SUMMARY

We design a philanthropic portfolio to achieve the enduring outcomes of our mission. We choose partners and make gifts along a spectrum of risk and across multiple theses, avoiding the temptation to deploy capital only toward prominent ventures.

 

REDEMPTIVE OPPORTUNITIES

1. Aligned with our mission, we set multi-year impact goals for our portfolio as a whole. We recognize that shorter-term goals (measured in months) may be necessary for some projects or pilot programs we fund; in other instances, we set goals to longer-term horizons (measured in years or decades).

2. We actively seek out mission-aligned nonprofits through research and relationships, instead of primarily reacting to inbound inquiries. We recognize that some of the highest-potential, highest-performing, and most-aligned ventures do not easily achieve public status and may acquire new partners through quieter means.

3. We intentionally develop a pipeline of funding candidates who are underrepresented in our nonprofit community due to gender, racial, ethnic, geographic, denominational, or socio-economic differences. We prioritize leaders closest to the communities and issues we serve, and we design selection processes with leaders in mind who have taken risks to cross cultural boundaries and often experience lower capital outcomes as a result of bias.

4. We consider alternative models for funding innovation and discovery, including research grants, prizes, and awards that incentivize imaginative work to test our theses and advance our areas of interest.

5. We allocate part of our granting portfolio to non-program activities that drive sustainability but might not otherwise be funded—including spiritual health, team development, sabbaticals, key role grants, and benefits.

6. To remain flexible to respond to unanticipated needs, we set aside a portion of our capital to support organizations in emergency or opportunistic situations. 

7. We approach the portfolio as an aggregate effort instead of a set of individual, mutually exclusive gifts. We balance ventures at the edge of innovative excellence in their space, as well as more mature institutions with reliable scale dynamics. This perspective encourages us toward a mission-driven lens and helps avoid the common “winners and losers” posture with the nonprofit leaders we serve.