About
The measures are free. Applying them is our work.
Defense as a Service™ gives its ideas away on purpose, so that more people use them. What we offer institutions is the judgment to apply them well.
The posture
The ideas and the measures are open. Anyone may use the Five Pillars, the definitions of the Prevention Ratio™ and the Prevention Dividend™, the way both are calculated, and the public Ledger, and the field will be better for more people working with them. A metric no one else can compute is a service, not a standard.
What we keep is the practical work: the full method for sorting spending and the judgment it takes, the way engagements are designed, and, in time, the verified data a benchmark needs. The trademarks keep the measures consistent as more people use them. The book says it plainly: “The frameworks are released for public use under the principle that paradigm shifts require many builders; the trademarks protect quality and coherence as the approaches scale” (Chapter 10, note 3).
The founder
Laurie Lane-Zucker is the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, PBC, the global platform and network for the impact economy, and the author of The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy (Berrett-Koehler, 2026). He coined the term “impact entrepreneur” in 2011, when he founded the company, and co-coined and co-developed “place-based education” in the mid-1990s.
Defense as a Service grows out of more than thirty years of work on what makes communities and institutions last. As founding executive director of the Orion Society from 1992 to 2004, he led the organization built around Orion magazine, launched the Orion Grassroots Network, and in the months after September 11, 2001, conceived and edited The New Patriotism, a book series whose authors included Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and David James Duncan. Its first volume, Berry’s In the Presence of Fear, argued that a society dependent on centralized systems and fossil energy is structurally fragile, regardless of its military spending. In 2003 he convened, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Pocantico summit at which Paul Raskin presented the Global Scenario Group’s two trajectories, Fortress World and Great Transition, that this work has carried ever since. He went on to found the Triad Institute and Hotfrog, one of the first Certified B Corporations and the first company to complete an equity transaction on an impact investment exchange. Impact Entrepreneur followed in 2011.
Defense as a Service carries that work forward.
Senior advisors
Stephen Cauffman
Senior Advisor
A consultant on community and infrastructure resilience, through Foresight Consulting. He retired from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2024 as Chief of the Resilience Services Branch, where he was responsible for development and management of security and resilience assessment products, the Regional Resiliency Assessment Program, and the Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework. Before that he spent 19 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he served in several leadership positions, was program manager for the World Trade Center Investigation, led NIST’s study of damage to buildings and infrastructure following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and initiated NIST’s program on community resilience.
Calandra Cruickshank
Senior Advisor
Founder and CEO of StateBook International™, a location-intelligence company that uses data science to guide investment decisions. Calandra works with Fortune 500 companies, economic-development organizations, government agencies and investors. With the International Sustainable Resilience Center, she developed the first digital Economic Resilience Scorecard™. She also lectures on data science for real estate at the MIT Center for Real Estate. She serves on the advisory boards of the Michael A. Klump Center for Real Estate at the University of Colorado Boulder, George Mason University’s Center of Excellence in Government Cybersecurity Risk Management and Resilience, and the International Sustainable Resilience Center.
Don Graves
Senior Advisor
Served as the 19th U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce, the department’s chief operating officer, overseeing its 13 bureaus including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He wrote its first National Security Strategy, and directed the federal efforts to support the recovery of Puerto Rico. Previously, he led the federal effort to stabilize Detroit during and after its bankruptcy, directed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and led small business, community development and housing policy, including overseeing the CDFI Fund at the Treasury.
The partnership
Defense as a Service works in partnership with Impact Entrepreneur, PBC. Impact Entrepreneur provides the platform and the network. Defense as a Service does the hands-on work with institutions. The two share a founder and a framework.
The marks
Defense as a Service™, DaaS™, Prevention Dividend™, and Prevention Ratio™ are trademarks of Laurie Lane-Zucker. Three of the four, Defense as a Service, Prevention Dividend, and Prevention Ratio, are the subject of pending applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. See the trademark notice.
A life’s work, brought to the budgets where security is paid for.
A first conversation is a diagnostic, and it costs nothing.