About Us

Our mission is to provide funding and other forms of support to organizations intent on increasing equitable access, among all people, to better health, education, food security, opportunity, justice, and harmony with their environment.

We’re particularly focused on organizations whose leaders are close to the communities they serve, implementing programs developed by those communities to address their particular issues. We believe in the power of catalytic funding, whether it’s to launch those who are just getting underway or to boost the impact of those who have been building their momentum and are ready to expand.

Announcing the Recipients of the $12M Maternal & Infant Health Award!

Our Approach is Based in Trust

We are whole-hearted champions of Trust Based Philanthropy. We don’t believe in onerous one-size-fits all grant proposals and progress reports. Instead, we meet with and nurture relationships with each one of our grantee partners to see how we can best align and support them.

1. Establish a Relationship

We find organizations with exceptional potential in their area and talk with them about their work, challenges, plans, dreams, and what they need to move forward.

2. Fund & Support

We provide unrestricted, mostly multi-year funding and other forms of support to help organizations achieve their goals. The definition of progress is left in the hands of the partners we fund, because their understanding of the issues involved and potential for impact will always be greater and more accurate than our own.

3. Continued Engagement

We have ongoing conversations with our partners on a timeline that makes sense for their projects, and we seek to promote their work to a wider audience to strengthen their capacity for impact.

"The Patchwork Collective exists to help redistribute wealth in the world. It’s not about ‘giving money away’, it’s about rebalancing inequities, to increase the potential for more people on our planet to thrive. It’s essential for our collective global wellbeing. And it isn't hard to do."

Marie & Benoit Dageville

Founders, The Patchwork Collective

Our Values

Our four core values — equity, trust, connection, and human-centered—ground everything we do, from the partners we work with to the programs we support.

Equity

Equity is the thread that ties each of our three pillars together: Global Health, Social Equity, and Climate Justice. Equity is different from equality, where everyone gets an equal share of the pie. Equity is not about equal division but instead about giving each individual what they need to survive and succeed based on where they are and where they want to be.

Global Health Equity means no one is precluded from good health based on their race, income, or location.
Social Equity means gender, sexuality, race and other dimensions of a person’s identity no longer determine their socioeconomic outcome.
Climate Equity means the just distribution of climate protection and conservation to alleviate the unequal degradation created by climate change.

Connection

We believe in the power of connection. To effectively address societal-scale issues like racial inequity and climate injustice, we need to work together—leveraging knowledge, pooling resources, and sharing best practices. Too often, well-intentioned but siloed efforts fail to endure, scale, or generate long-term impact. At The Patchwork Collective, we’re continually looking to build connections to help advance our vision for a more equitable world.

Human-centered

Above all, our work is human-centered. Whether we’re funding climate justice, global health, or social equity, we put people’s needs, rights, livelihoods, and happiness first. And we look for organizations and partners that do the same. We look toward impacted communities and local leaders, because designing real solutions begins with understanding the problems real people face.

Trust

We practice trust-based philanthropy so we can shift agency and power back to local communities. When it comes to solving global health challenges, social inequities, and climate injustice, we know we don’t have the answers—the impacted communities do. Our duty as The Patchwork Collective is to trust that our grantees have the specialized knowledge to get the job done efficiently, effectively, and equitably.

We know we don’t have all the answers, and so we trust our grantees to use their specialized and proximate knowledge to do what needs to be done—without strict reporting and oversight.

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