Founded by Olivia Leland, formerly the founding director of The Giving Pledge, Co-Impact is a global model for collaborative philanthropy that funds large-scale systems change. Their vision is to build resilient societies where women, men, and children can reach their full potential.
Using an open and transparent process, Co-Impact brings together local changemakers and funders from around the world to make health, education, and economic systems stronger and more inclusive. Their model is based on longer-term funding, flexible grants and investment in strategic support to give their partners the time and space to focus on deep systemic change.
Co-Impact’s mission is to drive collaboration over competition, and to create change across critical sectors like education, health, and economic opportunity by making them more inclusive. As Managing Director, Philanthropic Collaboration, Anna-Marie Harling says, “We can only achieve more inclusive health, education and economic systems by collaborating with the people who have been historically excluded. We see advancing gender equality and women’s leadership as central to that goal.”
Anna-Marie Harling:
Co-Impact started with a conviction that it was time for a step-change in philanthropy. Our founder, Olivia Leland, spent over three years speaking with philanthropists and change-makers to understand how philanthropy could be most effective at solving problems at scale. Three big ideas came out of these conversations: the need for longer term funding that focused on the root causes of inequality, strategic support for organisations to help them accelerate the impact of their work and to build an international organisation capable of doing this globally. The launch of Co-Impact in 2017 was the result of these insights. Our model is to bring funding partners and locally led organisations together to make health, education and economic systems more inclusive. We believe that advancing gender equality and women’s leadership is core to making change happen.
Anna-Marie Harling:
From the beginning there was interest from change-makers, but it was a very new concept. It took time to drive that commitment from philanthropists, mainly because this mindset of collaboration, pooling resources, focusing on gender and thinking about impact at scale, was not dominant. Over the past seven years, we've seen more people stepping up to work in this way, which is super exciting, but I still wouldn't say it's the norm. One of the interesting shifts that we have seen is that a significant majority of the decision-makers we deal with are now women, and that’s regardless of whether it’s a family foundation, the person who owns the wealth or a corporate leading the work.
Anna-Marie Harling:
Our funder partners commit at different levels – some give from US$250,000 for three years, up to and above $US10 million per year for 10 years and they range from individual philanthropists to families and institutional and corporate foundations. The funds are pooled and distributed across different issues.
The next part of the process is to connect with our local teams, who are based in Kenya, India, Brazil and Mexico, and whose role is to go out in their respective regions and source high-impact initiatives – identifying locally rooted partners that will strengthen health, education and economic systems when supported with resources to work at scale. Once identified , we provide a 10 -12-month design grant to give the organisations access to coaches and strategy organisations to help them think about how they can grow their impact at scale.
At the end of those 12 months, we make a Systems Change grant for about five years which is between US$5 million $US10 million. We also support them to bring in other funders and to seek out other organisations with whom they can partner.
Our community of funders are part of the entire process. We talk a lot about the engagement model and that can come from gatherings and webinars with program partners, or it can be learning trips to the field.
Anna-Marie Harling:
Today our funding community is around 57 partners from 16 countries, and we've raised almost US$800 million. Over half those funds have gone to more than 125 initiatives that are working on some of our most pressing challenges for women and girls: maternal health, infant mortality, restricted reproductive rights, poor learning outcomes in school, child marriage, access to livelihoods and financial resources.
One example is an organisation called ARMMAN in India. India accounts for 8% of global maternal deaths during childbirth and has the second highest number of deaths of children under five. You can't solve these problems with a piecemeal approach. Our investment in ARMMAN has allowed them to unlock US$250 million in government resources for a program that will train 740,000 health workers, impact 70 million women and children and reduce maternal mortality by 20%. This is not about scaling an individual organisation—it’s about backing a transformative solution that can be embedded within public systems, unlocking government resources and enabling impact that is sustained, multiplied, and owned locally.
That there’s real power in supporting local, predominantly women-led organisations. If you want to create change, it has to be sticky. One thing that constantly comes back from our grantees is how vital the design phase is because they rarely have that space and support to really develop their strategy.
Another big lesson is the importance of collaboration over competition. Often as funders, we encourage the people on the ground to compete against each other, but our model is to encourage organisations to think outside themselves, find partners and create coalitions to drive change. We’re always trying to find ways for philanthropy to support more collaboration because when you find the right partners, you end up expanding the impact of the work.
Anna-Marie Harling:
We have two funds: the foundational fund and the gender fund. The goal of the gender fund is to mobilise a billion dollars to support predominantly women-led organisations across the global south. We’re currently halfway to reaching that target and still have really big ambitions to drive more change. I think it's needed now more than ever.
Our other focus is to keep encouraging the philanthropy sector to embrace more collaborative approaches. This is about trusting your partners who are closest to the problems and then providing support for them to scale the solutions. Over the past eight years, the number of these collaboratives has grown significantly but we need more funding to move in this way.
Anna-Marie Harling:
Nicola and her team have been great supporters of our work, and they’re really committed to doing something significant around gender equality. There’s huge alignment with the vision that we have for our Gender Fund.
It was such a fantastic trip and there were three things that really struck me about Australia. One was this real collaboration among people who care about gender, who care about giving and who can care about effective philanthropy. And I loved the directness of everybody I spoke to. There was a real focus on action, which was so refreshing.
The other thing I noticed was a real openness to give at different levels. Nicola's gift is obviously generous and amazing but what I found exciting was it galvanised others – because how you come together is as important as what you can do through the giving.
