Foundations Collaborate to Grow Social Innovations

With the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation taking the lead, several national foundations are working together to create greater impact with their funding. The New York Times today highlights their goal of helping successful nonprofits become virtually self-sustaining through the greater efficiency that size and scale can bring. The effort by McConnell Clark and its partners “is groundbreaking,” an acknowledgment “by major funders that scale isn’t cheap and that the order of magnitude needed to scale up to make real and lasting changes will take collaboration,” said Kirsten Moy, director of the economic opportunities program at the Aspen Institute. This is an important step forward in establishing the potential of what staged capital can do to grow social innovation, and we look forward to learning from this and other emerging experiments.