It’s been a good month for Co-Impact. The organization, which bills itself as a “global philanthropic collaborative focused on improving the lives of millions of people through just and inclusive systems change,” recently got a shoutout from Melinda French Gates as part of her campaign to get more funders to join collaboratives.
Philanthropic collaboratives are among the tools necessary to help “bring people, resources and ideas together in innovative ways,” she recently told the Financial Times, suggesting that donors consider ways of giving that fall outside of the traditional foundation model.
But Co-Impact is just one among many donor collaboratives around the world grabbing the attention and dollars of funders. There are more than 200 collaborative funds, according to a database created by philanthropic advisory firm The Bridgespan Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Donor collaboratives allow philanthropists to pool their funds, usually with the aim of tackling large systemic challenges such as climate change, world hunger, and gender inequalities. Most collaboratives have their own staff and boards to guide the grantmaking process, meaning individual donors aren’t solely responsible for how money from the pooled funds is spent. Many of them are hosted by intermediary organizations such as Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, another global advisory firm.
The Audacious Project is one example. The project was launched in 2018 as a collaboration among funders seeking to raise $250 million to catalyze “social impact on a grand scale” for issues like pollution and COVID-19 pandemic relief. It is “housed” at the TED nonprofit organization, and it is a client of The Bridgespan Group. Partners include the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the Dalio Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, the Skoll Foundation, and Virgin Unite.
Several philanthropic organizations — including the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations — launched the FORGE funding collaborative in 2020 to support workers’ rights groups and help social movements deal with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaborative recently joined the Biden administration to launch a multimillion-dollar international initiative to support workers’ rights “as core to democracy.”
In recent years, several donor collaboratives have emerged to fight climate change and protect the environment. The Climate Rights Funders Collaborative launched in 2019 as an “experimental initiative between a handful of funders” to protect women’s, Indigenous peoples’, and other vulnerable groups’ rights to resources impacted by climate change such as food, water, healthcare, and housing. Members include the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations, True Costs Initiative, Wallace Global Fund, and one anonymous donor.
And then there is, of course, Co-Impact. French Gates has deep ties to the group, which was founded in 2017.
Co-Impact is headed by Olivia Leland, the previous director of the Giving Pledge, which French Gates started more than a decade ago with then-husband Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $50 million to support the launch of Co-Impact’s Gender Fund, which wants to raise $1 billion for gender equality efforts and specifically women-led organizations. Co-Impact recently announced a new multimillion round of grantees for the fund.
In addition to French Gates, Co-Impact’s powerful circle of supporters is like a global who’s who of wealthy women in philanthropy. It includes Tsitsi Masiyiwa of Zimbabwe, Roshni Nadar Malhotra of India, and MacKenzie Scott. Scott gave $50 million to Co-Impact in 2020. She then donated another $75 million to Co-Impact’s Gender Fund in 2021 — her single largest reported gift.
Donor collaboratives can be beneficial to both funders and grantees because they provide an opportunity for funders to learn from each other, gain access to shared resources, help prevent the duplication of philanthropic efforts, increase the size of gifts, and help simplify the application and reporting processes for grantees, according to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Collaboratives can be especially attractive to donors who don’t want to create their own foundations, said Bridgespan co-founder Jeff Bradach. Funders who join collaboratives can avoid many of the responsibilities associated with creating a foundation such as hiring staff and developing a mission.
“More new donors are less interested in building big institutions for themselves,” he told Devex in an interview.
Foundations aren’t going anywhere, but the “big swaths of wealth” are flowing into collaborative funds and direct giving assisted by advisors “in ways that didn’t exist before,” Bradach said. He added that he sees collaboratives as part of a broader “evolution” of philanthropy, which is changing as donors and nonprofits push new tools and new ways of doing things.
Topics such as gender and racial equity are being discussed more openly and urgently within the sector as it grapples with a legacy of white male-dominated leadership. Donor collaboratives tend to have more diverse leadership than foundations and other philanthropic institutions, Bridgespan found in a 2021 study. That’s important, according to diversity advocates like Edgar Villanueva, founder of the Decolonizing Wealth Project.
“A white-dominant mindset inside the [philanthropy] field” influences “who we lift up as experts, who we see as credible, and who we think of as having capacity,” he wrote in a 2018 New York Times editorial.
More than $2 billion is donated annually to collaboratives working on social, economic and environmental issues, according to Bridgespan research. If donors increase their support, collaboratives could distribute roughly $15 billion annually, the data showed.
There’s always been collaborative philanthropy and people doing things jointly, but the scale of Co-Impact and other funds directed at certain regions and certain issues is new, Bradach said.
They are growing and they speak to a desire among donors who are “interested and willing to give money in this different kind of way,” he said.
Update Jan. 18, 2023: This story has been updated to clarify the relationship between The Audacious Project and The Bridgespan Group.