CRI Foundation works with a range of partners, with a range of purviews. While we often work within the bounds of informal relationships or case-specific agreements, we also participate in select formal collaboratives, detailed below.

The Risk Pool Fund

What
Founded in 2018 by the Eleanor Crook Foundation, Vitol Foundation, CRI Foundation, and with early support from Open Road Alliance, the Risk Pool Fund (RPF) provides emergency funding to grantees in the event that they encounter an unforeseeable obstacle.

Why
Because it doesn’t make sense to let good projects stall, erode, or fail for lack of access to relatively small amounts of money.

USAID DIV

What
Since early 2019, CRI has participated in a partnership with USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) to further DIV’s impact by providing supplementary technical expertise.

Why
The DIV model is an exemplar in evidence-based government funding. If other divisions of USAID or other national governments adopt this model for vetting and funding development projects (as did France with their Fund for Innovation in Development), the return on investment of our staff costs will be enormous. A recent paper by DIV co-Founder and Nobel Prize Laureate in economics, Michael Kremer, revealed a conservative estimate of 17:1 social return on investment of DIV funded projects.

Big Bang Philanthropy

What
A collaborative of 20+ foundations dedicated to lessening the burden of poverty around the world. Big Bang Philanthropy encourages and enables funders to share information and help each other with questions or problems as they arise. While many Big Bang foundations have grantees in common, Big Bang is not a co-funding collaborative.

Why
Through Big Bang, CRI has developed valuable relationships across the world. These relationships have helped fuel our growth and provided venues for brainstorming and problem-solving.