Every non-profit and government leader I work with asks me the same question: am I well positioned to get the philanthropic support I need? This is an urgent question for leaders: many impactful organizations in my network need far more support for their work than they currently receive. And, it’s an urgent question for funders too, as they look to make impactful investments aligned with their goals and values. However, I often find this a difficult question to answer, as there can be a profound mismatch between the work a grantseeker identifies as ready for investment, and what level of impact a funder seeks in an investment.
This question is about to get a lot harder to answer. As Nan Ransohoff so clearly articulated in her May 2026 Substack essay[1], the social impact field is going to see a major shift in the philanthropic landscape and associated terms, priorities and frameworks for investing as an estimated $37-100B per in new philanthropic capital enters the giving ecosystem. Generated from the current AI boom, it will likely be concentrated in newly established foundations, donor-advised funds (DAFs) and family offices who are likely new to major giving and want to invest at scale, quickly, and in ecosystems they trust. To put that in perspective, total US charitable giving reached about $617B in 2025[2], so even the low end of the projected AI-driven range would amount to between 6 and 16% of today’s total giving.
Founders and employees at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have pledged significant portions of their equity, setting the stage for large amounts of capital to flow into giving vehicles[3].These investors will come with different mindsets and new tools. They will have new ideas for investing in some of our society’s biggest problems, and will need to quickly develop their methodologies, infrastructure and approach to execute on these ideas.
Based on my recent conversations with funders across the sector, the big question on many people’s minds is: how do we invest effectively? Is it better to create new institutions or models for impact, or fund existing ones? And, where can we rely on deep existing expertise and where do we need new perspectives?
These are not easy questions, and I don’t think the social impact sector is ready to answer them at the speed that this next wave of philanthropists will demand. Many of us are rightly holding on to the deep expertise that has been developed, the trust that has been earned, and difficult work that has been done to drive outcomes at scale. However, the time has come to examine our field’s existing infrastructure in a clear-eyed manner and assess whether it is still fit for purpose. Those of us working with government, non-profits and philanthropies must ask the uncomfortable questions about what we do – and don’t have – in place to drive impact at scale.
I don’t want to throw things away or just build only new things. Rather, I believe a rigorous and honest assessment will help us understand how and where the new infrastructure of the field needs to be built, and what of the current infrastructure most needs investment – and how to make the case for each. It’s a lot to do, but we have to start somewhere.
The Moral Imperative
Let me be clear: the scale of need across a wide range of issues I have worked most deeply in -- including housing affordability and supply, climate resilience and the clean energy transition, and the ongoing challenges of economic mobility -- has been outpacing our collective capacity to respond for decades.
Throughout my career, I’ve watched capital arrive in communities with enormous promise and get absorbed by administrative requirements or derailed by misplaced concerns about risk. I’ve seen organizations with deep community trust get bypassed in favor of organizations with shinier metrics but less trust. I’ve set up high profile and innovative delivery systems with a first round of committed funding, only to have the effort lose resources and the funder walk away before the evidence was in.
When I started working in affordable housing in New York City in the early 2000s, we developed ambitious plans to close the city’s housing gap, targeting investment of hundreds of millions of dollars for investment in communities across the city. However, New York City is arguably further from closing that gap now, despite this investment – and many others – and even as the tools, partners, and the evidence base have gotten dramatically better. The same is true for many other forms of place-based investment. The work matters, but it’s not been enough. Given the wealth at stake, I believe that we have a moral imperative to figure out what can be built on or improved.
The constraint, in New York as elsewhere, was rarely the capital itself. It was absorptive capacity, the organizational bandwidth of nonprofit developers to keep pace with demand, and entitlement timelines that no funder could accelerate on their own. More money flowing into the same constrained system produced the same constrained outcomes. Sometimes worse, because pressure without capacity breaks things.
Many other parts of the sector have the same challenges. Training programs scale up, credentials get issued, and the jobs aren’t there, not because employers don’t want the workers, but because the hiring infrastructure hasn’t caught up. The Inflation Reduction Act released clean energy capital faster than local permitting could absorb it. These aren’t isolated failures. It’s a structural problem.
New capital, deployed well at scale, could help change these patterns. But the history of major philanthropic cycles is not uniformly inspiring either. Money that flows faster than delivery capacity can absorb it doesn’t get distributed evenly. Instead, it tends to flow toward organizations with the best marketing, the most legible metrics, and the strongest existing funder relationships. Those indicators may be proxies for impact, but for every effective organization, there are many “funder darlings” that lack the ability to adapt or scale. And while these investment patterns are reinforced, the organizations doing the most important work in communities — work that is hard to measure, deeply local, relationship-dependent — often get bypassed and their solutions remain untested or unable to grow.
And when we consider public sector investment and its role in driving population level impact -- as well as diminishing public sector capacity to deliver solutions to meet community needs -- the picture becomes even murkier. As Jen Pahlka notes in her June 2026 response to Ransohoff, even $50B a year in new philanthropic capital is less than half a percent of total US public spending[4]. The resources that shape most people’s lives flow through the federal, state and local government. As Pahlka puts it, government is “where the literal money is — but it’s also where the impact is. And it’s where the legitimacy is.” Philanthropy that treats public sector dysfunction as a fixed constraint, and routes around it rather than working to fix it, will consistently miss the highest-leverage opportunities.
We must develop a new roadmap for delivery that is big enough to hold all of this. The stakes are too high for us not to do this work together.
What We Know About Delivering Impact
Let’s start with the baseline orientation for effective actors in an ecosystem: effective delivery of impact. The question isn’t “what should we fund?” — it’s “what can actually be delivered, by whom, at what scale, with what resources?” And, as you move along, “how do we know we are delivering impact?” Those are hard questions. We partner with organizations to tackle these questions every day at Delivery Associates, and it is tough. They don’t translate reliably to spreadsheets or desk research; in fact, they require ongoing proximity to leaders, and to the work.
Consider the issue of housing. Right now, there is no shortage of philanthropic interest in our country’s housing crisis. There is, however, a shortage of government permitting infrastructure that can process entitlements fast enough to keep pace with demand. A shortage of local organizations with the right balance of community trust and financial capital. There is insufficient flexible capital to meet the gaps in a project’s capital stack. And a there is a continuing shortage of local capacity and leadership on housing across byzantine local systems of government, where the real housing decisions get made.
None of those gaps automatically close because more money flows into the system. They close because the organizations doing the work get stronger, faster, and better supported. Successful delivery requires organizational capacity, adaptive thinking and leadership, and the ability to operate across sectors. These inputs are not free, nor do they emerge organically without support. They require investment.
The Intermediary Ecosystem: The Chassis
Why doesn’t this kind of investment happen, then? I believe it’s about legibility. Most money doesn’t flow directly from philanthropic funders or capital providers into local work that drives better outcomes. It often requires intermediaries: Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs), community development organizations, advocacy networks, backbone organizations, place-based nonprofits, or collective impact collaboratives. These organizations sit at the nexus of investment and need. They translate funder priorities into community outcomes, they manage the complexity of cross-sector coordination, and they carry the institutional knowledge of what works. They help make the investment potential legible.
These intermediaries are the chassis of the social impact machine. They are essential; and while you can upgrade the engine — more capital, new models, tech-enabled philanthropy — if the chassis isn’t there or can’t carry the load, nothing works.
The most transformative work I’ve been part of, whether place-based investment in housing production in New York City or at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, economic mobility investments made by Blue Meridian Partners, or clean energy transitions at scale and incentivized by federal legislation, has always involved intermediaries coordinating players across the ecosystem simultaneously. The government brings resources, policy authority, and legitimacy. Nonprofits bring community trust, deep local knowledge, and the ability to reach people that the government often can’t. Philanthropy can take risks that the government can’t and fund the capacity-building that government won’t. Private capital can move at a speed and scale that philanthropy alone cannot sustain.
When these players work in concert, transformation can occur and greater scale is achieved. And when they don’t, or when intermediaries are not fit for purpose any longer, the work fails. And this dynamic is even more relevant now. Before the third wave of philanthropy can be deployed effectively, we need a strong point of view on which models in this ecosystem are working and which aren’t. We need to be honest about what this chassis can currently carry — and where it may need to be modified or replaced to carry more.
Where Are the Gaps?
To begin this effort, I recommend starting with an honest assessment of the place-based intermediary ecosystem. My own experience suggests that there are three categories of gaps:
● Resourcing. The scale of current philanthropic investment is insufficient for the challenges we face — but beyond scale, the type of investment is wrong. The chronic shortage of enterprise capital — flexible, patient, organizational capital that lets intermediaries grow their capacity, retain talent, and take appropriate risks — is one of the most significant structural failures in the social sector. Organizations that should be operating at $50 million are stuck at $5 million because no one funds organizational development. Organizations doing transformative work lose their best people because they can’t pay competitive salaries. Data infrastructure — the ability to know whether something is working — remains chronically underfunded.
Andrea Levere, CEO of Capitalize Good, has spent years making exactly this argument. She calls enterprise capital ‘philanthropic equity’ — flexible, unrestricted capital designed to build organizational resilience rather than fund programs. The logic isn’t complicated: treat nonprofits the way you’d treat a startup. Give them the organizational capital to grow, not just the program capital to operate.
In addition to these longstanding constraints, government funding has become increasingly uncertain. While it has always had lots of conditions and administrative complexity, federal, state and local government funding has been essential to place-based investment since the 1960s, and it must remain the core pillar of place-based investment for impact. The[LB1] volatility of the current policy environment, combined with mounting fiscal and economic constraints, only puts more pressure on other funding sources (like philanthropic capital) to close these impossibly large resource gaps.
● Vision. The second gap is in vision. In a period of rapid, simultaneous change — AI reshaping work, climate altering the built environment, demographics shifting what communities need — holding a clear picture of success ten or twenty years out is genuinely difficult. Organizational inertia makes it harder. Large institutions with decades of history have systems, cultures, and incentive structures that resist genuine adaptation.
We’re starting to see funders treat long-term vision and leader stamina as things worth funding outright, not just as secondary considerations. Take the Barr Foundation’s 2026 Fellowship: each Fellow’s organization gets a $75,000 package, $25,000 set aside for the leader’s own renewal and development and $50,000 earmarked for keeping the organization resilient[5].
The third wave of philanthropic investment will, rightly, want to fund organizations with ambition and vision. The sector needs to develop that muscle — not just in exceptional leaders, but as a field-wide practice. That muscle will look like staying focused on a ten-year goal when every funder wants results by next quarter and building teams willing to say what isn’t working. Those capacities don’t come from excellence alone. They come from sustained investment in leadership and honest evaluation.
● Scale. The third gap is in scale. Federal government programs like the US Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods and the US Treasury Department’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund have created mechanisms for investing in place-based work through partners and/or government capacity at scale, but they are often fragile and subject to political whims. Many local efforts are fledgling and deserve more support. In the philanthropic field, a few funders have begun building real infrastructure for scaling proven models: Blue Meridian Partners and Renaissance Philanthropy are examples. MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving offers another glimpse of what large-scale, trust-based funding can look like in practice, having directed more than $26B in largely unrestricted grants to over 2,700 organizations since 2019[6]. Still, these remain the exception rather than the norm. This is where the third wave could make a significant contribution — if scaling is a design principle from the outset, not an afterthought.
What Works — and What Can Grow
So how do we know what works? We shouldn’t just conduct a gap analysis, as the sector has genuine assets, and any clear-eye roadmap must start there.
Place-based intermediaries with deep community roots have something no philanthropic startup can replicate quickly: trust. Not the excitement of a compelling pitch or a clear theory of change, but the trust that comes from showing up year after year, delivering on commitments, and being present when things go wrong. That trust is why communities engage with change instead of resisting it. It’s why locally-led development succeeds where externally-imposed development fails. It cannot be manufactured on a startup timeline.
The capital intermediary model that emerged in the 1990s — CDFIs like LISC, Enterprise Community Partners and many more — demonstrated that impact capital, deployed through locally-rooted organizations, could produce durable community change at scale. These models are imperfect and haven’t kept pace with the scale of need. But they proved something essential: national capital plus local knowledge, mediated by a well-run intermediary, works. That proof is worth building on.
And, the more recent collective impact movement captured something real about how systemic change happens: multiple players in the same place, moving in the same direction, with shared measurement and accountability. The tools and practices exist. The challenge is resourcing and replicating them at the scale the moment requires.
What is the next generation of intermediaries that need to be built, both for the place-based investment field and in other parts of the social impact ecosystem? How can they develop and grow from what’s been built, while leveraging the new tools, approaches and mindsets of this new era of wealth?
Building the Roadmap
We don’t need a single framework or a universal prescription. Rather, I believe that we as a sector need to develop a shared understanding of what intermediary structures work, which ones are best suited to the next wave of funding, and what needs to be built from scratch. A recently released report by the Rippel Foundation and the Intermediary Learning Network kicks off this important work for the community health sector by synthesizing decades of investment in intermediaries can lay the foundation for change by “amplifying existing community leadership, strengthening local partnerships and prioritizing belonging and civic muscle.”[7]
We need more of this kind of work, from a range of perspectives and domains. These powerful insights can then form the basis for an informed, agile investment strategy as the new capital generated by AI wealth begins to flow into the field. This strategy should include investment in what works, including investment in leaders, ideas and communities that are already successful and would benefit from more resources. It should also include deep investment in identifying and building new models for delivering impact across the public, private and philanthropic sectors.
This is my call to action to my colleagues. The third wave of American philanthropy is coming, and we must move quickly. Whether this vast wealth transforms the communities it reaches will depend not only on the ambitions of the funders, but on how ready the field is to leverage it. The question in front of the social sector is whether those systems are ready — and if they’re not, what it will take to make them so.
Laurel Blatchford’s career spans the public, private, non profit and philanthropic sectors. She’s been deeply committed to place-based work for over 25 years, including leadership roles across sectors in housing and community development, economic mobility, and climate and sustainability. She is currently a senior partner and director at Delivery Associates, where she leads the firm’s philanthropic market practice.
[1] Nan Ransohoff, “The Third Wave of American Philanthropy,” Substack, May 2026, https://nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-american-philanthropy
[2] Giving USA 2026: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2025 reports total 2025 U.S. charitable giving at about $617.2 billion, https://philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu/news-events/news/_news/2026/giving-usa-report-2026.html
[3] “AI, Philanthropy, and Charity,” The New York Times, May 27, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/ai-philanthropy-charity.html
[4] Jennifer Pahlka, “Philanthropy’s Willie Sutton Problem,” Eating Policy, June 19, 2026. https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/philanthropys-willie-sutton-problem
[5] Barr Foundation, “Barr Fellowship,” accessed July 24, 2026, https://www.barrfoundation.org/sector-effectiveness/initiative/barr-fellowship/
[6] “MacKenzie Scott is using her $26 billion philanthropy push to rescue organizations in danger after the Trump administration’s funding cuts,” Fortune, January 13, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/01/13/mackenzie-scott-26-billion-philanthropy-playbook-saving-organizations-federal-funding-cuts/
[7] https://rippel.org/publications/ilnreport/
If nonprofits were funded like tech - millions in unrestricted funding, autonomy, and able to fail yet raise another round for the next big idea - they could move just as fast. You can’t only fund perfection and proven research backed solutions, but expect nonprofits to move like tech - which thrives on experimentation, and taking big bets on unproven ideas and learning from/building on failures rather than punishing them. Even founders with repeat failures go on to raise millions for their next big idea. Philanthropy doesn’t fund that way (at least not for everyone). Where are the funders who are ready to spend money as quickly as all the investors who funded Quibi? Are we not blaming the sink for how slow the water is coming out the spigot?
As someone who used to work in community philanthropy and came to a real clash with its values and traditions, I really appreciate this thoughtful and detailed analysis.