Anna Shireen Wadia, Executive Director, Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund
At this year’s Grantmakers In Health (GIH) annual conference, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of philanthropic leaders deeply committed to improving the health and well-being of their communities. Again and again, I met funders whose work was grounded in a particular place, population, or issue.
These funders know their communities intimately. They understand local history, relationships, and the needs of their communities. Their focus is one of their greatest strengths.
Yet as I engaged in conversations throughout the conference, a common reality emerged: the challenges affecting these communities do not stay neatly within the boundaries of grant portfolios. Federal policies reverberate through local communities, regardless of where a foundation’s geographic footprint begins or ends. Families do not experience their lives in silos. Economic security affects health outcomes. Childhood well-being is shaped by the stability of caregivers. Sandwich generation caregivers lack resources and support to hold down jobs while caring for both children and aging parents.
This reality was on my mind as I sat in the plenary session and listened to Dr. Cara James, President and CEO of GIH, call for “radical collaboration.” Her message resonated deeply and also raised a question: if philanthropy’s power often comes from deep focus, how do we also address the broader systems and policies shaping the very outcomes we seek to improve?
Over the weeks following the conference, I realized that collaborative funds may offer one of the clearest answers. For the last five years, the Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund has been bringing diverse funders together across a lifespan of issue areas: paid family and medical leave, early care and education, aging and disability care, and quality care jobs. We are building power and pushing back against a scarcity mentality that pits older adults against children, or home care workers against people with disabilities. Our theory of change is rooted in the belief that we will only win transformative, systemic change in our care systems if we build power together.
Collaborative funds like the CARE Fund create a critical bridge between local focus and systemic impact. They allow foundations to remain deeply rooted in the communities they know best while pooling a portion of their resources to address the larger policies and systems that shape local outcomes, reflecting researchers’ calls for stronger federal policy solutions. A single grant to a collaborative fund can help foundations expand their reach across issue areas and geographies while gaining access to shared learning, expertise, and partnerships that would be difficult to cultivate alone.
A recent study by Bridegespan confirms these benefits of collaboratives, specifically noting that collaboratives help align funders around common goals, reduce duplication, and accelerate the spread of effective practices. Yet despite these advantages, collaborative funds remain an underutilized tool in philanthropy. Bridgespan also found that collaborative funds remain an underused asset class in most donors’ portfolios, leaving significant opportunities for greater impact on the table.
For health funders—and especially place-based funders—the case for participation has never been stronger. Massive federal policies—such as the slashing of Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and other harmful impacts of H.R. 1—increasingly shape the realities facing local communities. When place-based funders engage in national collaborative efforts, they help influence the broader systems affecting their communities; they also gain valuable insights from peers confronting similar challenges in rural regions, small towns, and urban centers across the country. Those lessons can then be brought home, strengthening the very communities they are committed to serving.
“Many decisions that undermine the economic security of older adults happen in Washington, not Denver. That is why since its founding a decade ago, Next50 has bridged national problems with Colorado investments,” said Peter Kaldes, President and CEO of Next50, one of 13 current partners in the CARE Fund, which since 2021 has pooled close to $50 million to strengthen the cohesion, capacity, and power of the care movement. “Our support of the CARE Fund continues that important tradition. Threats to our mission-aligned populations do not stop at state lines and neither do the solutions.”
The CARE Fund, with its state-focused funders like Next50 and national funders like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is committed to continuing to operationalize this radical collaboration through four priority strategies:
- Movement and Power Building: Underwriting deep year-round community organizing to build cross-movement cohesion and trust.
- Policy Innovation and Advocacy: Envisioning bold universal care policies while advocating to protect and restore federal funding for essential programs.
- Equitable Implementation: Ensuring that past and upcoming state policy victories work for historically excluded communities through legal defense and outreach.
- Narrative and Culture Change: Tapping into popular culture and strategic messaging to center care as a key kitchen table issue for working families.
Through these pillars, our grantee partners have secured historic victories, from preserving Medicaid as an entitlement to advancing state-level paid leave and childcare policies. This year, in Colorado, A Better Balance helped pass legislation expanding paid leave for parents whose newborns require neonatal intensive care or higher levels of medical support. For Colorado funders like Next50, it shows that investing in a broad care agenda can advance national solutions at scale while generating real returns at home.
Meeting the current moment requires funders to be forward-thinking, seizing windows of opportunity to turn crises into action. The path forward is not to abandon our deep commitment to place, but to complement it with the kind of radical collaboration this moment demands. By pooling resources, sharing risk, and building power together, we can protect the communities we serve today while advancing the policies and systems they will depend on tomorrow. The challenges facing our families are interconnected. Our philanthropy should be, too.