Since its inception, The Partnership Funds impact investing  in movement building ecosystems has proved a winning strategy. We initially backed the development of robust, intersectional state based ecosystems that win campaigns and co-govern in Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio and more recently in Florida and Missouri. Since 2014 our commitment has been to trusting general support commitments to grantees: through election cycles, transitioning leaders, shifting priorities in philanthropy, and an entrenched divisive political and social climate. While we all know how much work lies ahead, without question more is now possible in each of our grantee states because of our sustained commitment over time.

The Partnership Funds’s community works together through the framework and vision of developing independent political power (IPP) that is rooted in, and accountable to, multi-racial and multi-class bases within states. Our focus is on 501c(3) and 501c(4) grantmaking.

In each state the Funds supports one or more ‘anchor’ organizations who center strategic alignment and collaborative work across a host of advocacy, voter-engagement and related capacities to build a robust movement building ecosystem. The Funds further support those anchor-organizations’ core collaborators to align multi-racial base-building efforts, civic engagement, policy and corporate campaigns as well as special-opportunity projects that accelerate a cohort’s ability to make and sustain change in their state. 

We believe that racial justice organizations are key anchors in the struggle to win true democracy and liberation. The Partnership Fund’s anchor organizations are membership based, anti-racist in their approach, collaborative and focused on building exercising governing power.  Our investment strategy centers deep investments in organizations led by people of color aligned with pre-existing infrastructure. We know these organizations are underresourced and believe that investing in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, undocumented and gender non conforming leaders and organizations is necessary for democracy to realize its full potential and to strengthen and deepen existing state infrastructures.  This moment calls for investments that build multiracial ecosystems in states at a scale that can build and exercise independent political power.  

What is Independent Political Power and Why do we care?

The Funds invest in organizations and collaborations that pursue independent power – both civic and political. Independent power creates the conditions necessary for policy and community change. For the Funds,

  • Power is the ability to drive a clearly-defined agenda in an intended direction over time;

  • It is political in that the change we seek involves public officials and elections;

  • It is independent because it is based on community engagement and democratic principles instead of entrenched structures and partisanship.

  • It is independent because the organizations we invest in must be accountable, led by membership and community directly impacted by the problem and closest to the pain otherwise our investments maintain the status quo. 

Funding Strategies

Building Independent Political Power

We support movement building ecosystems in Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio and more recently in Florida and Missouri to build Independent Political Power. We support membership based organizations and their closest allies in these states. We back the sophisticated leaders in these states they know best what they need on the front lines. 

Conjuring the Infrastructure of the Future 

The Partnership Fund has been studying progressive state-based infrastructure  in our grantee states. The cores of our modern progressive political infrastructure emerged in 2003 when a famous powerpoint was presented by Rob Stein became a clarion call among national organizations, foundations and among the consultant class to build political infrastructure to mirror the rights massive coordinated network of funders, media, leadership develop organizations, networked outreach organizations etc. The infrastructure was designed to increase coordination, reduce duplication and increase scale. This effort birthed America Votes, State Voices, Catalist etc. This effort also over time also developed sophisticated resource development strategies that today reside in consolidated donor tables and alliances. 

While the infrastructure developed over the last decade has had significant impact - it has also had major challenges with diversity and inclusion. Our core strategy and aim is to work with BIPOC organizations to evolve and develop the infrastructure for the next decade rooted in meeting the needs of the communities closest to the pain. We are called by the leadership of our grantees to invest in infrastructure to promote wholeness through an intersectional analysis, and a commitment to develop self sustaining organizations.

Independent Resource Generation

Over the past several years, funders including Solidago, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, have funded individual organizations’ experiments, as well as new intermediaries tasked with working with groups in the field on the issue of alternative resource generation. We have heard from grantees the critical importance of autonomous resource generation to true independence. The Partnership Funds supports this approach and is particularly focused on supporting BIPOC membership based organizations to develop enterprise experiments (membership development, cooperatives, small community based businesses etc).

The Cooperative Approach to Independent Black Political Power

A new project of the funds is an experiment and exploration into building black political power with cooperatives.

an Emerging Southern Strategy

Lift some high level language from the docket about the southern strategy

Current Partners:

Wellspring Philanthropic 

Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Ford Foundation

Minneapolis Foundation

General Service Foundation 

Irving Harris Foundation

Solidago Foundation

Contribution Instructions 

The Partnership Fund is a project of the New Venture Fund. New Venture Fund is a 501(c)(3) public charity that provides fiscal sponsorship and project incubation services to more than 200 innovative public interest projects. There are several ways you can make a contribution to New Venture Fund or one of our projects:

Please make your check payable to “New Venture Fund.”

In the memo line of the check or in a cover note accompanying it, please note the name of the “The Partnership Fund” project. Checks that arrive without a project designation may be considered general support for the organization if we are unable to determine the project for which they are intended.

 Mail or overnight your check to:

 New Venture Fund 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20036