Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation will raise $65 million to support 100 next generation social enterprises that tackle some of the worlds most challenging problems. They will provide these organizations with three years of unrestricted capital and rigorous ongoing support by joining the board of directors. DRK partners with their social entrepreneurs to help them to build capacity in their organization and scale their impact. DRK supports these organizations in their most fragile and exciting moments during early growth, providing strategic and operational guidance. During the three years of board service, DRK will help the organization shape the board as a high impact board and provide hands-on coaching and mentorship to the social entrepreneur, which has proven to be invaluable to these early stage organizations. With experience on over 80 nonprofit boards, DRK recognizes patterns and can expertly steer organizations through common challenges for early stage ventures. DRK will also provide a peer-to-peer learning community of social entrepreneurs with convenings for extraordinary learning opportunities from experts as well as from their peers.
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation will raise $65 million to launch a third fund to support 100 next generation social entrepreneurs. Over the next year, DRK will have raised a $65 million fund, reviewed over 300 early stage social enterprises and launched the first cohort of 15-20 of the most impactful social enterprises by the end of 2016.
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation has a proven model for supporting exceptional leaders and innovative ideas to achieve large scale impact. Borrowed from their venture capital legacy, DRK finds exceptional leaders with innovative and impactful ideas that have the potential to scale. From their portfolio of over 80 investments to date, their organizations have impacted the lives of millions all around the world; from Room to Read who has helped 10 million children to become more literate, or Kiva who has enabled more than $680 million in microloans, or VisionSpring who has delivered more than 2.3 million eyeglasses to the developing world, or SIRUM who in the first 18 months has redistributed more than $4 million of critically needed drugs that would otherwise have been thrown away to front line community health centers that can't afford to buy the drugs their patients need. Their portfolio organizations have also helped to change the inherent systems that cause or contribute to the societal problems they are trying to address: EducationSuperHighway has helped to bring broadband to all U.S. schools, The Future Project is embedding a program in schools across seven major American cities to empower kids in low-income schools and One Acre Fund has increased over 300,000 farm incomes by 50% in Africa. These are the types of impact that the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation is looking to fuel with this next fund.
