Susan Crown has spent a substantial part of her career in the business of giving away money. Among other work, Crown spent 25 years professionalizing the previously ad-hoc Crown Family Philanthropies (she’s a member of one of IP’s 40 most powerful families in philanthropy) before launching the Susan Crown Exchange, which she has led since 2009.
Since its founding, SCE’s giving has been focused on a single goal: “preparing youth to thrive in a rapidly changing world.” To achieve what reads like a very broad remit on a fairly modest grantmaking budget (grants totaled around $5.4 million in 2024), SCE has refined the scope of its work into three main areas: Tech and Society, Social and Emotional Learning (a sadly politicized term that basically boils down to the essential “soft” skills that youth need to develop to succeed in business and leadership as adults), and Youth Sports. SCE’s Million Coaches Challenge, originally launched in 2021 to train 1 million youth coaches in youth development best practices, reached that goal in just four years. In June, the challenge announced an additional $2 million in funding to support “a national effort designed to dismantle systemic barriers to quality coaching across the United States,” according to the program’s press release. A fourth SCE initiative, the Catalyst Awards, awards grants to nonprofits outside of the Exchange’s main focus areas.
In its efforts to promote youth wellbeing, SCE has partnered with Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal, including on the nonprofit Young Futures’ efforts to make it easier for young people to grow up in a digital age, and standing up the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard.
Prominent in how SCE presents itself is its “exchange philosophy,” which elevates the goal of upending the traditional power dynamics between funders and grantees and “treating the organizations we support as true partners in shared objectives.” It’s yet another example of a funder adopting some of the principles of trust-based philanthropy — and it’s always interesting to note when someone from the super-rich set moves in that direction.
By the time she founded the organization, Crown told me, “I was done sitting around the burled walnut table talking about these people that we were helping. I wanted to get much closer to the problem and much closer to those who were on the front lines — and view them not as people begging me for money and jumping through hoops and telling me I couldn’t tell an unfunny joke, but engaging them as partners.”
As Crown explained, SCE Executive Director Haviland Sharvit developed a “challenge model” which involved sending an RFP to thousands of youth-serving organizations. They sent in a brief letter of intent, “and we made it very clear that what we wanted to do was set up a community of peers; that we’d have a facilitator and researcher [for grantee convenings].” After a “thorough, pretty rigorous interview and selection process,” Crown said, “what we did was, we made sure that these people who often operated in isolation, don’t have a peer group, and definitely aren’t appreciated” receive “great care” while working with SCE.
The challenge model, Sharvit said, revolves around “convening our partners — so, academics, researchers and the leaders and practitioners in these nonprofits — to come together to explore issues and continue to add insight, research and value to the fields in which we’re working.”
Nonprofit leaders hearing about yet another funder that holds convenings may read those words and groan. After all, nonprofit leaders are often obliged to travel to sometimes-inconvenient locations, taking time away from their real work to do so. But SCE convenings work differently than others.
Sharvit said the effort involved in attending SCE’s convenings is “top of mind as we’re launching these challenges.” Convenings are held once a year, not quarterly, and SCE works to schedule grantee gatherings around events that the nonprofit leaders are already likely to attend. “So in the sports case with the Million Coaches Challenge, the majority of folks were attending the Project Play Summit that the Aspen Institute [an SCE grantee] puts on, so we would plan our convenings around that.” Also, she said, “the structure of the convening is ultimately to help these leaders and practitioners make connections with each other and add value to their own work.” SCE further supports attendees by including both researchers whose job is to compile learnings about best practices generated by each funding cohort, and communications partners to support grantees with messaging around their work.
The word has gotten out. Sharvit said that nonprofits are increasingly asking to participate in convenings whether or not they’re among SCE’s grantees. “Especially with this Million Coaches Challenge, we’ve had folks knocking at the door that weren’t part of the initial cohort that just want to be part of the community,” she said. “They want to attend the events,” be on the challenge cohort’s email list and otherwise participate in and benefit from the collaborative work being done. There’s so much interest, Sharvit said, that SCE has tried to find ways to expand the communities around its initiatives beyond its grantee cohorts.
Regardless of ability to attend a convening, nonprofits and others can access the research and reports that SCE has created from the lessons that grantees learn from each other during convenings and other collaborations — resources that the foundation provides freely on its website.
Does SCE deliver on its intent to partner with grantees as equals?
While these aspects of how it works with grantees make SCE a worthy target for grantseekers, a quick visit to the funder’s website may disappoint many youth-serving nonprofit leaders. For one thing, the Susan Crown Exchange doesn’t accept applications; instead, it issues open calls for the initiatives it pursues. To put it another way, don’t call them — they’ll (open) call you.
Looking more deeply, IP surveyed the most recent available 990 IRS forms for 20 of SCE’s past and current grantees. The results were revealing: Only one SCE grantee reported net assets of under $500,000, while several had assets in the seven, eight, and even nine-figure range. An additional seven grantees we sampled hadn’t filed 990 forms, in some cases because the grantee program was an initiative of a much larger entity; for example, LiFEsports at The Ohio State University. And, in one case, a grantee with chapters across several states and cities filed multiple 990s. In other words, the Susan Crown Exchange appears to like working with nonprofits that lie either within its own financial weight class or well above it.
According to Sharvit, “we focus on investing in emerging opportunities and ‘white spaces,’ where ecosystem-building and field development often require organizations with the operational capacity to work across fragmented landscapes.” For example, “With the Million Coaches Challenge, each organization was required to train at least 5,000 coaches [in youth development best practices]. As a part of our selection process, we wanted to ensure that each organization had the capacity and infrastructure to meet those requirements.”
SCE’s approach, according to Sharvit, doesn’t entirely close the door to smaller organizations. “Looking ahead, we expect our funding in the AI and technology space could include a mix of organizations, from early-stage nonprofits to more established institutions.”
Sharvit also pointed to SCE’s practice of collaborative funding, citing The Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund— in which the Exchange has joined Pivotal and Pinterest to support youth and intergenerationally led nonprofits involved in the responsible technology movement.
While smaller organizations that lack the budget to follow up on the open calls that come their way may be disappointed, evidence points to SCE as a funder that plays very well with its chosen grantees. Additionally, the work it produces in collaboration with nonprofits has the potential to bolster the results of other organizations whether or not they ever receive a cent.
“Unlike any experience we’ve ever had with funders”
IP contacted 16 previous SCE grantees and offered them the opportunity to comment about their experiences as grantees entirely on background, and didn’t receive a single negative response. To be fair, we didn’t receive many responses of any kind. Some organizations declined while others ignored the request and, in one case, a past grantee no longer seems to exist. However, the responses we did receive were strongly positive.
For example, a spokesperson for a nonprofit who wished to speak on background said that while their organization wasn’t in a position to speak to SCE’s current work, “we had a great experience” partnering with the organization. Another nonprofit spokesperson told IP via email that “SCE was uniquely generous and thoughtful in how we were treated and compensated” during the convenings their organization attended as part of their work with the Susan Crown Exchange. “They made us feel like experts. It was unlike any experience we’ve ever had with funders.”
Obviously, these few examples don’t definitively prove that the Susan Crown Exchange lives up to its stated goal of upending the traditional power dynamics between funders and grantees and “treat[ing] the organizations we support as true partners in shared objectives.” After all, even past grantees may hesitate to potentially harm their future chances with any foundation. Still, my own conversations with Crown and Sharvit highlighted their mutual commitment to that goal.
A call for “communication and willingness” to work together
Susan Crown’s own net worth isn’t clear, but she is a member of a family with an estimated net worth of $18.3 billion and the chair and CEO of the private equity company Owl Creek Partners LLP. Given the good that SCE has achieved so far, it’s reasonable to wonder when, or if, Susan Crown or other members of her family might decide to put more of their money behind it.
At the same time, the same can be said about nearly all wealth holders whether or not they’re philanthropically inclined. Most of those with vast wealth can, and arguably should, give much more than they currently do.
For Crown and Sharvit, however, how one gives, and interacts with recipients, seems to be the crux of the matter. Sharvit called on other philanthropies to “think about their relationships with their grantees. Are they really elevating the expertise and impact of these partners?” This includes increasing opportunities for dialog, transparency and reducing bureaucracy.
Centering nonprofits as the experts in the field, she said, “just shifts the way of thinking, and ultimately, the impact that I think philanthropy in general is able to achieve.” Sharvit also held up the overlap in the issues that individual foundations are working on, and called on SCE’s funding peers to engage in “a lot more communication and willingness to either exchange information or pool funds together.” As someone who has followed and reported on philanthropy for years now, I, for one, hope that becomes common practice sooner than later.
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