A brief update from the Fund Manager -

In the last impact report, I wrote about the creation of the Visible Fund primarily to serve as a platform for reaching underserved communities with impact-focused, charitable capital. One of the most exciting developments for the fund was the discovery of the Recoverable Grants Model which allows us to recycle funds inside charitable structures, creating direct impact today and then recycling to underwrite additional impact in the future. It’s been so much fun identifying the first 12 initiatives of the Fund’s portfolio that fit this innovative funding model and hearing countless stories of transformation that have already resulted from those investments.

We’ve spent much of the last year also learning that unlocking growth opportunities across the 55+ communities where we serve around the world requires far more than just creating a structure and putting some funding in place. Coaching and consulting the dozens of Catalysts who lead our efforts on the ground then trickles out across 200+ staff members who serve on their teams. That collective staff in-turn steward relationships with many hundreds of local changemakers who we ultimately seek to empower. These are those local changemakers working in their own backyards to solve problems that deeply impact their own families, neighbors, businesses, schools and churches. Tapping into hyper-local perspective that reflects cultural and contextual realities is key to our model of integrated community transformation and is central to building sustainable initiatives in these really hard places by ensuring there is ultimately local buy-in. It’s exciting to report that a majority of the investments made to date have specifically employed these local changemakers, empowering them to focus more of their time and energy on transformative work.

One Collective has spent decades establishing these key relationships and building trust in a way that allows us to invest in transformation in ways most outside organizations simply couldn’t access. Allocating charitable capital towards initiatives that not only increase impact but also recycle those funds continues to push us up a steep learning curve in ways that are proving to challenge and sharpen our team as we grow. We’ve chosen to invest our time, energy and resources on bringing our own people along that curve in this earliest season of the Fund’s lifecycle.

To date we have vetted dozens of funding opportunities, many of which simply weren’t a fit for the Fund’s format, but this due diligence allowed us to work closely with field leaders to be better prepared for identifying and structuring future opportunities. As a result, our staff and partners across the globe have been inspired to both dream bigger and embrace a higher degree of strategic planning that bleeds into every aspect of their work. Each of these initiatives impact deep community-level needs ranging from addiction recovery to refugee and trauma care, early childhood education, nutrition, affordable housing, environmental care and job creation.

On behalf of all of One Collective, but especially those leading these initiatives and the people they serve abroad, thank you for investing in tomorrow’s transformation in ways that shine Jesus’s light on a broken world.

Sincerely,

Brandon Weidman (Fund Manager)