Application Deadline: All Year Round
The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation seeks to dramatically improve the lives of people and the world around us through innovative strategies, systems changing approaches, and disrupting technologies. Our goal is to find social entrepreneurs with dynamic ideas and nurture them at the early stages with maximum leverage and total commitment.
Prospects for our portfolio of social enterprises come from a vast field of compelling ideas and dedicated leaders. We concentrate our selection on the capabilities of the founder/leader, the scalability of the model, and the potential impact of the organization on the world.
WHAT WE FUND
DRK’s hope is to support outsized impact through entrepreneurs and enterprises that create a transformational paradigm shift to meaningfully address a pressing societal problem affecting people’s lives.
DRK Funds:
- Organizations addressing a critical social or environmental issue as the focus of their work.
- Founders who intend to expand their impact significantly over time.
- Organizations operating in Africa, Europe, India, Latin America, and the United States.
- Independent nonprofit and impact first, mission-driven for-profit entities, including US 501(c)3 and its non-US equivalents, C corporations, B corporations, and hybrid organizations.
- Fiscally sponsored organizations in select cases where there is a plan to spin out (in our experience, independence creates stronger enabling conditions for growth).
- Post-pilot, pre-scale organizations. This typically means: Your program, product or service is already in the market or in the field, you have early indication that your model is having its intended impact and your organization is 3-5 years old (this is not a rule, but a guidepost).
Organizations with one or more founders who are full-time or intend to be.
—We believe that full-time leadership from the organization’s founder(s) is critical to an early stage organization’s growth.
—We recognize that going full-time requires resources that you may still be putting together, and if that is the case we are happy to start a conversation with you in the meantime.
DRK Prioritizes:
- Evidence of focused alignment, systemic social change, data-based decision making.
- Leaders who are continually learning and iterating and welcome a deep working relationship with DRK for 3 years. Leaders who intimately understand the opportunity and the communities they serve. Leaders committed to advancing justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging for all.
- Organizations who are designed to realize their impact at scale.
DRK Does Not Fund:
- Idea or pre-pilot stage organizations.
- Organizations that do not plan to expand or scale their impact to achieve their mission.
- Projects housed within an established, mature organization (unless there is a plan to spin out).Awareness or field building campaigns.
- Organizations whose sole focus is the development of research.
- Programs promoting religious doctrine.
