Why the LEGO Foundation has launched its largest ever grant

The Lego Foundation has launched a $137 million challenge to tackle what it calls a “global early childhood emergency” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Build a World of Play Challenge will give five-year grants — two worth 100 million Danish krone ($15.2 million) and three worth 200 million krone — to five organizations around the world working with children under the age of six in a wide range of areas, including education, nutrition, family well-being, and reduction in home violence. Ten finalists will receive 6.5 million krone each. The challenge will involve a third of the foundation’s spending over the grant period — the latest example of what Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of the foundation, called a “big bang” approach, where the foundation makes a major investment in a particular thematic area with the intention of sparking new ideas, generating lasting change, and producing a big intervention, which might alter the behavior of institutional donors. In this particular case, the organization is looking for partners with a proven track record on ideas that can be delivered at scale. It hopes that the programs it funds will both support children whose development has been hampered by the pandemic, and demonstrate the importance of early years development, which it says has been “grossly underfunded in the past.” The grants are not limited to development organizations, but Albrectsen said programs in lower- and middle-income countries were a substantial part of the foundation’s plans. “Even pre-pandemic, early childhood development was underfinanced, and had limited attention from governments,” she said. “With COVID, children from birth to 6 years old are being impacted not by the pandemic but everything that has happened around it.” She said the foundation had deliberately left space for proposals looking at many different things. “We’ve framed the problem, which is the lack of attention,” she said. “We don’t want to prescribe how people think it should be solved. We want organizations to come to us with new answers.” The project is the foundation’s largest ever pot of funding, but not the first time it’s tried to make a big investment. In 2018 and 2019, it made grants of $100 million. “This is the third time we’ve used this approach,” she said. “We’ve previously focused on children in crisis and on refugee children. It feels right to me that organizations with our size and our voice should use these kinds of activities to tackle big problems.” Very large grants, she said, also enabled collaboration among organizations which had already successfully delivered. She said solutions that had already worked in one place, or with one group of children, could be picked up elsewhere, and adopted by governments or other funders. Albrectsen also talked about her hopes that the large scale of the project would attract other partners who could also support the organizations which bid. “We hope as we drum up excitement for this challenge, we will find other donors and investors who can come in and find funding for these innovative ideas,” she said. “We expect we will have a lot more ideas than our 900 million Danish kroner can support.” And she stressed the need to give long-term funding. She said the latest round of grants would last for five years, in order to give organizations time to deliver. “There are very few development solutions that create lasting impact and that can be implemented in a short time,” she said. “Sustainability and ownership don’t happen with a one-year grant.” That time comes with flexibility too. “Funders should reflect the reality they are investing in, and not the pre-described results framework,” Albrechtsen said. “Don’t be too rigid. Bring in the expertise, and have a view to adapt.” She added that programs often change, and that funding must be flexible enough to allow for adaptation, though many funders ask grantees to make plans at the start of a grant term and then stick rigidly to them. “There are a lot of unsolved problems out there,” she said. “We hope that philanthropy, with less restricted funds, and the potential to take more risks, can try to solve them. We’re starting to see more of that.”