Maverick Collective is a US-based community of women philanthropists who make catalytic investments in health and reproductive rights to advance gender equality. Over the past 11 years they’ve unlocked over a hundred million dollars in new funding for innovations in women and girls’ health, providing lifesaving healthcare for 7 million people across the global south.
The collective is made up of almost 60 women ranging in age from 25 to 75 years old and is based on a model of ‘experiential philanthropy’ which involves the women in the collective going out into the field to spend time with frontline leaders who are delivering the impact of their investment.
“It's about hands-on knowledge building,” says Managing Partner, Rena Greifinger. “Every step of the way the women in our collective are getting on calls and going to workshops to learn about how to diagnose and solve problems and the realities of working on complex issues in hard places where the context is always shifting.”
As Darley Tom, Maverick’s Managing Partner and Experience Architect, explains “Maverick is more than just the name; it's something we really take to heart. We’re always looking to approach things differently.”
Rena Greifinger:
Maverick Collective was founded in 2013 by the global health organisation Population Services International (PSI) in collaboration with Melinda French Gates and the Crown Princess of Norway. The idea was to create a space for women to practice philanthropy differently: to go beyond the cheque book and engage more deeply in the work that they were funding so they could become the smartest, savviest, and most strategic investors, particularly in solutions around women's health and gender equity.
Our mission is to accelerate global gender equality through bold investments in reproductive rights and women's health inequity. Our unique model is based on ‘experiential philanthropy,’ which means we engage women in real dollar grant-making and hands-on learning from the projects that they're funding.
Over half of our collective are under 45 years old when they make their first significant gift, and we’ve really honed a specialisation in working with new female donors and activating new dollars for women's health inequity.
When we were founded 11 years ago, there was almost no other place or network for women to show up in philanthropy in their own way. Traditional philanthropy is typically top-down funding with a lot of control for safe bets.
The Maverick model is about pushing innovation and using philanthropy as very flexible risk-forward capital to test new approaches and technologies, and to work on issues that are typically under-resourced and often stigmatised like access to safe abortion, menstrual health, mental health, cervical cancer and maternal health.
Darley Tom:
Instead of just thinking about how we fund access to reproductive health or products, we’ll try to centre things around the dreams and lives that we want to help create. What does that product or intervention look like for individuals? How do we include men and boys in the work? How do we think about these issues in new ways that can change the trajectory for not just one community, but for a broader set of people?
Rena Greifinger:
Our approach is about coming in with questions rather than solutions and working closely with the people who are most impacted by the problems we're trying to solve. The Maverick model is designed to help dismantle the power imbalance between donors and grantees. We've created a whole framework for our donors to show up in proximity with the people who they are funding. We call it the A-Game: Authenticity, Accountability, and Activism.
Part of our culture is to foster relationships between those who have resources and those who need resources, based on mutual authenticity and accountability- our donors feel just as accountable to those who are leading the programs as what they expect back. A lot of our work is around nurturing a generation of donors who understand what it means to drive equity and justice, not only in what they fund, but in how they fund.
Rena Greifinger:
We had a group of six Maverick donors who were co-funding a project in Ethiopia that was working to increase access to contraception among adolescent married girls. Our donors travelled to Ethiopia where the project team on the ground ran an advocacy and storytelling workshop to teach them how to go out and interview the girls involved in the program and then how to turn these stories into an advocacy tool to approach governments and other donors.
Travelling to Ethiopia also allowed us to have some big conversations about the power dynamics in philanthropy. We sat with our Ethiopian leaders and heard, from their point of view, what it’s really like to work with donors; what things go well and what happens when things don't.
A lot of women have only seen the old model of philanthropy and feel uncomfortable about not knowing or asking questions. They feel this pressure to be experts and to get everything perfect, which can cause them to either overextend or pull back and not show up at all.
Darley Tom:
I think one of the misnomers in philanthropy is that the conversation around trust has always been centered around philanthropists learning to trust organisations. But it's a two-way street; organisations need to trust the donor. When you have a donor who's investing their money and their time in showing up, it helps to foster that deep trust and connection. It’s a reminder for all of us, that changing the status quo will require everyone to show up differently.
Darley Tom:
We've learned that you have to meet people where they are. A lot of the women we work with are new to this space. They’re either new to wealth, new to philanthropy or new to global giving. Some have only ever experienced giving within their family system, and this is their first time stepping out on their own.
We have a core set of values at Maverick that our members rally around, but it's the diversity of the collective – the different perspectives, experiences, ages and giving behaviour that makes the community so strong. I think it’s important to know what your core values are and to accept that you can't be everything to everyone.
Rena Greifinger:
We are ready to engage more women with wealth to move more money to more causes that are working to accelerate gender equity. We're at an inflection point where we're looking to expand beyond the one nonprofit that we've been fundraising for over the last decade - of course, we want to continue supporting them, but we also want to support others as well.
Darley Tom:
Something we've been thinking about a lot, is what I call the ‘freeze.’ A lot of women feel the pressure of having to do this perfectly, and it holds them back from any kind of momentum. What I appreciate most about the Maverick Collective model is that when you invest money to be in the process, you’re suddenly in motion and surrounded by other women who are in motion and that propels you forward. It's about finding people who you can learn from, and to understand that you have to be in the process of doing to actually make progress.
Rena Greifinger:
Maverick is predominantly a philanthropy platform, but what we really want it to be is a space for a community of women to mobilise all their forms of capital, to the issues that they care about, in a way that aligns with their values. We want to give them opportunities to learn from each other because the simple act of getting more women in community, is going to help break down some of those barriers.
