Applications Invited for Draper Richards Kaplan (DRK) Foundation Grant

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About the Organization

DRK Foundation is a global venture philanthropy firm supporting early stage, high impact social enterprises. We believe that with early funding and rigorous support, exceptional leaders, tackling some of society’s most complex problems, can make the world a better place.   

Borrowed from our venture capital legacy, we find, fund and support exceptional leaders with innovative and highly impactful ideas that have the potential to scale. We provide unrestricted capital, and, most importantly, we provide rigorous, ongoing support by joining the board of directors and partnering with the leader to help build capacity in the organization and scale their impact. Learn more about Our Model.

We invest in early-stage organizations and are often their first institutional investor, as well as their first “outside” board member. We invest in a wide variety of sectors:  our current portfolio includes organizations working both domestically and internationally, helping to provide critical access to healthcare, education, food security, social justice, water and sanitation, transparency and accountability, and shelter.

We are now looking forward to finding, funding, and supporting the next generation of impactful DRK portfolio organizations. We have expanded our footprint in the world with offices in Menlo Park, Boston, Dallas, The Hague, and Nairobi.

About the Grant

DRK Foundation funds early-stage social impact organizations solving the world’s biggest social and environmental problems using bold, scalable approaches.

Attributes of a strong DRK candidate organization:

• Problem-first: Organizations addressing an urgent or critical social or environmental problem in an innovative fashion and in a way that directly benefits underserved populations.
• Systems-thinking: Organizations whose solutions work within existing systems, leveraging existing stakeholders, infrastructure, and incentives to grow their impact.
• Scalable: Organizations whose solutions can scale significantly, in that they can grow exponentially over time to directly impact a minimum of 10,000 lives within the next five years, and ambitions to grow well beyond that.
• Geographically-aligned: Organizations operating in our priority geographies of Africa, Europe, India, and the United States, although we will also consider opportunities in Latin America and Israel in select situations.
• Independent entities: Organizations who are structured as independent nonprofit or impact first, mission-driven for-profit entities, including US 501(c)3 and its non-US equivalents, C corporations, B corporations, hybrid organizations, and fiscally sponsored organizations where there is a plan to spin out.
• Financially sustainable: Organizations who have at least a growable stream of earned income revenues, or who have plans to develop an earned income revenue stream in the immediate future.
• Measurable evidence of impact: Organizations who are developing solutions based on data and clear evidence of what works, and who through their pilot(s) have a demonstrated ability to clearly and effectively measure their impact on underserved populations. 

Stage of growth:

• Early stage: Organizations who are early stage, which we define as post-pilot and pre-scale. This typically means:
• Your program, product or service is already being used in the market or in the field,
• You have early indication that your model is having its intended impact on the beneficiary populations,
• Your organization is relatively young (ideally between two and five years old, although we will consider both younger and older organizations).
• Venture funding: In the case of for profits, we typically support Seed to Series A organizations, and never lead rounds; we also generally but not exclusively refrain from participating in financings exceeding a $15M USD post-money valuation.  

DRK Foundation look for in terms of team attributes:

• Full time: Organizations with one or more founders who are full-time or intend to go full-time in the immediate future.
• Innovative: Founders and/or leadership teams designing creative, impactful solutions that leverage existing systems.
• Deep understanding: Founders and/or leadership teams who have a clear understanding of the problem they are solving, including the broader system they must work within to solve it,
• Learning stance: Founders and/or leadership teams who are continually learning and iterating.
• Collaborative: Founders and/or leadership teams who welcome a deep, hands-on, working relationship with DRK the full three-year period,
• Proximate: Founders and/or leadership teams who are proximate to the problems they are solving.

DRK support:

• Capacity: The core of DRK’s model is deep and extensive operational and technical support for each portfolio organization, both through a dedicated hands-on Board service role and specialist capacity-building resources across leadership and board development, organizational and fundraising capacity building, financial sustainability, and scaling strategy thinking.

This involves one of DRK’s senior team members taking a board service role for a three year period and serving as a resource to help the grantee or investee navigate their pathway to scale, often involving weekly conversations on key issues. There is also engagement with the broader DRK portfolio support team on specific and targeted issues, such as building out fundraising capacity, establishing a talent strategy, or refining financial models. In total, the capacity support can add up to $500,000 USD worth of in-kind support.

• Capital: DRK provides up to $300,000 USD in either unrestricted grant funding or investment capital over a three-year period, usually in multiple tranches. The exact instrument and tranches are decided in conversation with the grantee or investee during the closing process.
• Community: DRK convenes our portfolio and alumni annually, facilitating both in-person and digital connections to and within our community. This ranges from small 1:1 meetings to large 200+ person gatherings, including our three-day annual portfolio retreat.

DRK reviews roughly 3,000 applications every year. DRK funds a total of approximately 20 organizations every year, drawn from all of our priority geographies and across a wide variety of sectors.

How to Apply

Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation accepts applications for funding year round. Completing an application is the first step of our process and allows us to get to know you and your social enterprise so we can begin assessing your organization’s alignment with our funding thesis.

To help make this process manageable and accessible, we have designed the application to be relatively simple and minimally burdensome. The online application should take about 30-60 minutes to complete. If you would like to save your progress and resume later, please be sure to check the box at the top of the online form to save your information.

Please upload with your application a written executive summary, pitch deck, or business plan document addressing the following topics. Please feel free to re-use or re-purpose existing materials if you feel that they would provide relevant information.

If you don’t have existing materials, you can create a simple two-to-three-page document responding to each of the prompts below; please note that responding in bulletpoints is acceptable. You can find a template here: Template – DRK Application. (Again, note that DRK encourages you to use existing materials if they already sufficiently address these prompts, rather than creating new materials.)

Any additional materials (e.g., financials, impact reports, etc.) are welcome, but completely optional.

Note that organizations may re-apply up to twice, no sooner than one year after a decline notification from DRK regarding any previous applications. You will be asked to indicate that this is a re-application in the organization name field of the form. If you have any questions about re-applying, please email info@drkfoundation.org.

Problem and solution:

• Please succinctly describe the mission and objectives of the organization.
• Please describe the social problem your organization addresses.
• Please describe the solution your organization provides.

Impact:

• Please explain how your organization solves (or contributes to solving) the social problem in a way that improves on existing efforts.
• Please explain how your solution supports an underserved population, including the benefits that population has seen from your pilot(s).
• Please explain how your approach is unique, including in comparison to other initiatives or organizations addressing the same problem if possible/relevant.
• Please describe the organization’s tangible results to date, detailing how you plan to measure organizational outcomes and success in the future.

Scale:

• Please explain how you plan to scale the organization over time.
• Please explain the main sources of earned income that your organization will use to sustain your work over time.

Leader:

• Please attach a standard resume/CV for the entrepreneur(s) and/or key leadership team members (e.g. CEO, COO, ED etc). Applications with text bios for entrepreneurs or leadership team members will not be considered.

Apply Now

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Tags Environment and Sustainability Impact Investing Innovations and Technology Others