Roddenberry Foundation | May 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AemGg47mp5A

“Through +1, we’ve been able to access proximate organizations, learn from local experts, combine resources with other funders, and accelerate the impact of our giving. It has been extraordinary.” — Kate Faith, Vice President of Impact, Tarsadia Foundation

In 2020, in response to the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Roddenberry Foundation rapidly made a series of grants to organizations across the Global South. Funds went to a range of innovative initiatives, such as a mobile platform delivering real-time health information to rural communities. In a moment when supply chains were struggling and borders were closing, we saw how the global crisis was in fact a hyper-local one, manifesting differently across regions, economies, and public health systems. And our experience with these early grants opened our eyes to how locally-led initiatives—leveraging their close relationships with the marginalized communities they served—were uniquely positioned to respond to the crisis.

By mid-2020, we realized that we needed a new approach to our work and that to find proximate leaders, particularly in rural and last mile communities, we had to fundamentally change the way we source potential grantees. This led to the development of the +1 Global Fund, a platform for peer-nominations drawn from the networks of well-established institutions ("Network Partners"). These partners—such as Acumen, Ashoka, CARE, Dasra, and USAID—were invited to identify individuals, known as "Nominators," working within various sectors and regions across the Global South. These Nominators, trusted and respected within their communities, were then tasked with nominating locally-led initiatives ("Nominees") they deemed worthy of support.

Through several pilot rounds across multiple countries and with a variety of Network Partners we validated the model, demonstrating enthusiastic participation from Partners and Nominators that yielded high-quality nominations, and the discovery of exceptional locally-led initiatives, many of which had never received support from Global North funders before. Building on the success of the pilot rounds, Roddenberry began envisioning a more comprehensive platform comprising multiple +1 Funds, each dedicated to urgent issues in specific regions of the Global South. In 2021, with "Funding Partners"—Shockwave Foundation, Vitol, Sall Family Foundation, Tarsadia Foundation and others—we created individual Funds focused on health, food insecurity, and WASH in Sub-Saharan Africa, establishing a community of practice to guide our work.

After four years and over 1500 nominations by 1000 plus nominators in 26 countries we’ve drawn some powerful conclusions that now guide our work:

1. Societal problems are best addressed by those who are most proximate to affected communities and their unique contexts.
2. The interconnected nature of systemic problems demands integrated and systems-oriented organizations ****(and funding opportunities that support them).
3. There is an enormous untapped universe of these small, under-valued, and under-resourced systems-oriented organizations that need to be supported and promoted.
4. Meaningful progress hinges on our ability to connect these diverse organizations across networks and create opportunities for learning, sharing, and collaboration.

We invite you to learn more about +1 below, including how it is working today and our intentions for the future. Please click into any page that interests you, and get in touch to continue the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.