The Future of Giving Is Collective: Why the Fund-of-Funds Model Is Ready to Meet the Moment

By Iara Peng, Founder & CEO, JustFund

After hosting our recent webinar exploring the fund-of-funds model, I was reminded that what feels new is often part of something much bigger. What can feel like rapid experimentation in response to uncertainty is actually part of a much longer story; philanthropy’s steady evolution toward increased collaboration and impact.

The fund-of-funds model allows funders to make a single grant that is regranted across a network of trusted, community-rooted funds. It builds on decades of collaborative grantmaking and adapts it to today’s more complex and interconnected landscape; one defined by constrained resources, heightened need, and the reality that no single institution, and no single fund, can solve systemic challenges alone.

By pooling capital across aligned intermediaries and strategies, grantmakers experience reduced administrative burden, diversified reach, proximate decision-making, built-in learning across funds, and stronger alignment with systems-level change. 

Where earlier innovations sought to professionalize giving, and later ones aimed to measure and scale it, today’s innovations seek to network it. The future of giving is not simply larger or faster, it is more connected.

A Legacy of Collaborative Giving

Before pooled funds became mainstream, the Funding Exchange (FEX) built participatory, community-led grantmaking infrastructure in the late 1970s. FEX and its affiliated funds moved resources through regionally rooted intermediaries, supported grassroots leadership, and trusted those closest to the work to make funding decisions.

That approach helped seed the growth of women’s funds, environmental funds, LGBTQ funds, racial justice funds, and the evolution of services among community foundations across the country, making collaborative grantmaking more prevalent.

Today, women’s funding networks collectively move hundreds of millions of dollars each year through gender-lens philanthropy, while community foundations across the United States steward more than $100 billion in assets, much of it deployed through pooled or field-of-interest funds guided by community leadership. Participatory and intermediary-led grantmaking has become standard practice across issue areas, reflecting a broader shift toward trust-based, community-rooted funding structures.

Why Now? The Forces Accelerating Collaborative Philanthropy

Over the last five-plus years, collaborative funds have moved from the margins toward the mainstream. Several forces have converged.

1. Crisis Exposed Fragmentation

During COVID-19, collaborative funds were able to move money in days and weeks, not months. By mid-2020, billions in emergency philanthropic dollars had flowed through pooled response funds at community foundations and national intermediaries, according to The Washington Post.

The racial justice uprisings of 2020 accelerated this shift. A Washington Post analysis cites corporate pledges totaling nearly $50 billion from major U.S. companies following George Floyd’s murder..

These crises reinforced a lesson many already understood: siloed philanthropy moves slowly. Networks, rooted in trust, move faster.

2. Institutional Validation

Major foundations have increasingly invested in collaborative vehicles to expand reach and strengthen community accountability. Institutions such as the Gates Foundation have expanded investments in intermediary and pooled models to move funds more effectively and equitably. And, as we heard in our recent webinar, leaders at Hill-Snowdon Foundation are utilizing this model to move money toward complex issues with its Solidarity Is Our Strength (SOS) Fund.  

3. The Rise of Giving Collectives

Collaborative giving is not limited to large institutions. The collective giving landscape has expanded rapidly, with earlier research identifying around 1,600 giving circles engaging more than 150,000 people and contributing nearly $1.29 billion, and the newer Philanthropy Together-supported studies project continued exponential growth in both numbers of circles and total giving.

Donors increasingly want shared decision-making, community learning, and collective impact. They want to give in relationship, not isolation.

4. Global Proliferation of Pooled Funds

The Bridgespan Group reports that funder collaboratives are active globally and advancing a wide array of social change goals, including gender equity, climate change, racial justice, and civic engagement/democracy, demonstrating the expanding role of collaborative funds across multiple issue areas.

The Gates Foundation’s collaborative funds initiative notes that collaborative funds are among the fastest-growing and highest-impact drivers of philanthropy, mobilizing donors together to channel funding toward systemic challenges efficiently.

5. A Recognition that Proximity Matters

Research from Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group shows clear funding disparities for organizations led by people from historically marginalized communities, even when they demonstrate commensurate capacity and impact:

Among similar early-stage organizations, Black-led nonprofits had revenues 24% smaller and unrestricted net assets 76% smaller than white-led counterparts, a gap that constrains their ability to scale impact.

The Infrastructure Gap: Why Technology Matters

As collaborative funds scale, structural challenges persist. How do you:

• Collect shared information without duplicating grantee burden? 

• Coordinate decisions across multiple funders? 

• Track learning across networks? 

• Maintain transparency while moving quickly?

Traditional grant management systems were built for one foundation funding one organization at a time. They were not built for ecosystems.

That’s one of the core reasons we built JustFund. JustFund is designed to power collaborative giving through shared, reusable applications; common data across funders; transparent workflows; ecosystem-level tracking; and faster trust-based grantmaking.

If collaborative philanthropy is the strategy, shared infrastructure is the engine.

By the Numbers

The percentage of total money moved on JustFund from collaborative funds has trended upward significantly over the last eight years, peaking at 74% of all grantmaking in JustFund in 2024. Here’s a look at some other key trends about collaborative funds:

Average grant size (2022)

Addressing systemic issues

The Fund-of-Funds Model: A Philanthropic Index Fund

The fund-of-funds model builds on the history of collaborative giving and adds a structural innovation.

In this approach, a donor makes one grant to a central, mission-aligned fund. The result is  a single grant can help power dozens of funds and hundreds, even thousands, of organizations.

Like an index or mutual fund, this model diversifies across a portfolio rather than placing a single bet. But unlike financial markets, this is not about pitting funds against each other and seeing which will outperform their “competitors.” It is about strengthening ecosystems.

From Transactional Giving to Ecosystem Investing

U.S. charitable giving reached $557 billion in 2023, according to Giving USA. The question is not whether resources exist. It is whether they move in ways that match the complexity of the challenges we face.

The fund-of-funds approach recognizes that social change is networked. It requires coordination across geographies, issues, and leaders. It requires infrastructure that supports shared power and shared learning.

The opportunity before us is to move from isolated generosity to coordinated investment in the ecosystems that make change possible.

The future of giving is collective. The structures we design today will shape how effectively resources move, and whether they reach the communities closest to the work.