Project Redwood Is Enriched By Our Affiliations

Project Redwood’s grantmaking is facilitated by Tides.

Tides is a foundation and nonprofit partner with nearly 40 years of experience building a world of shared prosperity and social justice. Tides accelerates the pace of social change, working with innovative partners to solve society’s toughest problems. Tides partners are at the forefront of efforts to expand equality and human rights, cultivate a sustainable environment, support healthy individuals and communities, and advance quality education. Tides manages over $130 million in annual charitable giving and grant-making, serves as fiscal sponsor of over 200 mission-aligned social ventures, and provides collaborative workspaces to over 100 social ventures in San Francisco and New York City. For more information, please visit www.tides.org.

Collective Action Funds at Tides
Project Redwood is a collective action fund at Tides. Tides creates and facilitates effective domestic and international grantmaking programs for individual donors, institutions and corporations. Tides has granted over one billion dollars to organizations working for positive social change across the globe. Tides advises philanthropic partners to help them transform their ideas and values into strategic, well-managed and highly impactful philanthropy. Collective action funds at Tides provide a neutral platform for multiple donors to efficiently and collaboratively support the issues they care about most. Learn more about Tides collective action funds here.

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ role was vital to Project Redwood over our first 8 years of grantmaking.

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) is a nonprofit organization that currently advises on and manages more than $200 million in annual giving by individuals, families, corporations, and major foundations. Continuing the Rockefeller family’s legacy of thoughtful, effective philanthropy, RPA remains at the forefront of philanthropic growth and innovation, with a diverse team led by experienced grantmakers with significant depth of knowledge across the spectrum of issue areas. Founded in 2002, RPA has grown into one of the world’s largest philanthropic service organizations and, as a whole, has facilitated more than $3 billion in grantmaking to nearly 70 countries. RPA also serves as a fiscal sponsor for more than 25 projects, providing governance, management and operational infrastructure to support their charitable purposes. For more information, please visit http://www.rockpa.org.

ABOUT FISCAL SPONSORSHIP AT RPA
Fiscal sponsorship is a mechanism used in the nonprofit sector that enables individuals and organizations to start programs (i.e., sponsored projects) without establishing a nonprofit organization. The structure allows a project to seek grants and solicit tax-deductible donations under the sponsor’s exempt status. Foundations often support fiscal sponsorships as an independent means for testing innovative ideas or achieving specific charitable aims while still influencing the work, activities, staffing, and performance measures of the project. RPA’s fiscal sponsorship program can provide the project with other benefits such as program, administrative and management support or needed expertise in finance, tax and accounting, human resources, risk/liability and grantmaking.

Project Redwood works with Stanford’s d.school
to deploy low cost technologies to the poor.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, the “d.school,” is Stanford’s nerve center for innovation. Students learn design thinking through immersion in iterations of an observe-brainstorm-synthesize-prototype-and-implement process.

Design for Extreme Affordability (DEA) is a two-quarter d.school class for interdisciplinary teams of graduate students in engineering, business, medicine, education, and science. The teams partner with United States-based organizations as well as with on-the-ground entities in the developing world; their shared objective is to devise tangible, ultra-affordable solutions to the pressing problems of the poor that can then be implemented on a large scale. In the winter quarter, teams focus on design thinking. During the spring break, they visit international project sites. The second quarter is devoted to prototyping, testing, reviewing, and redesigning. The final result is a product or service, and an implementation plan and business model.

Project Redwood helps DEA projects move from classroom ideas to fledgling businesses that produce goods and services for the developing world. Over eight annual cycles of grant-making, Project Redwood has made both individual grants and, beginning in 2013, contributions to a pool of funds to provide post-classroom support for a wide range of low-cost, high-impact products. Recent examples include projects focused on crop yield improvements, sanitation facilities, water purification systems, solar cell phone charging devices, treatment for clubfoot, and treatment for acute respiratory distress in infants.

Visit THE EXTREME WEBSITE for detailed project descriptions.