Initiatives
Social Impact Exchange

The Scaling Market Place initiative

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are excited to announce the launch of the Scaling Marketplace - a major, new philanthropic initiative where funders are joining forces to support nonprofits that are bringing promising interventions and strategies to scale. Spearheaded by leading foundations, the marketplace enables funders across the country to efficiently connect to evidence-based, game-changing nonprofits with the potential to have a major impact.

Its intent is to make it much easier for funders to collaborate on issues where they have a common interest in achieving scaled impact, but require co-funding to achieve their goals of large-scale change. The vision for the Scaling Marketplace is the creation of a community that eventually includes thousands of funders that generate hundreds of millions of dollars, and more, annually in support of effective interventions.

The initiatives in the marketplace encompass a wide variety of change strategies, including policy efforts, practice dissemination, field-building strategies, program replication, systems change initiatives, and others. Launched initially with a focus on education and health, the Scaling Marketplace is intended to grow to include poverty alleviation and impact investing. It is launching with eight scaling interventions and 69 funders (see below).

HOW IT WORKS

The Scaling Marketplace is led by the Social Impact Exchange’s Working Groups – 25 to 35 major funders in different issue areas who identify, vet, and fund evidence-based nonprofits ready to move to the next level of scale. Working Group members provide a portion of growth funding needed for scaling each investment (“lead funding”), and then distribute the investment opportunities to broader networks of potential funders to complete the growth capital needed for scale up. All participation is on an opt-in basis, which allows funders to co-fund based on their interests and program areas.

Nonprofits in the Marketplace are first nominated to Working Groups and then go through a multi-layered due diligence process led by funders of those groups. Each nonprofit is pursuing an active growth capital campaign and is vetted for evidence of impact, scalability and financial sustainability. Potential co-funders connect with the nonprofits through an online platform (www.scalingmarketplace.org), via collaborations with existing national and local funder affinity groups and wealth management firms, as well as through peer-to-peer relationships.

The Scaling Marketplace creates an efficient, user-friendly way for local and national funders to find, review, and feel confident in co-funding scaling opportunities that fit with their priorities and have been qualified through a rigorous process.

The Marketplace’s 8 current scaling initiatives in education and health are collectively raising a total of $135 million in growth capital. Additional scaling initiatives will be added to the Scaling Marketplace several times a year. The current investment opportunities include:

Health

• Center to Advance Palliative Care
• IMPACT
• Playworks
• Project ECHO

• Achievement Network (ANet)
• Expeditionary Learning
• National Center on Time and Learning (NCTL)
• National Teacher Center (NTC)

To achieve the vision of a robust marketplace where thousands of funders participate, will require broad collaboration among many stakeholders – a large collective impact effort – that includes funders as well as affinity groups, funder networks, corporations, philanthropist circles and others. We hope to work with many of you over the coming years to build this market based system and achieve this vision together.

Please contact us directly if you are interested in learning more about the Exchange Working Groups, nominating initiatives, or helping us to build the Scaling Marketplace.

Warm regards and happiest of holidays,

Alex Rossides
President, Social Impact Exchange