Guide

How to build an effective funder collaborative that can multiply impact

August 4, 2026

The Funder Table run by Colorado Media Project and Press Forward Colorado

This post is part of “Building a Thriving News Ecosystem,” a series from Knight Communities Network, a Lenfest Institute community of practice for local funders creating thriving news ecosystems.

When the National Trust for Local News saw an opportunity to purchase the largest newspaper chain in Colorado and keep it out of hedge fund hands, they had one major problem: they weren’t even a nonprofit yet. They were a fiscally sponsored project with no track record. It was exactly the kind of risky, fast-moving situation that would make most foundations pause.

But because the Colorado Media Project had spent years building a tight funder table with Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Trust, and the American Journalism Project, the funders were already in conversation with each other and trusted each other’s judgment. Within a short time, they came together to back a loan that allowed the Trust to complete the purchase and keep those Colorado papers in local hands.

Melissa Milios Davis, who directed the Colorado Media Project at the time and is now director of grantmaking at Press Forward, says that moment captured exactly what a well-functioning funder collaborative makes possible. “It gave us cover,” she recalled. “None of us was fully on the line for doing this. We could say to our board, ‘Well, the Trust is doing it, AJP is doing it, so let’s try.’ It gave us more bravery to try things.”

Collaborative funding sounds simple in theory: Get a group of funders together around a shared problem, pool some money and watch the impact multiply. But as funders and philanthropy experts who have built these initiatives from the ground up will tell you, the gap between a productive collaboration and an expensive talking circle comes down to a handful of make-or-break factors:

A clear and honest reason for existing
A shared theory of change that everyone has genuinely bought into
Governance structures that give every funder a voice regardless of the size of their check
Enough humility to let communities — and not funders — drive the strategy.

For funders who would like to explore effective collaborative funding initiatives, these best practices and tips from those who know best will help you get the most out of collaboratives without getting stuck in competing interests and egos.

1. Find a shared purpose with community input.

Before launching a funder collaborative, it’s vital to understand what the community needs, and how this initiative will serve that need. Henry Rael, director of strategy and initiatives at McCune Charitable Foundation, has been a part of 10 funding collaboratives over the years including Press Forward New Mexico, and he has seen where things can go wrong. In some cases, the funders got together to discuss a shared interest but never got to the funding phase. In others, one funder wanted to bring on other funders to follow their idea.

“You can’t come in with a strategy,” Rael said. “You have your priorities, the areas that you’re wanting to support, but you’re willing to say, ‘the community has the strategy, and we’re going to fund the strategy that the community is coming up with.’”

McCune has stuck to that community-centered strategy with its collaborative Zone grants, especially the Native American Recovery Fund that launched after the pandemic and gave Native leaders a seat at the table. “Native leaders were involved in designing the structure and in the decision-making about who received funding,” he said.

Davis concurred that funders in a collaborative must be aligned with a shared theory of change before doing anything else. Importantly, the theory of change should be developed in a process where no single funder dominates. It forces everyone to agree on what the problem is, what success looks like and how you’ll know if you get there.

“The best place to start is with a shared theory of change that the funders can discuss, pressure test, buy into, argue about in a facilitated way,” she said. “Because collaborative funding really has to stem from a shared purpose, a shared definition of what the problem is, where we’re going, and what the solution sets are. And a shared theory of change can really help you get there quicker.”

2. Create an equitable governance structure.

In Press Forward local chapters, there is typically one funder that serves as the lead in the collaborative. But that doesn’t mean that this funder is the dominant one. It’s important to create governance that gives more funders a seat at the table, and one that feels equitable for everyone.

Rael said that the minimum contribution for McCune’s Zone grant collaborations was $5,000, allowing smaller funders to participate — but every funder had the same power in the collaborative regardless of size. “Every participating funder has the same voice,” he said. “It’s not possible for one funder to dominate because they’re putting more money in. Everybody has one voice.”

Tracy Baim, executive director of Press Forward Chicago, says that regardless of how much money funders contribute, “there’s no different weight to the impact or voice at the table.” She also noted how the group set up topic-based collaboratives on education reporting, immigration reporting, and possibly housing and health care in the future. The participating funders wanted to make longer-horizon grants that can help them truly understand the impact of narrative change or influence on public policy.

“We’re trying to do these topic-based collaboratives as three-year cycles, because it takes that long to really understand what the return on investment is to add that type of coverage,” she said.

3. Make a plan to get money out the door.

The Audacious Project from TED was cited by Alison Powell as an exemplar funder collaborative

Funder collaboratives can take a lot of time, energy and commitment from the participants. And often, that means starting with researching the field, setting up a governing structure, and having discussions about strategy. But it’s crucial to get through that infrastructure stage and make sure money gets out to newsrooms who are in dire need of funding.

Alison Powell is a partner and head of The Bridgespan Group’s philanthropic collaboratives practice and has written numerous research papers on funder collaboratives. Her research found that the top reason collaboratives failed was that the funders agree on vague shared goals but can’t agree on specific strategies or activities that follow.

“A lot of funder collaboratives end up being ‘all talk and no action,’ because they can’t really get to that point,” she said. “A lot of times where that is the case, it’s when you’re involving foundations who have their own strategies…There’s a lot of magic in the ability of funders who are working on a shared topic, when they can come together and acknowledge — when does one plus one equal three?” She cites The Audacious Project as a great example of collaborative funding with its support for social change leaders.

Davis stressed that collaboratives shouldn’t get so focused on the collaborative itself, which can lead to too many resources going to the overhead of the collaborative instead of out into the field. She noted that Colorado Media Project committed to having 90% of funds go out as grants.

“Keeping an eye on how much resources are going to operations versus putting grants out into the field — that’s definitely a thing that we took seriously, especially with such an under-resourced field as journalism,” she said.

4. Give new funders multiple entry points to the collaborative.

Press Forward Chicago funders gather at a quarterly meeting, with Tracy Baim at lower right (Photo by Michael Venegas)

While collaboratives work best when they are governed in an equitable way, it’s vital to offer funders multiple entry points to join. For instance, Press Forward Chicago’s immigration journalism collaborative gave funders three different ways to participate: aligned funding (funders giving directly to newsrooms), funding to the local chapter, or funding a specific pool set aside for emerging topics. Not every funder can participate in the same way, and forcing a single structure will lose people who otherwise might contribute.

“You want to have various entry points so that they feel they can be part of a large pooled fund, even if they’re at $10,000 to $25,000, and someone else is at $100,000,” Baim said.

Davis mentioned a tiered governance structure that allows more funders to have a seat at the table. Colorado Media Project has an executive committee for funders who put money in, while also having a funder table for those who want to learn and do aligned funding on their own.

“We wanted to be a big tent,” Davis said. “We wanted to be a place where people learn together, but only some funders were putting money in. But that didn’t mean that they were the only ones making grant-making decisions. And in fact, they didn’t want to be the only ones who were making the grant-making decisions.”

Final takeaways & next steps

Start small to gain confidence and to test the structure. Baim acknowledged that managing 12 to 15 newsroom grantees right out of the gate is genuinely hard. For smaller markets or newer collaboratives, it might make sense to make smaller bets to test the model. The same goes for funders: Fewer relationships to manage means less complexity while you’re still learning. “We did a big push on education coverage because we really wanted a diverse array of outlets,” she said. “But for a different market, it may only be three or four newsrooms that need to be in the collaboration to make it work.”
Don’t involve communities or build infrastructure before you have committed funders. Well-intentioned participatory processes can backfire badly if the resources to follow through aren’t secured first. Raising expectations in communities and then failing to deliver is worse than moving slowly. Governance and decision-making processes need to be clear before scaling up engagement. “The last thing you want to do is go through a deep participatory process, and then not actually bring resourcing to the table,” Powell said. “Before you involve people extensively, you have to be sure that you’re bringing those resources that you’re dangling.”
Designate a coordinating journalism hub and keep it separate from the money. Every topic-based collaborative needs one solid nonprofit partner to wrangle the newsrooms and coordinate the editorial work, according to Baim. That entity should not control who gets funded, though. Baim deliberately kept grant-issuing power with Press Forward Chicago to maintain a clear wall between the journalism coordination and the money decisions.
Work at the program officer level, not the CEO level. The alchemy of getting funders to cooperate happens with the people closest to the grantmaking, not the executives at the top. According to Rael, program officers are the ones who understand the day-to-day realities of grants and are willing to do the creative work of making community-friendly funding fit their institution’s requirements. “The magic of the collaborative happens at that level of the program officer who’s willing and committed enough to do what it takes to let the community get money the way they need to get the money,” he said.