This year marks 25 years of the Skoll Foundation investing in, connecting, and championing social entrepreneurs and innovators who have generated solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges using a collaborative philanthropy approach. Five years ago, we set out to evolve our strategy, inspired by founder Jeff Skoll’s concern that the existential threats facing the planet—from climate to pandemics to injustice—were getting worse.

As we conducted a listening tour of our community, the call to action became clear: We needed to figure out how to align the scale and speed of innovative solutions with the scale and speed of mounting global challenges and utilize a collaborative philanthropy approach.

We heard the community’s concerns that social innovators working to change whole systems need more opportunities to collaborate long-term with each other, philanthropists, and leaders across sectors.

We also heard what the community needs to achieve this sustained collaborative philanthropy approach: more resources to enable system orchestration, more connections to work effectively with government, and new approaches to unlocking private markets. And we didn’t miss the critiques of philanthropy: That we, as funders, need to collaborate more with each other, provide scaled funding to support what is working, and update our approaches to evaluation and monitoring to encourage collaborative philanthropy.

So we took action. Over the last five years, we have worked with social innovators and partners to test new collaborative philanthropy approaches to address these needs and concerns. Although our strategic evolution is still a work in progress, we cocreated this series with our partners to aggregate our learning and, we hope, to foster more of the collective action that is needed to achieve truly transformational change.

The series highlights approaches that have proven indispensable to accelerating that change and serves as a useful update of our thinking since the 2007 SSIR article “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition,”  by the Skoll Foundation’s founding president and CEO, Sally Osberg, and then-board member Roger L. Martin. Seventeen years later, we are struck by the durability of the values and ideas shared in that article, including the need to expand and deepen our support of social innovators working across sectors and playing a variety of roles to transform systems through collaborative philanthropy. But we know there is still work to do.

Read the full article about collaborative philanthropy by Marla Blow and Don Gips at Stanford Social Innovation Review.