Habitat education for yards, starting in two metros.

The problem, with what we can currently defend

The Raleigh–Durham CSA holds about 2.3 million people. Inner Northern Virginia (Fairfax County, Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax City) holds on the order of 650,000 households. A year-one target of 150 introductions is a rounding error against that stock. The constraint is not demand in the abstract. It is that a household ready to replace turf still has to find someone who does habitat work and not mowing.

Practitioners we have spoken with in both metros describe books running into the following season. We have not completed a structured survey; that is a month-one task. Until then this is directional, not a cited finding. Year-one work includes calling a defined set of native-plant designers and recording wait times, so the next version of this brief can replace the sentence with a count.

An in-person habitat consult costs $150–$300 and requires scheduling a stranger to walk the lot. Most curious homeowners never clear that bar. A $25 Yard Report — satellite of this address, read against local plant communities — is the first educational product. The next step is a consult, then an install the household pays for directly.

Who is doing this

Erika H. Myers — Lead founder

Erika has spent more than twenty years leading clean energy and decarbonization work across government, consulting, and nonprofit organizations. She has secured and managed over $100 million in philanthropic, grant, and partnership funding, and has built mission-driven organizations from early stage to established institutions — most recently as founding Executive Director of CharIN North America, where she stood up the organization and its member bench of automakers, utilities, charging companies, and grid operators. Before that she directed global e-mobility work at the World Resources Institute and led transportation electrification research at the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Earlier she was a clean energy consultant at ICF International and renewable energy manager for the South Carolina Energy Office. She has led teams of 20 to 120 across multiple continents and advises government, foundation, and multilateral stakeholders. Forbes named her among its 2026 Top Women Influencers in Energy and Climate. She lives in the Washington area and carries Northern Virginia.

Derek Hartwig — Co-founder

Fifteen years in enterprise software, working in business analysis and applied AI development. Builds and maintains the agent layer that runs day-to-day operations. Based in Holly Springs, North Carolina, inside the Raleigh–Durham launch area. He designed and built the Wildlot demonstration — the specialist directory, the introduction flow, and the Yard Report.

There are no employees during the grant period. One founder draws a partial stipend; the other is unpaid.

Board: in formation — three directors seated before the Form 1023 filing.

Why a nonprofit

The charitable purpose is habitat on residential land: converted turf, functioning rain gardens, sited nest boxes, and the public guidance that helps households and homeowners' associations permit that work. The introduction service is how the program is delivered, not the purpose it serves.

Public-benefit outputs we will actually run in year one:

• Free plant guidance tied to ecoregion — the Yard Report's plant list, also published without purchase as county-level guides for the Piedmont and the Chesapeake watershed.
• HOA policy templates that treat native plantings and nest boxes as permitted, not as violations.
• A reserved slice of gifts to cover the introduction fee and consult for lower-income households.
• Published specialist criteria, applied the same way to every applicant.
• Annual public reporting on introductions closed and jobs confirmed complete.

Specialists benefit from being listed. That benefit is incidental to the program and is why the organization takes no percentage of any invoice and never holds job funds. Criteria to join the bench will be published and open to anyone who meets them.

Who already does adjacent work

Wildlot is not a substitute for Wild Ones, Homegrown National Park, the North Carolina Native Plant Society, NC Cooperative Extension, or Audubon at Home in Northern Virginia. Those programs teach and certify. They do not keep a bookable bench of insured specialists or a $25 lot-specific report that ends in an introduction. We intend to sit beside them, list their resources, and send households to Extension and Audubon at Home where those programs are the better next step.

Northern Virginia has public money aimed at the same practices. VCAP, administered through local soil and water conservation districts, reimburses most eligible rain gardens and conservation landscaping at 80% of cost, up to $7,000. Fairfax County’s Conservation Assistance Program runs the same family of practices locally. That is a demand subsidy for the work our specialists perform. The launch rationale for NoVA is that subsidy, not a slogan about the Chesapeake.

How the organization is funded

Earned fees are designed to offset a growing share of operating cost, not to replace philanthropic support. A residential habitat introduction is a low-fee transaction by design, because a percentage of the job would put Wildlot’s interest against the homeowner’s. Grants and gifts sustain the organization; fees reduce what that support has to cover each year. Projections sit in the appendix. They are illustrations, not the case for support.

1. A homeowner requests an introduction. Wildlot collects $25. That amount is an introduction fee, not a percentage of the job. If no specialist accepts within ten days, the fee is refunded.
2. A homeowner may purchase a Yard Report for $25 — satellite of the yard, local climate, a plant list, and suggested next jobs. Sequence: Yard Report → habitat consult → install. The report is the educational product. We have not yet proven people will pay $25 for it; year one is that test.
3. A specialist pays $250 once to cover a background check and processing. The fee is waived for the founding bench — the first 15 specialists per launch metro — and begins with the third market.
4. The specialist invoices the homeowner directly. Wildlot does not hold job funds.
5. Gifts sit alongside fees and support advocacy, HOA templates, and subsidized intros and consults for households who cannot pay the posted fees.

Once introduced, a homeowner and a specialist deal directly, and repeat work does not come back through Wildlot. This is deliberate. The unit the organization measures is the habitat conversion, not the customer relationship, and every repeat job is habitat that cost the organization nothing.

Onboarding is waived for the founding bench so that the first specialists are not asked to pay to join an unproven service. The fee begins with the third market.

Year one earns $11,250 and does not cover formation, insurance, or recruiting. That is the reason for the request.

Use of funds

Wildlot does not take a percentage of specialist invoices. The onboarding fee is waived for the founding bench and begins with the third market. A mobile app would wait until 80–150 introductions have closed. The site you can click through is a demonstration of the product, not a production budget.

How two people run two markets

The request is small because the ongoing operational layer is cheap and the founders are not drawing market salaries. It is not small because the work is small.

Automated. Intake triage and scope checking, listing quality control, scheduling and follow-up messages, Instant Consultation generation, and monthly report assembly all run on purpose-built agents rather than staff time.

Human, and not compressible. Recruiting specialists is a phone call from someone credible in that metro, particularly to designers already booked into the following season. Trust and safety escalations — a no-show, a poor install, a hive dispute with a neighbor — are answered by a founder. Charitable solicitation registration, annual filings, and audit thresholds scale with the number of states, not with ticket volume.

Staffing by stage. Two markets: two founders, no employees. Six to twelve markets: one coordinator. Eighteen to twenty-five markets: two to three staff. Recruiting and compliance drive that curve; matching volume does not.

Year-one plan and milestones

Support is requested as two tranches. The second depends on evidence, not on the calendar.

• Month 6. Fiscal sponsor or filing underway. 10 specialists listed per metro against published criteria. 200 Yard Reports delivered. 30 introductions requested. Structured interviews with at least 12 native-plant designers, wait times recorded.
• Month 12. 15 specialists per metro. 400 Yard Reports. 60 introductions. Report-to-introduction conversion published. If conversion is under 8% after 200 paid reports, we stop treating the Yard Report as the front door and rewrite the model before the second tranche.
• Month 18 / end of grant. About 150 introductions. The first 80 should show whether specialists remain listed and whether households return the following season. Expansion beyond two metros, and any mobile app, wait on that. If fewer than 40 introductions have closed, we do not open a third metro.

Risks we will not talk around

• Commerciality and private benefit. Addressed above. Counsel reviews the program description before filing.
• The Yard Report is unproven and carries most of earned-fee volume at scale. Year one is a paid test, not a forecast. Free county plant lists exist; this product has to be lot-specific enough that households still pay $25.
• If no specialist accepts an introduction within ten days, the $25 is refunded.
• We do not hold job funds, so we will not see completion in a payment event. Completion is a specialist self-report plus a homeowner follow-up at two weeks. “Jobs finished” in reporting means both, not an inferred close.
• Backyard beekeeping is listed only where the specialist handles hive registration (North Carolina) and local and HOA rules (including Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax). Wildlot’s introduction is not a permit. Out-of-scope and hive-by-pool requests are blocked at booking.
• Independent specialists churn. The appendix assumes 50% of those ever onboarded remain listed at year five in the conservative case, 60% realistic — not 80%.

Proposed geography

• Raleigh–Durham

  Proposed year 1

  Founder presence, a long growing season, and specialists whose books already run into the following year.

• Northern Virginia

  Proposed year 1

  Founder presence, established demand for native plantings, and county stormwater and conservation-landscaping programs that already subsidize this work for homeowners. Virginia-only at launch.

• Charlotte

  Proposed year 2

  Similar plant communities and licensing context to the Triangle, within a short drive of Raleigh.

• Atlanta

  Later

  Piedmont ecology transfers, with a large residential base already interested in pollinator plantings.

• Austin

  Later

  Water use is a practical reason households consider converting turf. Considered only after the first two metros are stable.

Markets beyond the five named are selected on the same criteria used to choose the first two: metro population above 500,000, a working population of native-plant nurseries and designers, an existing base of homeowners already converting turf, and a regulatory context that permits backyard hives. Expansion is sequenced on evidence from the launch metros, not on the schedule in the appendix.

This demonstration

The site shows both sides of an introduction, a Yard Report, and a blocked out-of-scope booking. Listings are samples. Recruiting begins at funding.

Carbon credits

Residential plantings do not meet registry standards for additionality, permanence, or scale, and Wildlot does not present a backyard as a carbon project. Conservation tax credit programs in both Virginia and North Carolina apply to perpetual easements on qualifying acreage, which is a land trust's work and not this organization's. If a conservation partner later holds qualifying acres, that is their credit to claim. Carbon is not part of the product and is not in any figure on this page.