AWARDEE PROFILE: Garfield Foundation

In recognition of your thoughtful and equitable manner in supporting systems transformation.

The Garfield Foundation supports changemakers, via grants and advising, to deliver greater impact through systems understanding and networked action. All of the Garfield Foundation’s programmes are integrated and address complex environmental and/or sustainability challenges, while at the same time advancing the field of systems informed collaboration. Its network support grants are focused on supporting multi-stakeholder networks to build their systemic and collaborative capacity and efficacy to solve complex social-environmental issues.

The Foundation has embraced a systems mindset, contributing to systems change itself as an organisation rather than simply funding others. For over 15 years, it has striven to craft collaborative networks in pursuit of an approach that helps grantees and funders engaged in monumental systems change agendas to create greater impacts. On top of its long term, flexible funding to facilitate transformative change over multiple years, it has provided non-financial support to strengthen social entrepreneur organisations.

Recognising its thoughtful and equitable support of systems transformation, we are proud to give Garfield Foundation the Catalyst 2030 Award.

We at @GarfieldFdn are delighted to be recognized by #C2030Awards for our work to support #systemspractice. We applaud our #collaborativenetwork ptnrs @reamp, @CFENetwork & many other amazing networks we’re honored to support. Deeply inspired by their vision, heart & commitment. – Jennie Curtis, Garfield Foundation Executive Director

Our team at @GarfieldFdn is honored to be recognized by our Catalyst 2030 peers. Collaborating on #systemicchange—across silos & difference—is essential. Let’s find new “unusual” partners & complement each other’s actions to ripple out bigger impacts together. #C2030Awards – Ruth Rominger, Garfield Foundation Collaborative Networks Program Director

Visit the Garfield Foundation website

Drosos Foundation

Drosos foundation is committed to enabling disadvantaged people to improve their social and economic situations by promoting creative skills and economic independence. Start-up funding is aimed at facilitating pioneering work that sustains positive developments within society. Drosos Foundation seeks long-term impacts from its projects which continue to develop long after the projects have ended.

Visit the Drosos Foundation website

Echidna Giving

Echidna Giving is a private funder with one sole aim: delivering the promise of girls’ education. They quicken the pace of change in girls’ education in two ways: catalysing work that promises to fast-track outcomes for girls. Their chosen accelerators address pivotal moments in a girl’s life: early childhood and adolescence. They also support a robust ecosystem of girls’ education implementers, advocates, researchers, leaders and champions across lower-income countries.

“At Echidna Giving, we deeply value and respect the expertise of our grantees, so it is a real honor to be nominated by them. We embrace trust-based philanthropy grantmaking practices to empower and support our grantees with the tools, resources, and community they need to scale their solutions and shift systems.”

Visit the Echidna Giving website

Engagement Migros

Engagement Migros partners with pioneers with innovative ideas to tackle social and environmental issues. Their collaborative approach involves a deep relationship with partners, a shared agreement on goals, and long-term funding. Additionally, Engagement Migros supports projects that aim to benefit individuals and society through ethical and responsible technological advancement.

Visit the Engagement Migros website

Imago Dei Fund

Imago Dei Fund invests in visionary and impactful organisations working to advance universal human rights, gender balance, justice and spiritual holism. Their values align with innovative agents who are challenging cultural and religious systems that perpetuate injustice. They co-created the African Visionary Fund to provide an avenue for donors to move resources quickly to African visionaries without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops.

Visit the Imago Dei Fund website

Mark Leonard Trust

The Mark Leonard Trust focuses on education/training, environment conservation and community development. It does so by making grants to various organisations with the objective to develop both organisational capacity and impact through a major grants’ portfolio for mutual learning and problem solving among charities. Its main target communities are children/young people, as well as other charities or voluntary bodies.

 “We are so glad to be awarded one of the first Catalyst2030 Awards. Mark and Zivi Sainsbury set up the Mark Leonard Trust in the 1990s, and our main concerns are Climate Change and environment, food sustainability, younger people at risk, and music as a catalyst for social development. A little over ten years ago, we realised our ambition to be not just donors but investors in our group of partners, newly envisaged as entrepreneurs. The close, honest engagement with our ventures has transformed how we feel we can contribute as grant-funders. We see our role as using our resources and networks to build their capacity, to get round obstacles in their path and reach their goals for growth and impact, in the knowledge of the commitment of a long-term social investor.” – The Mark Leonard Trust

Visit the Mark Leonard Trust website

Open Road Alliance

The Open Road Alliance has a long history of offering quickly available grants or loans in times of crisis or funding gaps. They were very well placed and made additional commitments when the COVID-19 crisis hit, on top of sharing their years of experience, knowledge and practice with so many other donors. Open Road offers fast, flexible and affordable funding — both grants and loans — to organisations facing discrete, unforeseen financing gaps that threaten to derail their work.

 “As a team, Open Road is thrilled to be nominated for the Catalyst 2030 Award. For nearly a decade, we have been dedicated to providing the fast, flexible capital that social entrepreneurs need when facing unexpected obstacles. The past year has reinforced just how critical this type of entrepreneur-centric capital is to keeping impact on track.” – Maya Winkelstein, CEO, Open Road Alliance

Visit the Open Road Alliance website

Osprey Foundation

Osprey Foundation empowers individuals and communities through education, health, economic opportunity and human rights in a sustainable way. They act as catalysers for collaborative systems change through grants, capacity building projects and impact investment. The Osprey Foundation co-founded and funds Agenda for Change, a collaboration of 14 organisations focused on systems change in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector.

“The Osprey Foundation appreciates being recognized by Catalyst 2030 as a funder of systems change. We support systems change because we believe it’s the best way to achieve sustainable, scalable and affordable basic services for everyone, including the poor. In Osprey’s water, sanitation and hygiene program, our largest program area, funding for systems change approaches accounted for almost half of our grantmaking in 2020 and informed all of our other work. Among our systems-change grantees are two Catalyst 2030 members, the WASH Agenda for Change and Water For People. Osprey provides flexible funding to these and other organizations and initiatives in order to find better ways to build the collaborative local systems – including communities, governments, and the private sector – needed to make a real and lasting difference in people’s lives.”

Visit the Osprey Foundation website

Stiftung Mercator Schweiz

Stiftung Mercator Schweiz partners with organisations that share their commitment to building an open-minded society which provides youth with equal education opportunities. Their approach includes research and practical projects, empowering organisations in their development and ensuring that knowledge and experiences are shared and spread. In 2019, it supported a total of 389 projects in Switzerland.

Andrew Holland | Director

“Our Goal is to initiate transformative processes and enable social change. In our rapidly changing world, this requires a systemic view of the challenges, a holistic and iterative approach to developing solutions and strong civil society actors and ecosystems.”

Visit the Stiftung Mercator Schweiz website

Tecovas Foundation

Tecovas Foundation supports systemic social change by ensuring that social entrepreneurs have access to the tools they need to scale, collaborate and build capacity. They are committed to funding access to solutions and know-how that locals and communities already have. Their approach is to invest in innovative projects and to help scaling-up while collaborating with social entrepreneurs and others.

Visit the Tecovas Foundation website

Thousand Currents

Thousand Currents funds grassroots groups and movements led by women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in the Global South. Their partners are currently working with more than 200 million women, small farmers, Indigenous Peoples, urban residents, sexual and ethnic minorities and youth. They are interested in supporting food sovereignty, alternative economics and climate justice.

Visit the Thousand Currents website

AWARDEE PROFILE: Ford Foundation

In recognition of your leadership during the COVID-19 crisis and encouraging other donors to increase giving. 

In response to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, the Ford Foundation is leading a group of foundations that are collectively looking to increase their giving by $1.7 billion over the coming two years. Ford Foundation is issuing $1 billion in Social Impact Bonds, the net proceeds of which will enable the foundation to pay out more than 10 percent of the value of its total endowment in 2020 and 2021, which is double the level of grant-making required by law.

Working with the Council on Foundations in the US, the Ford Foundation led a call to action during the COVID-19 crisis to loosen or eliminate the restrictions on current grants, contribute to community-based emergency response funds, commit to listening to their partners and especially to those communities least heard, and to consider adjusting their practices more fundamentally in the future based on lessons learnt from the crisis. This was perhaps the most significant sign of a change in thinking by a major philanthropic organisation – to trust social entrepreneurs more, at least during the pandemic.

In recognition of its attempts to work in true partnership and level power dynamics between donor organisations and social entrepreneurs, we are proud to confer the Catalyst 2030 Award upon the Ford Foundation.

Visit the Ford Foundation website

Bush Foundation

The Bush Foundation continuously listens to their communities. During the early stages of the pandemic, they immediately pivoted and reached out to the community to explore what emergency response funding might be needed. In May 2020, when the murder of George Floyd occurred in Minneapolis, USA , they increased their responsiveness to be sure that the organisations best positioned to support and meet the needs of the community received additional funding quickly. They went above and beyond to extend general operating support in addition to the typical programme support they provide, dipping further into their portfolios to ensure adequate funding.

“The Bush Foundation is honored to be a finalist for a Catalyst 2030 Award. We wholeheartedly support social entrepreneurs in our region of the world. We share the goal of making the world a better place for all people.” –Jennifer Ford Reedy, President, Bush Foundation

Visit the Bush Foundation website

Luminate

Luminate is a global philanthropic organisation with the goal of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies. It does this by funding and supporting non-profits and for-profits and through advocating for policies and actions that will help people participate in and shape the issues affecting their lives, and make those in power more transparent, responsive, and accountable. It has provided core funding and patient capital that supports organisations in the long term.

Visit the Luminate website

Porticus

Porticus is an international philanthropic organisation. It aims for lasting, meaningful change – working with local and global changemakers to create a better future across four key areas: education, society, faith and climate. Porticus supports social entrepreneurs and intermediaries to help strengthen and develop the sector.

Visit the Porticus website

AWARDEE PROFILE: Greenwood Place

In recognition of your investing in the community of entrepreneurial philanthropists and the organisations they support in the long term. 

Greenwood Place is a community of strategic philanthropists working in the United Kingdom and internationally. Their team provides strategic advice and implementation support to individuals, families and foundations working across a diverse portfolio of issue areas. They believe in the power of entrepreneurial philanthropy to tackle tough social and environmental problems and work to create meaningful relationships between donors and grantees in service of long-term systemic change.

Greenwood Place strives to work in true partnership with social entrepreneurs, explicitly focusing on streamlining application/proposal and reporting requests to minimise burdens. In all its funding decisions, it has co-created a shared vision with social entrepreneurs and ensured that the ideas of social entrepreneurs were incorporated into final projects. It has supported evolving paths to system change, providing non-financial support such as networking opportunities to strengthen social entrepreneur organisations and advance their work.

For its investments in communities of social entrepreneurs, we are proud to give Greenwood Place the Catalyst 2030 Award.

Visit the Greenwood Place website

Central Square Foundation

The non-profit Central Square Foundation’s vision is to ensure quality school education for all children in India by bringing innovative solutions in education, as well as working with the government to drive scalable, sustainable and positive impact. They collaborate to build research and create effective, proven tools around critical issues such as early learning, technology in education, classroom instruction methods and system governance. They provide grants to support early- to mid-stage non-profit organisations working to find distinctive innovations for improving the quality of school education in India as well as flexible intellectual support.

Visit the Central Square Foundation website

DKA Austria

The Dreikönigsaktion (DKA) is a Catholic non-profit organisation supporting children and youth, education, food security, drinking water and medical care. They safeguard human rights and pastoral work as a service of the church to the weakest, for over a million people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They work with reliable local partner organisations and are active in the fields of advocacy, educational work and lobbying, taking responsibility for a common sustainable and ethical world. They have supported innovations and ventures and spend energy and time in understanding the organisation and collective. They take ownership of projects while providing freedom, mutual learning and growth.

Visit the DKA Austria website

Global Fund for Children

Global Fund for Children partners with community-based organisations around the world to help children and youth reach their full potential and advance their rights. They are the only global nonprofit dedicated to finding, funding, and coaching local organisations that empower young people. They provide a crucial link, connecting community leaders with the resources, networks, and support to realise their visions for truly transformational, youth-driven change.

 “At Global Fund for Children, we’re honored to be selected as a finalist for the Catalyst 2030 Awards. Like Catalyst 2030, we believe in breaking down barriers and taking smart risks to spark social change. That’s why we support visionary local leaders and organizations working in the heart of their communities to help children and youth reach their full potential and advance their rights worldwide.” – John Hecklinger, President and CEO, Global Fund for Children

Visit the Global Fund for Children website

Global Philanthropy Alliance

Global Philanthropy Alliance is a US-based non-profit, public foundation that makes small grants to youth-led or youth-empowering organisations in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa working to find entrepreneurial solutions to social problems in their communities. They acknowledge that local social entrepreneurs and organisations are positioned to have the greatest impact of any development effort due to their ability to assess community needs and devise unique solutions to address issues relating to the health, wealth and well-being of their respective communities. They are bent on changing the narrative for young people by creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for young and resilient youths and creating an ecosystem where young people can thrive, by making funds accessible at a grassroots level.

Visit the Global Philanthropy Alliance website