The impact investing movement is on an encouraging trajectory and has achieved impressive scale in recent years. Much of this growth can be credited to an expansion of dynamic and courageous field-building organizations. However, the collective need for philanthropy of these important organizations currently exceeds available funding. This dynamic creates challenges, including that:
- With fixed budgets and competing priorities, grant dollars are spread too thin to build or sustain adequate organizational capacity in the field, leading to high levels of financial stress. This, in turn, forces organizational leadership to focus on short-term fundraising at the expense of long-term strategy and vision.
- Fragmentation makes it harder to coordinate leadership during a critical moment for the fields of impact investing and inclusive capitalism. This fragmentation can stall strategy and risks creating competition where coordination would be more effective. This makes it harder to galvanize an affirmative, unified vision for the movementʼs future.
This RFP
To support a more sustainable and effective ecosystem for the impact sector, this RFP seeks to support strategic consolidation among nonprofit field-building organizations in the impact investing and inclusive capitalism ecosystems. We hope to help remove some of the barriers to mergers, acquisitions, and other forms of deep collaboration by providing financial support for integration costs.
The Collaboration Fund is a pooled grant fund that will provide financial support to relevant nonprofit organizations exploring and executing strategic mergers and collaborations. Possible uses of proceeds include:
- Feasibility studies and due diligence: Helping organizations assess alignment and potential synergies before committing to a merger.
- Legal and consulting costs: Covering essential professional services to navigate the complexities of structuring a successful merger.
- Integration planning and implementation support: Ensuring smooth operational, financial, technological, and cultural transitions post-merger.
- Staff transition and change management: Providing resources to support leadership transitions and mitigate disruption for employees and stakeholders.
- Reputation-enhancing strategic communication: Celebrating strategic mergers and the leaders willing and able to participate in them to provide reputational cover to leaders willing to put the mission above their job security.
Who Qualifies?
The Collaboration Fund is targeting nonprofit field-building organizations in the impact investing or inclusive capitalism space, or immediately related fields, with a mission to create collective value and benefits for the field that everyone can use. This is a broad category, and can include organizations that:
- Create shared infrastructure, such as measurement standards, common language, or open-source frameworks.
- Convene or bring together people and organizations toward common goals and objectives.
- Produce publicly available resources, such as critical research that helps catalyze growth and positive outcomes in impact investing.
- Build capacity through training, thought leadership, and education.
- Advocate for conditions that enable market growth and positive outcomes.
- Create other outcomes intended to benefit the field and create collective value.
For the purposes of this RFP, strategic collaboration includes full legal mergers, acquisitions, shared service integrations, programmatic consolidation, and other durable structural combinations that materially reduce overlap and increase field-level effectiveness.
Awards:- There is no specific grant range required, though we anticipate most grants will be between $100,000 and $400,000.
Deadline:- 22-08-2026
