Throughout our history, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has enjoyed a variety of relationships with funding partners, ranging from simple information-sharing to more complex, closely aligned co-investments.  We are committed to advancing funding partnerships for the benefit of our grantees and the entire youth development field.

In 2007, EMCF launched the  Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot (GCAP). Its purpose was to raise, with co-investors, $120 million in up-front growth capital to help three of out most promising grantees—Citizen Schools, Nurse-Family Partnership and Youth Villages—make a significant impact on some of the nation’s most intractable social problems.  Within a year, we reached our fundraising goal, helping these grantees secure, over and above the Foundation’s investment of $39 million, commitments of $81 million from their boards and 19 co-investors, including other foundations, financial institutions and individual philanthropists.  Today all three grantees are much stronger organizations. They serve more youth, earn more annual revenue, and are well-positioned to benefit from new federal funding opportunities for proven programs.

List of GCAP Co-investors.

In 2011, EMCF advanced and adapted this capital aggregation approach by creating the True North Fund to leverage our role as an intermediary organization for the Social Innovation Fund (SIF). By combining federal funding with the private resources of the Foundation and other philanthropic co-investors, we hope to maximize support for SIF grantees positioned for growth, and demonstrate how public and private dollars can be aggregated to help evidence-based programs achieve greater impact and scale.

EMCF is proud and grateful to have been joined in the True North Fund by four initial partners that have committed a total of $17 million over three years to help inaugural members of the True North Fund that meet their own grantmaking criteria fulfill a portion of their SIF matching fund requirement and expand and evaluate their programs. 

We welcome and actively seek additional institutional and individual philanthropic partners to join us in propelling effective organizations to scale and sustainability through the True North Fund.

Current list of True North Co-investors.