What Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective looks for in a partner

It’s no surprise that Anne Marie Burgoyne, managing director of Emerson Collective, had a long line of people forming to meet with her following her session at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on Wednesday. Burgoyne leads philanthropy for this social change organization started by Laurene Powell Jobs. Emerson Collective uses a range of tools — from philanthropy to impact investing to policy advocacy — to make progress on issues such as education, the environment, immigration, and health equity. Its work has expanded internationally as it supports new areas, including migration driven by climate change. Nonprofits are eager to work with Emerson Collective because of its grants, which are given as general operating, multiyear grants, as well as all of the support it provides beyond the grants. As part of a longer interview for Devex @SXSW, the special edition of our This Week in Global Development podcast, Devex asked a question exclusively for our Pro readers about what Emerson Collective looks for in its partners. “If I think about how we choose, I start with the question of how and where we source, right? Because it ends up kind of being a funnel, if you will,” Burgoyne said. Emerson Collective reads all the cold emails it receives, and sometimes, they’ll schedule a call. Partners in the Emerson portfolio also recommend other organizations doing important work, Burgoyne said. And peer funders also share ideas with Emerson Collective. “There is a piece often that is related to being in the arena of the work we’re doing,” she added. For example, for many years, Emerson Collective’s immigration work was U.S.-based, and focused on immigration reform as a system, with aspects of it that related to community-based work. But over time, its work has expanded to include climate migration, so the organization is considering new partners that may not have been a fit in the past. Burgoyne added that Emerson Collective places a lot of value in the leader, and leadership teams, of an organization. “Our experience has pretty strongly been that leaders who have some level of proximity to their work, have built or appear to have the potential to build a lot of thought leadership in the sector that they’re in, are really asking the question of how day-to-day to do very strong, credible work, and then are looking to the horizon to ask what that means in terms of larger conversations around culture change, or policy change, or reallocation of resources, that tends to be a leader that for us, we see being a strong fit for the portfolio,” she said. The Emerson Collective team is also interested in understanding an organization’s model, including whether there’s a culture of iteration and learning, how responsive the team is to the community it serves, and whether the organization is working efficiently, Burgoyne added. “So there’s a journey of sourcing, and then there’s a piece where over time, we’re really trying to understand the leader and their team, and the model, and their solutions to see where we can find those strong fits for the portfolio,” she said. Update, March 20, 2024: The headline on this story has been changed.