Polycrises, Philanthropy and Collaboratives
The interconnected threats of climate change, war, mass migration, resource scarcity, deteriorating global cooperation and democratic backsliding are ushering in an era of crises that will demand philanthropic action at a new scale and level of complexity. At present, private foundations organize giving around singular programs or issue areas, which can prevent them from responding rapidly.
The World Economic Forum 2023 Global Risk Assessment warns of “the risk of polycrises – where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” The report outlines a future scenario in which societal failures to mitigate and adapt to climate change and failures in global cooperation combine to produce a natural resource crisis that will drive humanitarian disasters and global conflict. The climate emergency on its own will generate frequent and increasingly concurrent natural disasters that will dwarf governments’ emergency and crisis response capacities.
Collaborative funds that can aggregate philanthropic and governmental resources and channel them to local, on-the-ground crisis response efforts will have increasing value in a future rife with disaster events or unplanned events. The CoVID-19 pandemic previewed how philanthropy, and collaborative funds more specifically, will be called upon to respond to future disasters. As the US government’s own pandemic response teetered, donors set up funds that coordinated the distribution of personal protective equipment and the disbursement of thousands of payments to individuals and businesses to cover rent, lost wages, and other immediate needs. Foundations and individual philanthropists could not have executed these programs on their own: the speed, complexity, and scale of these crisis response efforts required that they pool their funds and work with collaborative organizations with the administrative capacities and local knowledge to handle thousands of small payments to locally based institutions and individuals. Host organizations had a large role to play in that response as well, with far more flexible policies than individual foundations. A leader of a collaborative fund shared the following, “Prior to the pandemic, we were making grants to artists; during the pandemic, we had to pivot to helping artists pay their rent. A foundation would never be able to permit that type of payment, but our fiscal sponsor host was able to accommodate that type of support given their mission and nimbleness.” It goes without saying, but bears repeating that this type of flexibility will be required in these moments of polycrises.
Beyond the growing need for rapid response capacity, a world of multiple, intensifying, and interconnected crises requires philanthropic strategies and investments that work at the intersection of multiple issues and that are nimble enough to respond to sudden, unanticipated threats and black swan events--in other words, strategies that transcend the issue silos and sclerosis of institutional philanthropy. Given their interdependency, trying to solve issues in isolation from one another is ineffective. We cannot fix the climate crisis if we don’t improve the functionality of democratic institutions and address polarization. In turn, the health of our democracy is intertwined with the unrestrained capitalism and technological development that is driving extreme economic inequality and generating profound insecurity and social atomization. To complete the circle, democracy and social cohesion are threatened by a climate emergency that will displace millions of people in the coming decades and undermine political stability in the Global North and South.
Some foundations, like the Kataly Foundation, have embraced an intersectional approach to their investments, supporting organizations working to address multiple, interrelated issue areas and allowing them to pivot between and among issues without penalty. However, far more institutions remain focused on single-issue giving that tends to lock grantees into issue silos and impede the kind of cross-sector collaboration required to address the interrelated threats and challenges we are facing. Collaborative funds are more likely than institutional philanthropies to focus their investments on multi-issue field-building and movement-building efforts, rather than limit them to siloed, single-issue domains. This is one of the most important reasons we think collaborative funds will continue to grow.
