The Lancaster Revolving Water Fund (Lancaster RWF) operates in Lancaster County, PA, the most productive non-irrigated farming country in the country, situated at the southern edge of the agriculturally rich Susquehanna River Watershed within the Chesapeake Bay Basin.

The Lancaster RWF was founded in 2021 as a joint partnership between i2 Capital and the Lancaster Clean Water Partners (Partners) which aligns expertise in blended finance and public-private partnership models with a broad partnership of conservation, business, and regulatory leaders. This expertise positions the Lancaster RWF to work alongside the region's thousands of producers and municipalities to increase access to capital and scale up implementation.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP), nearly half of the more than 1,400 miles of streams in Lancaster County are considered impaired. The Partners was founded in 2018 to unite Lancaster’s various perspectives to reduce nutrient and sediment impairments to achieve a shared vision of clean and clear water by 2040. The Partners is a countywide, collaborative partnership of diverse partner organizations – with local leaders in business, municipal public service, higher education, conservation planning, and non-profit management – that come together with a focused set of priorities and strategies to dramatically reduce nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment flowing into Lancaster County streams and ultimately into the Chesapeake Bay.

Together, i2 Capital, the Conservation Innovation Fund (CIF) and the Partners are working to integrate the Lancaster RWF model into the financing equation for producers and municipalities, which need to increase the scale of watershed conservation efforts across this critical agricultural landscape. Because the Partners have a broad remit and access to various funding sources, the Lancaster RWF benefits from a comprehensive view of where and how various conservation practices and projects are identified and funded from within the conservation funding landscape. This allows the effort to begin to more efficiently align funding sources, and to blend or substitute market-based funding with grant-based funding as appropriate to achieve targeted water quality outcomes. Further, in partnership with Ecosystem Services Market Consortium, the Lancaster RWF is piloting a corporate carbon offtake agenda that stacks water and carbon assets to produce maximum benefits for regional producers while achieving corporate sustainability objectives in line with global carbon quantification and reporting standards.