What is Venture Philanthropy?
Venture philanthropy is a set of related approaches developed by individuals from the private, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors across the United States in the 1990s, and more recently in Europe and beyond. Venture philanthropy is characterized by a focus on performance and impact, investor engagement and the financial support of strategies and organizations rather than programs. Most practitioners of venture philanthropy make multi-year investments in a relatively small number of organizations. Responding to an array of challenges associated with more traditional forms of philanthropy, venture philanthropy models vary along many dimensions: some focus their support on an issue area (e.g., education) or a region (e.g., New York or Washington, DC); other are issue-neutral and national; some focus more on investor engagement, while others emphasize the relationship with their portfolio of organizations; still others focus on seed-stage organizations and their leaders, while others foc
In the broadest sense, venture philanthropy is a relatively new, largely unproven, and yet potentially powerful movement in grantmaking that seeks to adapt strategic investment techniques to the culture and needs of the nonprofit sector and to serve as a complement to more-established philanthropic models. Venture philanthropy efforts often share the following key characteristics: • *They provide not only financial resources but also management assistance and other resources that for-profit executives have come to rely upon. • • *They feature relationships between the grantmaker and nonprofit partner that are more of an active, involved partnership than solely a funding relationship. • • *Their grants cover a longer time period than do typical foundation grants. • • *They focus on helping to build and strengthen organizations of their nonprofit partners, not on the development of new programs. • • *They help their nonprofit partners establish and track outcomes, and use this informatio
