The rise (and rise) of philanthropic re-granters
How re-granters are reshaping where philanthropic capital lands, and what CEOs need to know. Localisation is the language. Re-granters are the reality. The grants are increasingly going to the same organisations the original funders backed years ago, just through a longer chain.
Daniel Rogers and Virginia Simpson · SignalWork
Something has shifted in how philanthropic capital moves, and the organisations that adapt fastest will be the ones that recognise it for what it is. Intermediaries are not new. They have existed for decades. What is new is that major global funders are now structuring their entire deployment strategies around them, and the speed at which capital is being routed through them in 2025 and 2026 is unlike anything in the previous decade.
The clearest current example is Adeso's Proximate Fund, launching in 2026 in partnership with the African Philanthropy Forum and NEAR. The fund channels capital to African-led civil society and social entrepreneurs through country-level hubs, with grant decisions made by Africa-based teams who know the ecosystems they are funding. The Mastercard Foundation took a similar route in 2025, committing $300 million through UNHCR to support refugee education across Africa. UNHCR holds the deployment authority. The donors do not see most of the grants. They see aggregated impact and trust the intermediary to make the calls.
Neither of these organisations is a household name. Both are now making decisions about hundreds of millions of dollars that used to be made inside a major foundation's grants office.
Why this is happening
Three things are driving it. The first is fragmentation. There are now hundreds of major foundations, family offices, and impact funds making independent decisions, and the coordination problem cannot be solved from inside the system. The second is localisation. Funders have learned, often through hard experience, that you cannot drive systems change from a distance. Energy transitions require trust with government officials who have been in their posts for fifteen years. Globally headquartered organisations rarely have those relationships. Regional intermediaries often do. The third is pattern. Re-granters scale around acute crises, and the crisis category rotates. Pandemic response built one generation in the early 2020s. Climate philanthropy built another. The current acceleration is being driven by refugee response, post-aid health systems, and human rights work in regions where Western funding has withdrawn. Each cycle leaves the infrastructure stronger, and the major funders increasingly default to deploying through it because the muscle is already there.
The honest question
If re-granters were simply moving capital closer to the work, the story would end there. But the picture is more complicated.
A major funder commits capital to an intermediary. The intermediary's grant decisions are shaped by the funder's priorities, by its own strategic frameworks, and by the relationships its leadership team has built over years in the same convening circuits as the funders themselves. The grants tend to go to organisations the intermediary's leadership already knows, often the same organisations the original funder backed directly a few years earlier. The result is something that looks like distributed decision-making but functions like a slightly longer version of the original chain.
This matters because the localisation language attached to the shift suggests capital is moving toward frontline organisations. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. The Grand Bargain, the 2016 commitment to direct twenty-five percent of humanitarian funding to local and national responders, has had to push its target year out repeatedly. Localisation is harder to deliver than to announce.
The point is not that re-granters are failing. Many are doing genuinely transformational work, and the recent USAID cuts have made their role more critical, not less. The point is that the perception problem does not disappear when capital moves to a re-granter. It moves with the capital. The room you now need to read is no longer just the funder's. It is the intermediary's.
What this means for CEOs
Reading the re-granter's room is a different exercise to reading a funder's. The questions are different. Where did the leadership team come from, and which previous funders are they still loyal to? What is their own theory of change, separate from their funders'? What pressure are they under from their own boards, and how does that pressure translate into grant decisions you will not see explained anywhere?
Most of the answers are not on the website. They live in the conversations the intermediary's team has with peers, with their own funders, and with the small number of people they trust to be honest with them.
The work starts with mapping. Most CEOs we speak to can name the major funders in their space but cannot name the re-granters those funders now deploy capital through. That asymmetry is where opportunities are being missed. The leaders getting funded right now are the ones who have done the work of understanding who the intermediaries are, how they think, what they are trying to prove, and what they are under pressure to deliver. That kind of understanding rarely comes from desk research. It comes from sustained, often confidential conversations with the people inside those rooms and the people who have already been through them. The introductions, when they come, usually come from a major funder who already knows the intermediary. Those introductions matter. But what makes an introduction land is having already done the homework. The intermediary's room is one you can walk into prepared, or one you can walk into hoping. The difference shows up in what gets funded.
If your organisation is navigating the shift toward intermediary-led funding and wants to understand how you are seen by the re-granters that increasingly decide where capital flows, get in touch.