Jeff Skoll made his money as eBay’s first employee and first president. He started the Skoll Foundation in 1999 with a different theory of change than most philanthropists: that the fastest path to large-scale social transformation isn’t funding programs, but funding the people who have already proven they can redesign systems from the inside.
That’s a consequential distinction. Programs end when funding cycles end. Systems-changers create effects that outlast any individual grant.
What Skoll Actually Funds
The Skoll Foundation specifically targets social entrepreneurs who have already demonstrated results at a meaningful scale and need capital to expand, not to prove their model, but to replicate it. This is a later-stage investment thesis than most foundations use.
Catalyst Grants provide three-year funding to organizations that have proven their model’s effectiveness and want to scale it. This is distinct from seed funding (which tests whether something works) and from general operating support (which keeps existing operations running). Catalyst Grants are specifically designed for the phase where you know something works and need investment to grow.
Spark Workshops provide social entrepreneurs with the space and structure to explore their purpose, find solutions, and develop their approach: more of a capability-building investment than a capital one. The two programs together address both the financial and the strategic needs of social enterprises at the expansion stage.
The Systems Change Philosophy
The Foundation’s analysis, developed in the book “Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Revolutionary Change,” by Roger Martin and Sally Osberg, emphasizes that genuine systems change requires social entrepreneurs to understand not just the problem they’re solving but the full architecture of the system that produces it.
Florence Nightingale didn’t just improve hospital care. She changed how military medicine was documented and governed. Muhammad Yunus didn’t just provide loans. He built a new financial infrastructure for people excluded from banking. The Skoll Foundation looks for people operating at that level of ambition.
Build Change, one of the Skoll Fellows, works in emerging countries to construct earthquake and typhoon-proof houses and schools, changing building standards and codes, not just building better structures. Ashoka, which shares a network relationship with Skoll, provides a pipeline of early-stage social entrepreneurs whose work Skoll can monitor before selecting who to fund at the scale-up stage.
Most philanthropists fund the visible end of social change — the service delivery, the program, the intervention. Skoll funds the design layer — the people who can change the rules that make bad outcomes predictable.
The Network Effect
The Skoll World Forum, an annual gathering in Oxford where social entrepreneurs, investors, business leaders, and policymakers meet, is one of the more productive environments for cross-sector collaboration on complex social problems. It’s where Skoll Fellows exchange ideas and strategies with each other rather than just reporting progress to a funder.
This network design reflects Skoll’s underlying theory: that social entrepreneurs are more effective when they have peer relationships with others working at the same level of systems ambition, regardless of whether they’re working on the same problem. The cross-pollination between Fellows working on climate, poverty, and health access produces insights that siloed funding rarely generates.
For social enterprise founders: the Skoll model is worth studying not just as a funding opportunity but as an organizational design. The combination of capital, peer community, and capability-building creates conditions for durable growth that capital alone doesn’t.
To find out more about the Skoll Foundation, visit their:
P.S. The Skoll Foundation’s case study library documents the work of their Fellows across sectors and geographies. It’s one of the best public resources for understanding what systems-level social enterprise actually looks like in practice.