board of Advisers drawn from a diverse cross-section of leaders representing organizations working on environmental sustainability and social equity in science, civil society, business, and academe.