Ades decided to start a giving circle for women in New York City. Working with her friend, Mindy Wigutow, and using the Impact100 model developed by Wendy Steele, she co-launched Impact100NYC in March 2020. This was right before the city shut down for COVID. At first, Ades worried that the pandemic would prevent people from wanting to commit the time and the money —$1,000 a year — to join. But she soon discovered that the opposite was true. “People were really looking to do something, to make a difference in the city and feel good,” Ades said.
During the first year, Impact100NYC grew from three members to 147 through word of mouth. Today, four years later, Impact100NYC’s members — now 356 strong — have raised $365,000 so far in 2024. This year, the giving circle gave three $100,000 “Innovation Grants” to three New York City nonprofits, plus an additional $5,000 in general operating funds to each. Impact100NYC also had enough pooled money to make two additional general operating grants of $15,500 each to two other nonprofits.
The giving circle model absolutely addressed Ades’ desire for more meaningful giving. “It really makes you feel connected,” she said. “Nonprofits submit applications for a dream program they would like to have funded. We have grant review committees, and we meet in these committees, read through the applications, discuss them and vote on them. We really get to learn about the needs in the community. It’s a great learning experience and a great way to feel connected to the nonprofits and to your donations.”
The life-changing magic of group giving
Giving circles are a burgeoning force in the effort to democratize and diversify philanthropy, and by some counts, they’re the fastest-growing style of philanthropy. A giving circle is a group of friends, colleagues or like-minded strangers who pool their money, agree upon a grantee, and together, donate a larger amount than any individual member could alone. It’s a little like a book club for giving — a social group/support group that turns a personal aspiration into a chance for a recurring party and provides motivation to stick to a goal that can be easy to skip. Between 2017 and 2023, some 370,000 people donated $3.1 billion through giving circles, as IP’s Dawn Wolfe wrote earlier this year, drawing on numbers from Philanthropy Together, a PSO for giving circles that also launched back in early 2020. That $3.1 billion is up from $1.3 billion in 2017.
The growth of the movement is partly due to people’s desire to connect, both to their giving and to other people. Social isolation and loneliness are on the rise, not just among older people, but also among other generations, including Gen-Z, as IP has written. But another reason for the explosive growth of the giving circle model is the way it lends itself to tech-driven implementation, such as through the giving-circle-focused platform Grapevine.
Grapevine, founded by Emily Rasmussen and launched in 2020, is dedicated to expanding the giving circle movement by making it easy for people to start or join one. “We didn’t create the model, but we brought the model online. We’ve created a tool that can help them and support them directly. We’ve made it easier and more accessible,” she said. “The other side of the house is the experience, a community space.” The system lets members build tighter bonds through things like one-to-one coffee chats, which can be set up through it.
So far, the site, which has a nonprofit and a social enterprise arm, has helped nearly 80,000 mostly small-budget givers donate more than $39 million to some 5,100 nonprofits. Of the 4,000 listed in the giving circle directory created by Philanthropy Together and Grapevine, “we created 44% of the new giving circles in the last three years,” Rasmussen said.
The Kickstarter of philanthropy
Rasmussen, who has a background in nonprofits, microfinancing and dance, was working on global microfinance at a firm in New York when crowdfunding started to become a thing. She heard about Kiva, then Kickstarter. “As a former ballet dancer, I love the arts and I was very excited about Kickstarter,” she said. Then she got an idea that excited her even more: creating the first crowd-granting platform to route money to nonprofits and bring everyday people into the philanthropic ecosystem. “I loved the idea of tech helping unlock funding from communities around the world for communities around the world,” she said.
At the same time, Rasmussen was realistic about the potential obstacles between her and her dream of creating the Kickstarter of philanthropy — such as a lack of solid tech and business skills. Through her job, she’d helped bring Harvard Business School students on trips to visit NGOs in India and Kenya. This inspired her to apply for the MBA program at Harvard; she was accepted and began refining her vision there. “The crowd-funding model seemed very powerful but also transactional. I wanted something more connected and impactful, more community-based and collaborative, more recurring gifts, rather than one-time campaigns,” she said.
Out of all that came the first iteration of Grapevine. But like any savvy, newly minted, MBA-turned-entrepreneur, she was open to pivoting to meet market demand. When a few giving circles began using Grapevine, she realized she’d found the platform’s niche. Rasmussen’s team collaborated with several giving circles to build out Grapevine to make it more responsive to the needs of community giving groups, such as adding tech tools to collect donations from many members, hold the funds, give grants and issue tax receipts.
To start a giving circle on Grapevine, users log in and answer questions about their values, focus area and vision. They then create a pitch and invite other people to join. There are no platform fees, but it does ask for (completely optional) tips. And while companies pay Grapevine for all kinds of support, individual giving circles don’t.
“It’s important to us to keep a free version of this so people can easily get involved. That means the movement can grow more quickly and have more impact. We need to make it easy, reduce the friction, have good tech and remove other barriers like price. That’s been our philosophy so far,” Rasmussen said.
Major foundations join the giving circle movement
Grapevine also seeds and supports giving circles proactively. “We have been able to identify gaps. Someone might reach out and say, ‘Do you have a giving circle in Cleveland?’ We look and realize we don’t. Then a few more people ask, and eventually we decide, ‘Let’s just start it. We’ll invite that woman and the other three and launch it and see if anyone wants to step up and lead,’” Rasmussen said.
Grapevine is extending the reach of the giving circle approach by tapping foundations such as Nextdoor Kind Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Catalyst Fund and W.K. Kellogg Foundation for seed money and matching grants. It is also working with foundations and companies who use the platform, such as by helping them include employees in company-funded grantmaking decisions and CSR initiatives.
Newman’s Own Foundation, which is funded by the company’s profits from sauces and snacks, among other food items, launched the Newman’s Own Community Fund on Grapevine last year. For its pilot program using the platform, the foundation put in $100,000 for Giving Tuesday donations and let anyone who joined the online community vote on final grantees. More than 500 people joined, donating an additional $3,000 in total.
“Members voted and the top three winners received different amounts, while all the other nominees each got $750,” said Alex Amouyel, Newman’s Own Foundation’s president and CEO. This year, Newman’s Own Foundation will be giving away more than $500,000 for food justice for kids, including two publicly decided grants of $10,000 each through Grapevine. Voting for these starts August 20.
Amouyel, who believes everyone can be and should be a philanthropist, said the giving circle model is a natural fit for the nonprofit. “Our money doesn’t come from Paul Newman himself, per se, or an endowment. It comes from the millions of consumers who buy our products, our salad dressing, pizza. One way of thinking of it is that the philanthropists behind Newman’s Own Foundation are the consumers, the millions of people who are buying the product. It’s everyday philanthropy.”
Rasmussen, who seems to have boundless energy for growing Grapevine — or maybe for life in general — is working to expand institutional involvement. “I’m really excited about the foundations that are joining and bringing bigger pools of capital and bigger networks. These are very exciting collaborations. You’re taking the fastest-growing form of philanthropy and putting fuel on the fire,” she said.
Smells like teen giving
Its mobile platform and ease of entry make Grapevine appealing to burgeoning teenage philanthropists, as it turns out. In New York City, as the Impact100NYC giving circle came together, Ades’ teenage daughter, Rae, and Wigutow’s teenage son, Jesse, sat in on so many planning calls between their moms in their cars on speakerphone that they got inspired to create a giving circle of their own. Using Grapevine, they launched Impact100NYC Next-Gen in 2021, with a $100 annual donation per teen, which can be donated, sponsored or earned (and a stipulation that no teen in New York City would be turned away due to lack of funds).
“They started to really learn and understand the model and they said, ‘We can do this,’” Ades said. “They got together with a group of friends, and their model follows ours. They have given away in three years just about $25,000. There are about 75 to 100 teens a year. They are committed to doing quarterly hands-on volunteer activities, too.”
