philanthropy
(30)
The Thiel Foundation pays $250,000 to buy time before a degree
Peter Thiel’s foundation gives young builders two years, a grant, and a network. Its wager is that a few ideas deserve a head start on the usual career.
African Diaspora Network puts the missing people at the table
A Silicon Valley nonprofit turns diaspora connections into training, partnerships, and philanthropic capital. Its most useful lesson is how to make an introduction amount to something.
PULSE Foundation makes room for the second act
Belgium’s entrepreneurship foundation backs the climb and the comeback. Its revealing wager: a founder who closes a business still has something worth investing in.
FreeWill made the will free. Charities pick up the bill.
FreeWill turns an avoided chore into a doorway to charitable giving. The people making wills pay nothing; the organizations hoping to inherit pay for the tools.
Ren does the paperwork. Generosity gets the credit.
Behind more than $200 billion in charitable assets sits a company many donors never meet. Ren turns the awkward business of giving into technology, accounting and payments that other institutions can call their own.
Changing Our World Works Both Sides of the Giving Table
The New York consultancy has spent 27 years translating between donors, companies and institutions. Its real product is not generosity. It is alignment.
Visceral and the expensive art of saying no
The creative agency builds brands and websites for organizations trying to change the world. Its own turning point was deciding which work to turn away.
Capitol Impact and the business of getting people unstuck
A hospital needs builders. A student needs work boots. Capitol Impact makes a business of connecting the institutions that can help them both.
Progress Management and the billion-dollar afterlife of an apartment portfolio
Conrad Prebys built a San Diego rental business whose wealth reached classrooms, concert halls and medical research. The sale of his apartment portfolio exposed a harder question: what happens to the people still living inside it?
AM PR Group’s business is the next move
Vanessa Anderson’s Los Angeles agency works where celebrity, commerce, and culture meet. Its relationship with Issa Rae offers a useful lesson: the next opportunity may require a different job description.
CERI’s bet: Western Australia can export more than minerals
Mining money helped build CERI. Now the Perth nonprofit teaches researchers to build businesses, with subsidised classes, patient mentoring and a fund designed to back the next batch of founders.
The $600 Million Bet That Mental Health Research Should Not Wait
CAMH Foundation turned an unfashionable cause into a $600 million campaign by making the gap impossible to ignore: public money can run a hospital, but philanthropy can give its scientists and patients room to move faster.
NorthRock Built a $12 Billion Firm Around the Rich Person's Worst Job: Coordination
Wealth creates options - and an absurd amount of administrative work. NorthRock's bet is that affluent clients will pay one team to make the investment manager, CPA, estate lawyer, insurance adviser and philanthropy plan behave like one system.
The Richmond Firm That Manages $4.9 Billion by Managing Memory
A former KPMG tax partner built a Richmond multi-family office on a stubborn premise: the hardest part of managing $4.9 billion isn't the portfolio - it's the paperwork, the people and the memory behind it.
The Startup Turning Charity Into a Feed You Actually Want to Scroll
Jason Hausske wants giving to feel less like a year-end tax chore and more like a habit you post about. His bet: philanthropy grows when it stops being private.
The Billionaire Quietly Rebuilding Charleston, One Hotel and Tennis Court at a Time
Ben Navarro made his fortune lending to Americans the banks turned away. Now his family office is spending it on hotels, tennis stadiums and schools in one Southern city - and treating Charleston itself as the portfolio.
The Boston Foundation Built a $2.6 Billion Machine for Giving - Then Pointed It at Boston’s Hardest Problems
It looks after charitable money, but its real product is judgment: where Boston’s needs are sharpest, which local groups can respond, and how grants, research and policy can work together. In fiscal 2025, that judgment helped move $255 million through 12,472 grants.
DonorsChoose
A Bronx history teacher wanted books his students couldn't afford. Twenty-five years later, the website he built has moved more than $1.6 billion into America's classrooms - one crayon, microscope and field trip at a time.
Goodwill Industries International
Goodwill Industries International is the umbrella organization for a North American network of about 150 autonomous, community-based Goodwill nonprofits. Founded in Boston in 1902 by Methodist minister Edgar J. Helms, it runs the classic model of collecting donated clothing and household goods, reselling them through thrift stores and, increasingly, online, and using the proceeds to fund free job training, career services, and support programs. The parent body sets brand standards, coordinates national partnerships, and runs shared initiatives such as the online marketplace GoodwillFinds and the Goodwill Digital Career Accelerator, while local members deliver services on the ground.
Hispanic Scholarship Fund
The Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) is a national nonprofit, founded in 1975, that empowers Latino families with the knowledge and resources to complete a higher education, while providing scholarships and support services to as many students as possible. Beyond financial awards ranging from $500 to $5,000, HSF connects roughly 10,000 selected Scholars each year to mentoring, career conferences, internships and employer partners. Through 2022 it had distributed more than $700 million in scholarships, and it now serves over 40,000 Scholars, alumni, parents and community members annually across the United States and Puerto Rico.
Kendra Scott
Kendra Scott is an Austin-based jewelry and lifestyle brand founded in 2002 that pairs accessible, colorful, customizable designs with a mission of 'Family, Fashion, and Philanthropy.' Built from a $500 startup into a company valued at more than $1 billion, it sells fashion, demi-fine and fine jewelry - plus watches, fragrance, eyewear and home goods - through 150-plus stores, a strong e-commerce channel and wholesale partners. Its signature Color Bar lets shoppers design their own pieces, and the company has given tens of millions of dollars to causes supporting women and youth.
Tory Burch
Tory Burch is a New York-based luxury lifestyle brand founded in 2004 by designer Tory Burch. Blending preppy American sportswear with bohemian and eclectic details, it sells ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, accessories, jewelry, fragrance, beauty, home decor and the Tory Sport activewear line through roughly 400 stores worldwide, wholesale partners and multi-language e-commerce. The privately held, family-run company generated an estimated $1.8 billion in retail sales in 2024. From the start the brand was built to fund a mission: the Tory Burch Foundation, launched in 2009, advances women's entrepreneurship through access to capital, education and a fellowship program.
Dataro
Dataro is a predictive AI platform that helps nonprofit fundraising teams turn their existing donor data into ranked, day-to-day actions. It analyzes data inside a charity's CRM to score every donor, flag who is at risk of lapsing or ready to give, and recommend the next best step - so teams can prioritize the right supporters without increasing outreach. Used by more than 300 organizations across 20+ countries, including World Central Kitchen, Amnesty International, Save the Children and Greenpeace, Dataro raised a $14.28M Series A in February 2026 led by Blueprint Equity.
Resilia
Resilia is a New Orleans-based B2B SaaS company that helps nonprofits build organizational capacity and helps funders - foundations, corporations, governments and banks - go beyond the grant with coaching, technical assistance, and impact intelligence. Founded by serial entrepreneur Sevetri Wilson (who first built the nonprofit-formation tool ExemptMeNow), the two-sided platform pairs on-demand courses, templates and fundraising tools for grassroots organizations with dashboards that let grantmakers track and scale impact across their portfolios. Resilia raised a $35M Series B in 2022 - the largest venture round ever for a solo Black-female-founded tech company.
Bold.org
Bold.org is a venture-backed platform on a mission to fight student debt by making it effortless for anyone - individuals, families, companies, and foundations - to create, fund, and manage scholarships, fellowships, and grants. Free for both students and donors, it pairs a two-sided marketplace with the nonprofit Bold Foundation, which holds donations in escrow and sends funds directly to students' schools. Since 2020 it has channeled tens of millions of dollars in tax-deductible financial aid to thousands of students.
Chariot
Chariot is a New York fintech building the payment infrastructure for charitable giving. Its flagship product, DAFpay, is the first donation option that lets people give directly from a donor-advised fund in a few clicks, and it now appears on the donation forms of more than 100,000 nonprofits. Chariot also helps charities receive, code, and reconcile grant payments through a single portal, tapping into the roughly $326 billion sitting in donor-advised fund accounts.
Digital Health Strategies
Digital Health Strategies is a Washington, DC-based healthcare data and technology company that helps hospitals and health systems grow what it calls their Share of Health. Its AI-powered platform identifies the existing patients, donors, and plan members most likely to benefit from a service, then activates them through personalized communications wired into clinical and operational workflows - closing care gaps, lifting service-line volume, growing membership, and raising philanthropic dollars. Founded in 2014 by John Simpson and Ben Texter, both alumni of Blue State Digital, the firm works with leading systems including Johns Hopkins, Geisinger, Providence, Scripps, and Hackensack Meridian Health.
Bloomerang
Bloomerang is an Indianapolis-based software company that builds a complete giving platform for nonprofits, combining donor management (CRM), online fundraising, and volunteer management into one system. Founded in 2012 on the insight that nonprofits were losing the majority of first-time donors, Bloomerang centers its product on donor retention and relationship-building rather than one-time transactions. It now serves more than 24,000 small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a philanthropy and technology organization founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, structured as an LLC. Once spanning education, science, justice reform and housing, CZI has refocused on a single audacious goal: helping scientists cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century. Its flagship CZ Biohub network now builds AI 'virtual cell' models, generates massive biological datasets, and ships free open-source tools so researchers everywhere can move faster.
GoFundMe
GoFundMe is the world's largest social fundraising platform, where individuals, communities, and nonprofits raise money for everything from medical bills and tuition to disaster relief. Founded in 2010, it has helped people raise over $40 billion through nearly 200 million donations.