Prosoco Covers Our Work

Legacy construction materials innovator, Prosoco, features the work of Center for Infrastructure and Society on their We Build It Together campaign.

Introduction of article:

How one Bay Area carpenter wants to connect regenerative construction to millions in venture capital. 

Ask someone to describe Adam Sgrenci, and they’ll likely tell you he’s a connector. It just comes naturally to this self-described lifelong carpenter to connect people, ideas and industries. Sometimes his connections are easy to see, like our labor shortage and housing crisis. Other times, the connections feel obscure at face value, like skateboarding and an ex-dictator’s abandoned Tunisian estate.

But they’re there, and Sgrenci wants to find them.

A professional trajectory full of rich, offbeat experiences led Sgrenci to his current role as the founder and executive director for the Center for Infrastructure and Society (CIS). This Bay Area start-up is a social enterprise, Sgrenci says – a “regenerative investment vehicle.”

His brush with Silicon Valley’s tech industry told him the money was there – “impact” venture capital eager for investments that do more than produce a certain return. He saw desire to invest in funds that give back (aka regenerate) in ways that check off the triple bottom line: economically, environmentally and socially. There was enough interest and “patient capital,” in fact, to make impact investment assets worth an estimated $1 trillion today – a number that’s expected to grow.

When Sgrenci saw a gap between the money and the regenerative projects, he realized construction could be the bridge between them.  

A string of international gigs working alongside project teams in West Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia provided all the proof he needed to know it could work.

Read full article written by Darcy DeVictor Boyle on Prosoco's site here