Philanthropy
The Challenge:
Philanthropy and funders play a catalytic role in the current environment. Despite funding bold initiatives, efforts can remain fragmented, uncoordinated across sectors or disconnected from systems change.
What’s Possible?
Funding cross-sectoral programs and investing in building cross-sector partnering skills allows philanthropy to amplify its influence and unlock systemic change.
What this looks like in action
A foundation funds a multi-sector learning lab bringing together academics (offer research and rigor), businesses (scale efforts), and communities (local knowledge) to tackle food insecurity, youth mental health, etc.
A foundation requires cross-sector partnership building and systems thinking training as part of their grant process for any projects or programs they fund.
Example Partnership Models
1. Partnerships for Social Innovation
Social innovation ecosystems bring together community actors, institutions, social entrepreneurs, and policymakers to co-create solutions that address structural inequities. These ecosystems aim not just to innovate at the margins, but to rewire the relationships and power dynamics that shape public systems.
Sectors involved:
Community-Based Organizations Non-Profit
Government administrators and Policymakers
Industry / Private sector
Philanthropy
Regions: Africa, South Asia, US
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Through initiatives like the Fifth Estate, we designed multi-stakeholder models that bridged social innovation models with institutional decision-making processes.
The approach included convening intergenerational coalitions, facilitating structured dialogue between community-based organizations and government bodies, and embedding youth-driven policy recommendations into formal systems.
These partnerships enabled social entrepreneurs and grassroots leaders to influence governance structures—leading to programmatic uptake by public institutions and philanthropic actors, and shifts in national policy frameworks.
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At Purdue’s Shah Global Innovation Lab, we contributed to the design of innovation ecosystems that positioned community needs and social impact as central drivers of technology development, and customization.
Rather than relying solely on traditional tech transfer pipelines, the lab cultivated partnerships among researchers, social entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and end users to co-design solutions with dual-market strategies.
These ecosystems enabled technologies in water, energy, agriculture and health to be developed with affordability, accessibility, and adoptability in mind—shifting how innovation is conceptualized, financed, and distributed for impact.
2. Partnerships for Research-to-Use Pathways
Research translation partnerships create structured pathways for aligning academic research with the needs and priorities of practitioners, policymakers, and communities. Effective models emphasize co-definition of research questions, iterative engagement, and the translation of evidence into decision-ready formats, as part of the early co-design strategies.
Sectors involved:
Academia
Community-Based Organizations Non-Profit
Government administrators and Policymakers
Philanthropy
Regions: Africa, Central and East Asia, South Asia, South America, US, Global
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Under the USAID funded LASER PULSE program, we developed the Embedded Research Translation (ERT) model to structure collaboration between researchers and development practitioners from project inception to implementation.
The model includes a four-stage process: stakeholder co-definition of problems, joint development of research scope and methods, periodic evidence-use consultations, and co-creation of policy and practice products.
This model was applied across 50 applied research projects globally and has been adopted by USAID and academic institutions as a framework for designing research that informs real-world decisions.
3. Partnerships for Tech Transfer & Innovation Commercialization
Tech transfer partnerships bridge academic research and real-world application by enabling technologies developed in university settings to reach markets and communities. Effective models align research incentives with commercial pathways and development needs, while building institutional capacity to manage innovation pipelines.
Sectors involved:
Community-Based Organizations Non-Profit
Government administrators and Policymakers
Industry / Private sector
Philanthropy
Regions: Africa, South Asia, US
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At Purdue University, we contributed to the design of interdisciplinary tech transfer frameworks that connected engineering research with global development outcomes.
Working within the Shah Global Innovation Lab in the College of Engineering, we supported models that engaged faculty, commercialization experts, and development actors in co-assessing technologies for market viability—considering both low-resource community needs and private sector scaling potential.
This approach informed licensing, open-access dissemination, and entrepreneurial spinouts for technologies targeting clean water, sustainable energy, health, education, and agricultural innovation.
7. Purposeful Stakeholder Engagement
Effective partnerships begin with the right questions—and the right conversations. Purposeful engagements create structured spaces for stakeholders to surface root causes, align on priorities, and design actionable strategies. When grounded in systems thinking, these engagements go beyond consultation to build collective insight and lasting momentum.
Sectors involved:
Academia
Community-Based Organizations / Non-Profit
Government administrators and Policymakers
Industry / Private Sector
Philanthropy
Regions: Africa, Central and East Asia, South Asia, South America, US
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As part of USAID funded Asia Resilient Cities (ARC’s) early implementation, city-level diagnostics brought together local government, civil society, and community members to co-define climate resilience priorities.
These sessions enabled city stakeholders to surface cross-cutting issues—such as climate risk and informal economic exclusion—and structure work plans around local context and institutional capacity.
These diagnostics informed the co-creation of city resilience strategies, helping to align funding, governance reforms, and policy shifts around locally defined priorities.
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A multi-city forum series was designed to address epidemic preparedness by connecting local needs with national decision-making.
The process combined stakeholder interviews, needs assessments, and facilitated dialogues across four regions, culminating in a national synthesis convening.
The model emphasized stakeholder-driven framing, cross-sector collaboration, and the translation of community insights into actionable public health communication strategies.
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This engagement applied a structured systems method—Comprehensive Success Factor Analysis (CSFA)—to help USAID, academic, NGO and local government partners in Colombia identify root challenges across youth development, rural livelihoods, and migration.
This method combined pre-conference surveys, expert scoping groups, and in-workshop mapping to generate “issue trees” and narrow sector challenges to actionable research focus areas.
By combining researcher-practitioner engagement with systems gap analysis, the model enabled USAID and its partners to align future research funding with high-impact, field-defined needs.
