How Billionaires Are Pooling Assets for New Philanthropy Fund

Forbes Nov 22, 2017
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philanthropy fund

Billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll and others joined forces this week to launch Co-Impact, a philanthropic collaborative already committed to investing $500 million in global health, education and economic inequality. The high-profile group, primarily made up of signatories of Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, will pool their networks, expertise, and resources to invest in long-term initiatives in the developing world.

Impact Philanthropy is a complex topic, and others found these selections from the Impact Giving archive from Giving Compass to be good resources.

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    Building Shared Understanding for Children and Families

    Giving Compass' Take: • FSG profiles the Staten Island Foundation, which has created an early childhood initiative with equity as a focus and a goal of solving core issues through close community engagement. • Among the tactics this foundation found useful is to make sure there's room for all perspectives and to encourage a healthy dialogue for systems change. Are we doing enough of that in other sectors? • Here are some other community-driven solutions that show promise. As those who have tried to do it before know, convening members of the community around a common issue can be difficult. But when you are able to successfully convene actors around a shared vision, there is a sense of hope that is contagious. The Staten Island Foundation, which first began working with FSG on Tackling Youth Substance Abuse in 2011, partnered with FSG this year to create the Staten Island Alliance for North Shore Children and Families, an early childhood initiative to improve wellbeing for children from birth to 8 years old. FSG supported The Staten Island Foundation in engaging a diverse group of cross-sector stakeholders to develop a common agenda for change, including a guiding vision, equity principles, and preliminary indicators and outcomes (e.g., family engagement, academic success, school readiness, and child health). The initiative’s steering committee worked to ensure that equity stood at the core of this initiative: members developed strategies to intentionally confront systemic barriers to opportunity. As a first step, this included disaggregating data by race, ethnicity, and geography, and inquiring as a group about the disparities that existed.

The new fund reflects an evolving approach to philanthropy that focuses on collaboration between public and private groups to create larger ‘systems change.’ Key to the fund’s model will be open collaboration between philanthropists and social entrepreneurs, local communities, governments, and non-profits. Grants will commit up to $50 million over five year periods for initiatives that have proven outcomes through independent assessments.

Co-Impact goes hand-in-hand with the Giving Pledge and, fittingly, the pledge’s founding director Olivia Leland will serve as the CEO. Leland explained that she was inspired to found the organization after noting the growing number of high net-worth individuals committed to philanthropy, but a lack of infrastructure necessary to turn those commitments into sustainable, scaled investments.

Read the full article by Alexandra Wilson about this philanthropy fund from Forbes

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