Open Road Alliance

Overview

Founded in 2012, Open Road Alliance is a private philanthropic initiative that provides grant capital to non-profits for mid-implementation projects facing an unexpected roadblock or a sudden catalytic opportunity. Open Road makes discrete, one-time charitable and recoverable investments across all sectors and geographies. \\Open Road's model is based on speed and financial leverage. Most traditional grant-making programs have slow, inflexible, and restrictive procedures for releasing funds. Many do not provide funds outside of their fixed grant cycles at all. To address this funding gap, grants from Open Road do not operate on a traditional grant cycle. Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year and the application itself is a concise, three-step process: an initial conversation, short written application and final interview. The grant is then released to the organization within a few weeks of approval. This turn-around time is possible because Open Road grants relatively modest amounts to organizations that have previously undergone a rigorous review by the primary funder of the project, which has typically already committed hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, to the initiative. By leveraging this pre-existing due diligence, Open Road can rapidly accelerate its decision making process.\\In addition to its portfolio of investments, Open Road conducts advocacy and research to develop tools and best practices for addressing risk mitigation and contingency funding. In a community of philanthropists seeking maximum impact, we believe that traditional funding structures and attitudes have room to improve. By sharing our investment portfolio and independent research with our grantees and peers, we work to improve the dialogue between philanthropists and the organizations they support. Our goal is to decrease the frequency of these unexpected funding shortfalls and increase the effectiveness of grantmaking within our sector as a whole.