Innovation and Excellence Fund
Deep Needs, Powerful Impact
The Innovation & Excellence Fund helps you maximize the impact of your giving of cryptocurrency and appreciated assets to benefit vulnerable children worldwide.
Today, millions of children live without the care and protection of family. Together, we can marshall innovation and excellence on their behalf.
The Challenge
Donors today face major challenges.
Few givers have the time to find, research, and fund the most effective programs and promising solutions. As a result, giving decisions are often driven by marketing campaigns and chance connections, not highest-value investment opportunities.
Child-serving organizations face a series of major challenges, too:
TYRANNY OF THE URGENT
Caught up with each day’s needs, many organizations have little bandwidth to innovate or improve.
SHORTFALL OF “RIGHT-SIZED” FUNDING
While large organizations can access large grants, small and mid-sized organizations cannot access funding to develop new models or scale proven solutions.
INEFFICIENT FRAGMENTATION
Organizations often labor in highly fragmented and competitive ways, rather than contributing their complementary strengths to a shared vision.
The Solution
The Innovation & Excellence Fund turns each of these challenges into opportunities — identifying innovative solutions, expanding promising models, incentivizing collaboration, and opening more doors for family care for children.
Gifts to the Innovation & Excellence Fund catalyze five key drivers of change – at a level not typically available to individual givers — ultimately to see more children thrive.
DISCOVERY AND REACH
The expansive CAFO network allows us to identify and reach some of the best ideas and highest-potential projects across the field.
STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES
We continually seek out and evaluate promising models and also identify key gaps in the field.
Findings are presented to an independent Advisory Board of experts who help award competitive grants to support innovation, incentivize collaboration, and scale the most promising solutions.
MICRO-CHALLENGE GRANTS & SUPPORT
We strategically deploy targeted right-sized grants for smaller to mid-sized organizations. Requiring matching funds from organizations leverages our investments and ensures ownership and success. Where feasible, grants in the form of Bitcoin will further encourage the use of blockchain technology to build creative solutions for children and families.
EXPERT SUPPORT
Hands-on training, coaching, and outcome evaluation are provided alongside every grant to ensure successful outcomes.
COLLABORATION AND CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT
Grant recipients are required to join peer learning groups both to learn and to share along their grant journey. CAFO monitors and reports outcomes and distills key learning to drive improvement across the entire sector.
Your Opportunity
Investors have an unparalleled opportunity to accelerate growth and drive innovation across an entire field, working together to see the world’s most vulnerable children thrive.
Investors may indicate whether they prefer an all-international, all-US, or mixed portfolio.
All gifts will go directly toward:
CHILD-SERVING ORGANIZATIONS
Competitive grants for vetted child-serving organizations. All must be willing to pair granted funds with matching resources and to share learning with organizations across the field.
COACHING AND TRAINING
Expert guidance and peer support for child-serving organizations as they execute these programs -- spurring continual improvement and spreading innovation and excellence across the entire field.
HIGH-IMPACT COLLABORATIVE INITIATIVES
Providing backbone coordination enabling an array of quality organizations to work together for a shared vision, each applying their greatest strengths in complementary ways for the good of children.
