How the Skoll Foundation Is Evolving Philanthropy for Collective Action

myAgro, a Skoll Awardee, helps thousands of small farmers, like this one in Senegal, afford seeds for their crops, as well as provides training and other tools. 

This year marks 25 years of the Skoll Foundation investing in, connecting, and championing social entrepreneurs and innovators who have generated solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Five years ago, we set out to evolve our strategy, inspired by founder Jeff Skoll’s concern that the existential threats facing the planet—from climate to pandemics to injustice—were getting worse.

As we conducted a listening tour of our community, the call to action became clear: We needed to figure out how to align the scale and speed of innovative solutions with the scale and speed of mounting global challenges.

We heard the community’s concerns that social innovators working to change whole systems need more opportunities to collaborate long-term with each other, philanthropists, and leaders across sectors.

We also heard what the community needs to achieve this sustained collaboration: more resources to enable system orchestration, more connections to work effectively with government, and new approaches to unlocking private markets. And we didn’t miss the critiques of philanthropy: That we, as funders, need to collaborate more with each other, provide scaled funding to support what is working, and update our approaches to evaluation and monitoring to encourage collaboration.

So we took action. Over the last five years, we have worked with social innovators and partners to test new approaches to address these needs and concerns. Although our strategic evolution is still a work in progress, we cocreated this series with our partners to aggregate our learning and, we hope, to foster more of the collective action that is needed to achieve truly transformational change.

An aerial view of rural farmland in Kenya. 

The series highlights approaches that have proven indispensable to accelerating that change and serves as a useful update of our thinking since the 2007 SSIR article “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition,”  by the Skoll Foundation’s founding president and CEO, Sally Osberg, and then-board member Roger L. Martin. Seventeen years later, we are struck by the durability of the values and ideas shared in that article, including the need to expand and deepen our support of social innovators working across sectors and playing a variety of roles to transform systems. But we know there is still work to do.

Each article in this series speaks to the theory and practice of a specific approach. If we were to identify a meta-theme that cuts across the articles, it would be this: To accelerate social innovators’ impact, we need to double down on building and growing more collaborative ecosystems to drive collective action over time. To achieve greater impact faster, we need radical new energy and partnerships across the whole ecosystem.

This theme comes into sharp focus in the next article in the series from leaders who operate as system orchestrators. Many social innovators shared with us that to drive systems-level change, they often felt compelled to evolve or even leave their organizations to better orchestrate and harmonize the efforts of others in their sector who are tackling the same challenges. As we looked at successful large-scale systems-change efforts, we found that nearly every one had a system orchestrator at its center.

We also found that building more collaborative ecosystems requires paying careful attention to the obstacles that block participants from working together on shared goals. Too often, social innovators and government officials are like two ships passing in the night. Social innovators move fast and take risks, but often lack resources to scale their ideas, while government leaders bring resources to the table but work at a slower pace that could inhibit creation.

“Engaging Government in Collective Action” shares insights on how to advance proven social innovations through government funding, infrastructure, and channels. One organization might specialize in bringing together public and private entities to access budget appropriations at the state level, while another organization might help health and finance departments in local governments all over the world collaborate more effectively.

On the theme of building more collaborative ecosystems, we look to the philanthropic sector for opportunities to develop more joint funding efforts. As a mezzanine, growth-stage funder, we regularly grapple with how to move projects from early to more mature, settled stages.

A Kenyan woman uses her solar-powered led light. Produced by Angaza. 

Over the last decade, 20 percent of the Skoll Foundation’s funding has been in pooled funds. This is core to our ethos, our approach to collective action, and our goal of social transformation. In “Reimagining Collaborative Philanthropy,” our cofunding partner Rippleworks explores the growth of collaborative funding models over the past several years and outlines possibilities for how we might expand and proliferate these models to amplify the impact of social-venture organizations.

Private-sector capital must be brought to the table in a more intentional way. In “A Mission-Aligned Investing Approach,” we explain how we use our full balance sheet to help organizations progress beyond what we—and more importantly, they—could have achieved with grants alone. We have been heartened to see the increase in foundations venturing into mission-aligned and program-related investing and hope this article sparks more interest in the expanded array of assets we’ve developed through our close partnership with our sister organization, the Capricorn Investment Group.

We continue to believe in the power of storytelling and narrative change as essential drivers of social change. “Changing the Narrative about Narrative Change” highlights how our longstanding efforts to connect social innovators with storytellers and media partners through platforms like the Skoll World Forum have matured into a broader effort to support leaders who are building movements, flipping the culture to make room for alternative narratives, and dismantling harmful cultural norms through narrative change and storytelling. By providing flexible long-term funding and allowing partners to take risks, funders can foster transformational change through storytelling and other efforts.

To encourage these system shifts, the final article in the series discusses how our approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning has evolved to encourage partnership and center the learning goals of social innovators by measuring impact at the systems level.

The approaches we share in this series will not work for all funders; philanthropic strategies are as diverse as the views of the organizations and individuals who have decided to use their wealth for the betterment of society. Nor are we claiming that evolving our strategic approach has been easy or straightforward—it hasn’t. Working to cultivate collaboration and transform entire ecosystems is by definition a nonlinear activity, and the process can often feel messy and complicated.

But we know it’s worth it when we see social innovations scale and impact accelerate because of our collective efforts to find new and different ways to collaborate, mobilize assets, and learn together.

The Skoll Foundation supports organizations and individuals working together to change an ecosystem for the better, with a focus on taking their solutions to the next level of scale and sustainability. For example, three Skoll partners—Community Health Impact Coalition, the Financing Alliance for Health, and Last Mile Health—came together under the leadership of H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf after the COVID-19 pandemic to create Africa Frontline First (AFF), a collaborative focused on transforming health financing in support of Africa’s community health workforce. AFF then joined forces with the Global Fund, Johnson & Johnson Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation to create the Africa Frontline First Catalytic Fund (AFF-CF), which has mobilized $100 million in initial catalytic funding to support the work of 220,000 community health workers who serve an estimated 146 million people in eight African countries.

There are many roads that lead to transformation. This series, The Journey to Transformation: Evolving Philanthropy for Collective Action, highlights the ones that have led to intentional collective action and social transformation. By sharing what we’ve learned from our community-guided work, we hope to give color and imagination to new ways of uniting to achieve common aims, deepen engagement in spaces where we are already working, and uncover new spaces to invest in.

As the proverb goes, going it alone may be faster in the short run, but it won’t help accelerate our collective impact. In that sense, there is only one path that leads to transformation, and that is going farther, together.

Twenty years in, the Skoll Award for Social Innovation and the Skoll World Forum have brought together an incredible community of visionary changemakers. Watch this highlight video to learn more about the systemic change these innovators are achieving across the globe.

Read more stories by Marla Blow & Don Gips.