After piloting the Cause Fund model for 18 months, Charitable Impact is rolling this model of giving out to other causes. 

Cause Funds, launched in 2023, allow donors to give to a cause rather than a specific charity or non-profit.

For instance, a donor might decide to make a gift to a fund focused on addiction recovery or food security.

From there, each Cause Fund is led by a Cause Leader who has experience or expertise in that cause and is supported by an advisory council. 

Together, the Cause Leader and advisory council choose where best to direct the donations pooled through the Cause Fund. 

Charitable Impact piloted this model of giving for those who wanted to donate to organizations fighting ALS or supporting ALS patients. The ALS Super Fund was led by Mark Kirton, a former NHL player diagnosed with ALS in 2018. 

Before Kirton passed away in August, he appointed an advisory council to help steward the Super Fund, which included other patients, caregivers, clinicians, neurologists and medical experts. 

“In the long term, I would love to see Cause Funds as the new normal,” said Kevin Moorhead, senior director of Cause Funds at Charitable Impact. 

“Like a mutual fund, it provides a diversified portfolio of actions that are led by experts in their area, and they can trust that’s making a change. 

“It’s giving them a big social dividend with less risk, because you’re not just investing in one charity, but a whole portfolio.”

From charity-first to cause-first

For Moorhead, many of the issues that Cause Funds seek to address require thinking beyond specific organizations, and more about what the cause needs. 

Cause Funds began with the realization that many donors know which cause they would like to give to, but not which organizations and projects might be the most effective in directly addressing challenges. 

“I’m convinced that we must have more coordinated, pooled, strategic efforts to solve systemic problems in our society,” he said. 

“And I think that the current philanthropic landscape is akin to sprinkling sand on a beach.”

Cause Funds also “create a common goal”, reminding donors that we are “facing an issue that is bigger than any one organization,” said Leigh Naturkach, executive director of ALS Action Canada, a patient-led group. 

This method of pooling donations provides donors with confidence that their donations are meaningfully used and enables people with lived experience to have a say in where funds are directed. 

“We need people who care so deeply about the cause that it trumps their own specific charity,” Moorhead said. 

For the ALS Super Fund, Kirton recruited people with expertise in ALS, including academic and clinical research and lived experience. One person in the latter group was Cali Orsulak, who cared for her husband until his death in 2023. 

The ALS community faces a lot of unique needs, Orsulak said, from preparing for disability and death, to supporting families. 

“Where I’m from in Central Canada, I couldn’t find anything where that was being addressed, and I couldn’t find anything locally where I felt we were making any progress in the disease.”

As Orsulak joined the ALS Super Fund, she observed that the advisory council was focused on directing funds towards projects that would make a difference for ALS patients in the immediate term. 

They needed to ensure that the funding would benefit patients rather than research centres, prioritizing work that would give results within a patient’s lifetime, she said. 

The ALS Super Fund advisory council chose four priority areas to direct funding to: equitable access to clinical trials; translational research projects; research dedicated to patient support and quality of care; and national data gathering efforts that can support advocacy. 

Growing the Cause Fund model

“One of the things I will take away from this [ALS Super Fund] is being valued,” Orsulak said, adding that patients’ and caregivers’ opinions and perspectives are given weight throughout the decisions on where the money should flow. 

Moorhead recalls that when the ALS Super Fund was first announced, charities in the ALS space were skeptical of the model. 

However, he has found that once each Cause Fund is spun up, it doesn’t need much additional support from Charitable Impact other than to process any donations. 

This year, Charitable Impact has announced several new Cause Funds.

The Food Security Fund will be stewarded by Anick Silencieux, the founder and executive director of Support Black Charities. 

Operation Overcome will be dedicated to youth mental health, and Recovery Ecosystem will support addiction recovery.

While there is some replicability in the Cause Fund model, Moorhead recognizes that each one will take time to develop, and in some cases, the plan or the right advisory council may not form right away. 

“Cause Funds are a paradigm shift,” Moorhead said. “It’s not an AI or algorithmic fix. This is human beings talking, getting to know each other and establishing relationships.”

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