Systems Transformation Partners advises at the systems level — on the architecture of how institutions coordinate, how resources move across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries, and how diverse actors with different incentives build shared frameworks for action. This practice operates at two scales simultaneously: within organizations navigating their own internal boundaries and silos, and across the multi-institutional landscapes where the most complex global challenges require collective solutions.
Dr. Erica Key founded STP after more than two decades designing and leading coordination infrastructure at global scale. As Executive Director of the Belmont Forum Secretariat, she advanced a co-investment architecture spanning 28+ member governments and engaging 200+ financing programs worldwide — enabling structurally diverse institutions to pool resources and co-design transdisciplinary research without requiring shared legal frameworks.
As a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, she stewarded large-scale federal research portfolios in earth systems and sustainability sciences — working across the agency, with partner federal agencies, and with international scientific bodies including Arctic and polar research programs spanning all seven continents. As Executive Director of the Future Earth US Global Hub, she led global knowledge synthesis, total valuation frameworks, and science-policy translation efforts spanning six continents. She founded the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress — an action-forward global platform that doesn't just convene, it activates: connecting researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and capital allocators to accelerate implementation of sustainability solutions. She advises bodies including the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum and has partnered with institutions across the globe.
STP is deliberately and permanently sector-agnostic. Engagements are shaped around the client's actual challenge, drawing on strategic advisory, coordination design, financing architecture, stakeholder convening, policy translation, and implementation support in whatever configuration the work requires.
If your challenge requires moving across boundaries to build something new — we would welcome the conversation.
Get in touchSTP's engagements span the full range of institutions navigating systems-level change — multilateral bodies and international foundations designing coordination mechanisms; corporations translating sustainability commitments into operational strategy; emerging organizations building the governance and data infrastructure that new regulatory environments require; and frontier initiatives reimagining financial systems, value frameworks, and the relationship between human institutions and the living world.
What these clients share is not a sector or a scale. It is the need to move fluidly across boundaries — between disciplines, geographies, institutional cultures, and ways of knowing — to build something that wouldn't be possible from within a single boundary alone. STP is as comfortable working across departments within a single organization as it is coordinating action across dozens of institutions in multiple countries.
Our programmatic reach is both extensive and inclusive.
This has meant building financing priorities and governance structures for new capital collaboratives; negotiating open data and digital governance frameworks across multi-institutional partnerships; designing science-policy interfaces for intergovernmental processes; developing blended finance architectures for nature-based and community-led initiatives; guiding corporations through the translation of global sustainability frameworks into operational targets; supporting financial innovation aligned with regional and global development agendas; and convening multi-stakeholder processes that produce durable agreements across sectors and geographies.
No two engagements are identical. The capability that runs through all of them is the same.