Five Ways Founders Pledge Funds Maximize Impact
Find out how you can maximize your impact this Giving Season through our high impact Funds.
Effective philanthropy is hard. The world is full of worthy causes, but knowing where your donation can do the most good takes time, expertise, and access most individual donors don’t have.
At Founders Pledge, we believe giving should be just as strategic as investing. That’s why we built our Funds—purpose-built vehicles designed to identify, fund, and scale the most promising opportunities for impact. Backed by rigorous research and deep networks, our Funds turn generosity into coordinated, outsized results.
If you're looking to give with confidence this Giving Season, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog, we share with you how we ensure every contribution is strategically placed to generate the greatest possible, lasting impact.
Here are five ways our Funds maximize your giving:
1. Funds fill urgent and time-sensitive gaps
When crises emerge or rare windows of opportunity open, the most impactful grants often need to happen fast. Most donors can’t mobilize quickly enough—but our Funds are built to move at the speed of need.
The GHD Catalytic Impact Fund’s rapid grantmaking
When USAID froze global health funding in early 2025, ten Sub-Saharan African countries lost an average of 14% of their health budgets overnight. This was a systemic shock that put critical programs—such as maternal care, vaccinations drives and HIV/AIDS treatments —at risk, and demanded an instant response.
Within weeks, our Global Health and Development (GHD) Catalytic Impact Fund made a grant to the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to embed technical expertise within their Technical Support Units (TSU) health ministries, helping them rapidly redirect resources and plug the sudden budget gap.
Each dollar donated will influence hundreds of dollars in government health spending, which makes the grant over ten times more cost effective than direct cash transfers. The grant is an investment in building systems that will last long after our initial funding ends.
Image Source: CHAI website
2. Funds leverage deep domain expertise and networks
Most donors don’t have insider visibility into emerging opportunities. Our Fund teams do — they’re on the front lines of discovery, building relationships, attending closed-door convenings, and conducting rigorous research to surface the most promising interventions.
The GCR Fund’s research into defusing nuclear escalation
Our Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) team has done extensive research into one of the most neglected areas of nuclear risk mitigation: how to prevent a limited nuclear conflict from escalating once one has begun.
In 2023, the GCR Fund advised the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) in establishing their “Averting Armageddon” initiative. This three-year project, closely informed by our own research on nuclear risk, is one of the few projects doing crucial policy work to develop and promote interventions that could stop a limited nuclear conflict from spiraling into an all-out existential catastrophe.
Image Source: Unsplash
3. Funds build diversified portfolios of promising opportunities
Strategic investors don’t put everything into one company—they build a portfolio. They spread their bets across different sectors and strategies to increase their odds of outsized returns.
Philanthropy works the same way. Many of the most impactful opportunities come with uncertainty, and focusing on a single solution can mean missing others with even greater potential. Our Funds enable you to adopt a portfolio approach to your giving, ensuring your donations support a range of promising strategies.
The Climate Fund’s global diversification
Our Climate Fund aims to change the way the world fights climate change. The Climate Fund builds a global portfolio that is more robust, diversified and future-proof, and spans multiple dimensions:
- Geographies: from the US and EU to China and emerging economies
- Political strategies: from progressive climate initiatives to the “Ecoright” field of conservative clean energy organizations
- Technological pathways: from nuclear and advanced geothermal to coal plant repowering
This approach increases the chances of backing transformative solutions, just as a diversified investment portfolio increases the likelihood of breakthrough success.
Image Source: Unsplash
4. Funds create solutions that don't yet exist
Sometimes the highest-impact opportunity isn't funding what’s already there—it’s building something that’s missing. Our Fund Managers do active grantmaking to shape and launch projects that would otherwise never exist, filling gaps and blindspots in the current landscape.
The GCR Fund’s new coordinating forum
In 2024, our GCR Fund Manager noticed a problem: multiple organizations were running diplomatic dialogues between US and Chinese experts on extreme risks, but the landscape was fragmented and uncoordinated. Popular topics were getting duplicated, while critical gaps remained unfilled.
In response, we partnered with the US National Academies to launch the Conclave on Great Powers and Extreme Risks, a twice-yearly forum to coordinate these efforts and close critical gaps.
Image Source: Unsplash
5. Funds unlock more resources through innovative funding mechanisms
Our Funds coordinate with other donors, run matching campaigns, and offer catalytic capital — approaches that amplify every dollar and reduce risk for individual donors.
The Rapid Response Fund’s match campaign
When Catholic Relief Services urgently needed $2.5M to keep health clinics open for 75,000+ people in Darfur, small individual donations alone weren’t enough. To close the gap, the Rapid Response Fund partnered with PRO to launch an innovative matching campaign: once 70% of a project’s budget was raised from individual donors, the Fund contributed the final 30%.
Thanks to overwhelming support from the community—and strategic collaboration with PRO—we successfully mobilized the full $2.5M, preventing a devastating disruption to life-saving care.
Image Source: Catholic Relief Services
Maximize your impact today
The world’s most pressing challenges—from climate change and pandemic preparedness to global health and catastrophic risk—demand more than good intentions. They require coordinated, strategic, and expert-led philanthropy.
Our Funds offer exactly that: a way to move beyond individual giving and join a collective effort that’s shaping the future. Each contribution doesn’t just support one organization — it powers a research-driven strategy for lasting change. Join us this Giving Season and be part of the movement that’s transforming generosity into impact.
