New Venture Fund

New Venture Fund (NVF) was established in 2006 as a 501(c)(3) public charity to support innovative social entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations seeking to address society’s most pressing needs. Soon after, NVF established a new model for comprehensive fiscal sponsorship, one that has helped reshape the fiscal sponsorship sector. Focused on making more impact, NVF gives funders and social change leaders the capacity to move toward desired outcomes faster, in an efficient, cost-effective and time-saving way.

NVF partners with philanthropists, change-makers and disruptors to build a fair, healthy and sustainable world for all people. We do this by supporting meaningful projects, providing a venue for risk-taking and bold action, and making sure our projects have what they need to succeed.

We host projects that tackle the structural causes of inequality and environmental degradation, and we use every resource we have from financial to human capital to accelerate their work. We do all of this in an organizational environment where all employees can thrive.

At NVF we are steadfast in our support of racial and gender equity. Our goal is to foster robust cultures of safety, respect, fairness and accountability, while helping our projects adopt an ethos of continuous improvement that is reflected in their daily work. Our charge: Projects that used to take more than a year to get off the ground would instead take weeks. We took the challenge seriously and built an organization that brings resources and expertise to social entrepreneurs and nonprofits quickly, harnessing all we know to move from talking about change efforts we want to see to seeing changes happening on the ground. Instead of leaders struggling to learn accounting systems, HR and funding databases, they got to focus on what they are best at: standing up visionary efforts, activating support and building momentum.

NVF’s expertise starts with an independent board of directors that has extensive experience in philanthropic and nonprofit management. From top to bottom, we are interested in how we can have more impact and push ourselves to innovate on this every day.

From 2013-2018, we partnered with more than 8,000 donors. The vast majority of our funding comes from foundations, more than half of which are among the 50 largest grantmaking foundations in the United States. Individuals and families follow, then corporations. A small percentage of funding comes from community groups, associations and nonprofit organizations. The vast majority of our donors are public, while a few choose to remain anonymous, often to keep the focus on the work being done. In this time period, we have made 4,919 subgrants. Graphic 1 presents a breakdown of New Venture Fund’s sources over the past five years. Graphic 2 demonstrates our funding growth since 2006.

NVF supports social sector innovations that lead to better outcomes.

Funders care about solving social problems and are looking for ways to make significant progress. They want to try new things. They increasingly recognize that traditional grantmaking processes are often too slow to keep up with the times and may create distance between them and the projects they support, and even perpetuate past inequities. In this context, many funders now favor — and seek out — more direct partnerships with other funders, social entrepreneurs and nonprofits leading like-minded public interest projects on the ground.

That is where NVF comes in. We help execute a range of public interest projects on issues such as conservation, global health, public policy, international development, education, disaster recovery and the arts. In partnership with funders and in support of social change initiatives, we provide a flexible backbone of support services, guidance and extra hands to move collaborative efforts forward efficiently and effectively.

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