Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors the past, present, and futures of Native peoples throughout the US. At Lever for Change, we celebrate the outstanding projects in our Bold Solutions Network that are committed to American Indian, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian populations. We invite you to support one of these highly vetted projects centering Native voices, stories, and issues.

I am excited to share that we are on track to reach our goal of leveraging $1 billion in funding for outstanding organizations this fall!

Lever for Change will celebrate its third birthday this month and we have much to celebrate. When we launched in 2019, we hoped to accelerate solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems by encouraging problem solvers to think big and by connecting those big ideas with donors willing to support them with large, multi-year grants of more than $10 million. Our team of six had serious doubts about whether we would succeed. Nonetheless, we set out with the ambitious goal of driving $1 billion in philanthropic funding to outstanding organizations by 2023.

Thanksgiving makes me think of pecan pie and pecan pie makes me think of pareto optimality. What can I tell you? I’m an economist.

A friend of mine, a master teacher, is fond of an exercise in which she asks her students to briefly study a dime and then, without looking back at it, write down 10 of its features. Most can only recall two or three. Then she asks students to join forces in small groups and, working together, most can now reconstruct the full list. How does this apply to our work at Lever for Change? We’ve learned that working in partnership with others often leads to increased productivity and better outcomes for all.

Time flies. It’s been just over a year since our team at Lever for Change launched the Bold Solutions Network. Born of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition for $100 million, Lever for Change unlocks capital that might otherwise remain on the sidelines. We embolden donors to make larger grants than are typical in philanthropy—$10 million or more—through customized competitions, which provide the opportunity for donors, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs to connect and solve global challenges together. We then amplify the top-ranked solutions in our Bold Solutions Network to catalyze investments in outstanding teams and accelerate large-scale social change.

Lever for Change is excited to launch Swift Grants – a new funding opportunity for Bold Solutions Network members offering small grants of up to $25,000 for collaborative projects.

At Lever for Change, we prioritize ensuring that our processes and approaches provide value and raise the visibility of bold solutions. While we continued to learn, evolve, and improve over the past year, we have seen strong evidence that being a member of the Bold Solutions Network proves valuable not only for teams who ultimately receive an award, but for all members.

When Lever for Change launched two years ago to unlock philanthropic capital that might otherwise remain on the sidelines, I initially suggested the name “Archimedes” for our new enterprise, because it was designed to move large amounts of philanthropic dollars for social change.