A new set of funders, shaped by movements like Abundance, Progress, and Effective Altruism, wants to build more, move faster, and expect more from the systems that serve people. Nan Ransohoff has called this shift a third wave of American philanthropy driven by AI wealth. Delivery Associates’ CEO Nick Rodriguez and Director Laurel Blatchford saw this thinking up close at the Progress Conference in October 2026. They came away struck by the attendees’ optimism about hard problems, their focus on science and technology as both an entry point and a way to deliver, and their openness to debate. We asked them what they are seeing in the wider shift, and what it means for howchange actually happens.

New philanthropic wealth is arriving from people who built technology companies, and movements like Abundance, Progress, and Effective Altruism are shaping how they think about their role in driving social change. What do you think is different about this moment, and why does it matter now?

Nick: In one sense this follows a familiar pattern. A new technology creates wealth, and the people who made it want to contribute to the good of society. Sometimes that’s directly related to how they made their money, as a response to its implications or a way to offset them. Sometimes it isn’t. There will be a diversity of approaches.

Three things feel different. First, depending on who you ask, this technology is more transformative than any that came before. The wealth was made through something that feels unprecedented, and the people at the center of it feel that weight.

Second, several people have told me this group is more likely to still be in the middle of their careers, still building the thing that generated the wealth. There is a lot more to do in building AI systems and an AI-enabled future and protecting us from the worst harms, and much of that happens in their day jobs. Engaging them on philanthropy will look different than it does with someone who has retired from a first career and made philanthropy a second one. Learning to navigate the connection points and disconnects will help.

But the most important difference is that we all have a sense of the stakes. There’s a lot of uncertainty about AI’s impact, and there’s a conviction from people that we have to be ready for whatever it brings. There has never been a moment when philanthropic capital was more needed. That is both exciting and daunting, which is how we think about most of the problems we approach. It may be exciting because it’s daunting, and because it’s a challenge worth rising to.

 Laurel: I share a lot of Nick’s reflections. His point about people being in the middle of their careers matters because it means a different kind of support is needed. People are still working out what that looks like and how much time they’ll have for their philanthropy.

The other part is the optimism. It’s the boost that comes from being able to apply the intelligence and skills from your career to a problem you want to tackle in the social sector. It’s been described to me as less focused on process, such as the right way to deliver technical assistance or build evidence, and more on how much you can, as a partner, engage intellectually and get deep on solving a problem.

Effective Altruism adds a clear return-on-investment throughline: you put money in here and you save lives there. That framework has complications, of course, but it underlies a lot of this thinking about making an investment and seeing results.

The Abundance agenda has put housing supply at the center of its argument. How does the focus on housing at the conference compare with where the wider housing field has been focused, and what is one specific effort that shows it working?

Laurel: The focus on housing was exciting to me as someone who has worked in all corners of the ecosystem for many years. Many of the bigger problems we see now around housing supply and affordability have been years in the making. What’s thrilling is a wider coalition and a broader tent of people caring about housing, because the impacts are so widely felt. There are also different techniques, tools, and newer advocacy efforts like Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY), which have taken the ideas of Abundance and Progress to drive a specific agenda and to make sure there’s a real conversation about the trade-offs of things like zoning and environmental regulation.

Everyone I met who was working on housing supply was talking about new kinds of advocacy, policy tools, financing, and technology. The field needs all of them.

For a specific example, I’d point to the YIMBY movement’s success in drawing attention to where housing regulation needs to change, zoning in particular but also environmental regulation, in communities all over the Bay Area. Supporters argue these ideas that will open up housing supply in the years to come.

Where is the thinking less developed, and what does that mean for funders?

Nick: One thing I heard again and again is that the conversation about making progress and building more is more mature in some subsectors than others. Housing is a good example, where a lot of thought has gone into what progress and abundance mean and what a return on investment could look like. Science, including research and development (R&D) is another. You can see it in the chapters of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which covers many sectors.

In housing, the field is fairly well defined: YIMBY advocacy, the zoning, permitting, and infrastructure rules that govern how much gets built. There’s still more to do. In education, or in healthcare outside science and drug discovery, the thinking is less developed and there’s less consensus on the answer. That leaves new frontiers: where the highest-leverage investments are, what the right policies are, and the question we love to ask, which is what approach to delivery will maximize the chance those policies succeed.

Many new and creative funding models are under way to drive results more quickly.  Long-term government ownership and systems can take years. What needs to be in place for fast-moving philanthropic money and government-led systems to work together?

Nick: The people thinking about this are going to run into a familiar problem for philanthropy. Funders want to move faster than government, and that’s usually the right instinct. But when it’s time to scale or institutionalize anything, government is often an indispensable partner. The key is knowing which phase you’re in. Sometimes you act outside or around government to spark change. Other times you encourage government to make that change itself.

There was alot of energy at the conference for policy as a philanthropic lever. If you can change a law, you’ve used philanthropic capital to do something permanent and hard to reverse, and that could make a difference. I think investing in advocacy to get the policies right matters.

The opportunity beyond that is to invest in delivery, what people sometimes call state capacity. The term has many definitions. To me it includes the policies that govern how government works, but it’s more than that. It’s government’s ability to get big things done. That depends on how it’s organized, the day-to-day practices of people inside it, and how it works with political leadership to carry out the laws it passes. So the full range is advocacy to get policy right, policies that make government effective, and investment in its actual capacity to deliver. All of it will have this force-multiplying effect on every innovation and idea funded outside government. This generation of philanthropists should get comfortable investing around government, through government, and alongside government.

Laurel: Having worked in government, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector, I think the biggest issue is understanding the very different perspectives each sector brings, and making them legible to one another. During the 2020–2021 presidential transition, I briefed incoming federal leaders on how to work with philanthropy, and saw up close how challenging it was for both parties. The incentives are different and the timelines are different. A foundation president might say, “I want to invest in this, but how do I know government will be a consistent partner?” A government leader might say, “I want philanthropic support, but I don’t know how to share information and ideas closely enough for it to be catalytic alongside the larger scale but more focused funding I bring.” Bridging these perspectives and bringing government and philanthropy together is hard but necessary for progress on big problems such as housing.

The most exciting and innovative example I saw was on the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2013. We laid the groundwork for several years of large investments of disaster recovery funding in communities that had experienced disasters. We worked with the Rockefeller Foundation to pair communities with technical assistance providers, architects and designers, all alongside existing federal funding. The communities submitted to HUD met federal requirements but in many cases they also went further, because the work had been done (with philanthropy’s support) to make the projects investable.

That’s what I mean by making legibility mutual. It means understanding which lane each partner sits in, working together on timelines that benefit both sides, and staying away from the politics of the moment to focus on the ideas and shared long-term goals.

If a funder wanted to turn one of these big ideas into results, what are the first one to three things they would need to get right to make it happen?

Nick: A theory of action and a delivery chain can be very helpful here. Start by asking where you’re investing and how you expect that investment to make an impact, through which mechanisms and levers. When it’s time to implement at scale, switch from the theory of action to what we call the delivery chain: who does what to deliver a changed experience to people.

Take drug discovery, which this movement is excited about. There are different levers in that theory of action. One might be investment in the tools that enable faster R&D. A second might be investing in the R&D itself. The third might be investing in and advocating for policy that smooths the way for clinical trials to happen at speed. The next one might be funding early market adoption or advance market commitments, so a product doesn’t reach only wealthy people at first. The last one might be working through government health systems to make sure that the miracle cure, when it's developed, is distributed and delivered at scale. That last lever may look different in the Global South than in the Global North, but you can see a whole continuum of different types of investments.

The first thing to do is get clear about which of these phases you’re in and why. The second is to think through the delivery chain that carries implementation at scale. The third is to track progress and determine the return on investment by understanding the ultimate outcome and how you’ll measure it. For any innovation being funded, those are the big three.

Laurel: It starts by understanding the problem very deeply. In our work with partners across the social sector, we ask: What is the root cause? How do you want to tackle it? How do you know what will work? How do you know when it’s off track? What are you going to do about it, and how do you make it sustainable?

The other thing to remember is that many of these funders are anchored on expertise and the depth of an idea. What we do well is bring people together to compare notes and build processes that work, and we do that very well with experts. For us, it’s also about identifying where we’re most excited and have ideas, either in-house or with close partners, so we can bring both Delivery Associates’ capabilities and our excitement about those ideas to funders.

If you’re backing a big idea and want to talk about how it reaches scale, get in touch at info@deliveryassociates.com.

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