To Meet Urgent Needs, Philanthropic Partnerships Are a Must. Here’s How We Made Ours Work
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To confront today’s perfect storm of urgent global challenges, we must operate in new and different ways. Although sector norms and financial incentives do not always make it easy, that often means working together.
This is precisely the conclusion that Co-Impact and The Philanthropy Workshop came to after years of working alongside each other as philanthropy-serving organizations with distinct but complementary missions. Co-Impact convenes funders to pool resources and make large, long-term, flexible grants to systems change initiatives led by locally rooted leaders advancing gender equality and women’s leadership. TPW is a global community of more than 400 philanthropists committed to amplifying best practices and unlocking philanthropic resources.
Following a year of collaboration and discussion, this fall, we formalized a partnership to leverage each organization’s core strengths in order to drive significantly more resources toward solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
This was not the easiest path we could have taken. Collaboration requires focused effort and the readiness for all parties to relinquish some degree of control. But the process was enormously beneficial to each partner, and we’re now able to accomplish far more than we ever could alone. It also taught us important lessons that reaffirm the benefits of collaboration and make us keen to continue partnering with, supporting, and learning from other organizations, too.
Forging a partnership
For years, Co-Impact and TPW pursued our work in parallel, making an impact, but in separate lanes—Co-Impact bringing funders together to support at scale the social initiatives it selects, and TPW mobilizing donors to give more strategically, and ultimately, unlock more resources. Our relationship was one of mutual respect, although we worked separately at attracting and supporting philanthropists who shared our values, and we provided them different offerings.
All the while, we were in conversation, candidly sharing our frustrations with the status quo and our beliefs that philanthropy could do so much more. We recognized that we were encouraging collaboration among our donors, but we could do more to walk the talk as organizations. It also became clear that, rather than pursuing a path of typical “growth”—adding new functions in competition with each other (e.g., TPW creating a fund or Co-Impact creating new services for its funding community), exploring a partnership was far more strategic—and in the short run, more challenging.
As a sector responding to increased global urgency, we know that proven solutions to advancing systems change exist, and we need approaches that recognize that no organization or funder is single-handedly going to drive the change on their own. We must build partnerships to leverage resources, community knowledge and lessons learned. Using this context, Co-Impact and TPW undertook an exploratory process to answer key questions like:
What is each organization’s core competency?
How can we serve communities and the field better by working together versus as separate organizations?
And how can we craft a partnership that doesn’t overwhelm our operations?
A core part of our process was choosing an open-source approach to our work. Through regular, cross-continent, video-enabled conversations between us and our teams, we shared openly about our opportunities and challenges and examined where we could provide our communities the best of both Co-Impact’s and TPW’s offerings. We were honest about our strengths, weaknesses and barriers. This took considerable time, effort and investment, but it was deeply important.
One of the drivers behind our partnership was asking, “How can we facilitate greater impact by making it easier for our donors?” We knew that continuing to approach and engage them separately (along with the many other organizations doing similar work) was not an efficient long-term strategy. We were willing to yield to each other in service of better social outcomes.
As part of our partnership, every TPW member can benefit from Co-Impact’s deep experience with what it takes to achieve equitable systems change at scale. And every Co-Impact funder joins TPW’s global peer network of social investors, where they can benefit from 25-plus years of expertise educating, building community, and catalyzing action among peer partners.
Why partnerships are necessary
Candidly, this partnership arose from mutual feelings of trust, ambition and frustration—and a recognition that we have an accountability and new sense of urgency to take risks and speak more openly about what is and what is not working in philanthropy. There are powerful initiatives in need of funding and there is unprecedented and increasing wealth in the philanthropic sector to deploy (over $61 trillion!)—so what is the bottleneck?
While often well-intended, existing systems and infrastructures are frequently siloed and outdated. There are too many nonprofits competing with each other instead of leveraging core competencies. Organizational duplication, short-term funding cycles, and bureaucracy waste time and money. Traditional restricted funding does not incentivize collaboration or innovation—it more often hinders it. Employing trust-based practices that could better support collaboration is not often the norm. It requires identifying qualified partners, embracing a long-term view, taking informed risks, and relinquishing control so that every party can do what they are best at. And to produce the kind of big change we need to see, it has to happen not just between funders and grantees, but among donor-supporting organizations, too.
Despite all the “collaboration talk” in philanthropy—funders ask it of nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits ask it of funders—the reality is that financial incentives do not align to encourage it. Too many social sector organizations are forced to compete for support instead of aligning their talents and operations. And too many influential leaders and institutions with significant resources are not engaging in social issues beyond occasional, relatively nominal charitable donations.
We see the transformative potential of greater efficiency, shared knowledge, grassroots expertise and open-source systems. We need to remove the roadblocks embedded in philanthropic structures and practices. For that to happen, we must fundamentally re-examine and change how many of our social systems operate.
Early next year, Co-Impact is launching its second fund, the Gender Fund, which aims to raise and grant $1 billion to support equitable outcomes in healthcare, education and economic opportunity for more than 100 million people, while advancing women’s leadership, agency and power. Meanwhile, the TPW community contributed $1 billion to proven global solutions in 2020, and aims to grow from 400 to 2,500 members over the next five years, unlocking $10 billion of philanthropic capital annually across all Sustainable Development Goal issues by 2026. Our partnership will help both organizations achieve these significant objectives.
Nonprofit collaboration is hard. It can be messy. It can be slow. It is usually not funded. And it is essential for real progress. We don’t have all the answers—we’ll make mistakes and will continue to learn alongside each other to optimize our effectiveness.
In the spirit of progress, we hope you will join us in this moment of bold movements, truth telling, true partnerships and accelerated philanthropic outcomes. We are committed to this journey with a learner’s mindset. We are candidly assessing our strengths and weaknesses and are seeking partners who complement efforts and compensate for taking more risks. We are committed to transparently sharing our results and learnings.
While the global challenges facing humanity are daunting, by leveraging our mutual assets, we know we can unlock proven solutions, deploy new resources, and transform the way we work—from operating in silos to working in solidarity.
Renee Kaplan is CEO of the Philanthropy Workshop. Olivia Leland is founder and CEO of Co-Impact.
