(Illustration by Peter Grant)
Marie Dageville’s life took a dramatic turn in September 2020 when Snowflake, the cloud computing company co-founded by her husband, Benoit Dageville, had its initial public offering. Suddenly, the couple had more wealth than they ever imagined.
They quickly committed themselves to redistributing their wealth through philanthropy, launching the Patchwork Collective foundation in 2022 and signing the Giving Pledge in 2023. “We feel a responsibility to give—and to give with urgency,” they wrote in their Giving Pledge letter.
This sense of urgency led the Dagevilles to collaborative funds, where they saw the most opportunity to learn while giving and could give in a way that empowered local leaders. Their satisfaction with this funding model has since led to a decision that they will channel 50 percent of their grantmaking budget into collaboratives.
At the 2025 Global Summit of Collaborative Funds in San Francisco, Marie Dageville shared a dais with Laura Garcia, CEO of Global Greengrants Fund, a collaborative that Patchwork Collective supports, which helps build grassroots movements focused on environmental justice. During their conversation, the two women shared that they consider each other true partners in their work. The edited transcript follows, highlighting the how and why of using collaborative funds to advance movements.
Laura Garcia: Over the last few years, you have quickly ramped up your giving and become a prominent voice encouraging donors to get more money out the door. How have you been able to make so much progress in such a short time?
Marie Dageville: When I started in philanthropy, I didn’t have a background, but I wanted to do things quickly. My first step was working with Matti Navellou at ICONIQ Impact. I did not have any philanthropy staff, so ICONIQ became my “team.” When we launched the Patchwork Collective, our initial funding efforts were part of collaborative funding programs that ICONIQ had created.
I learn by doing, and the best way was to join any collaboratives that I could. It’s helped me to move more funds much faster, and I’ve learned a lot. It helps to not be the only one making decisions, as I’m not an expert in knowing what communities need. I wanted a way to deploy funds with other people. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work with communities that were underfunded and led by locals. And I wanted to invest in relationships that could be partnerships. Collaboratives were helpful on all those fronts.
Global Greengrants Fund is one of the collaboratives that we invested in early on through the Patchwork Collective. You have a unique model—can you describe it?
Garcia: Global Greengrants has been around for 30 years. We’ve made more than 18,000 grants in 165 countries. We work at the intersection of environmental justice and climate justice and have a focus on supporting grassroots movements. We have a decentralized grantmaking model that brings together more than 200 local leaders who help us select our grantees.
Our number one priority is diluting differences in funding flows around the world, and we do that through collaborative movements. We are a very complementary funder. Once the groups we fund have access to bigger pools of funding, we step away. We fill a major funding gap.
Your philanthropy has been very bold, and you have been clear about prioritizing trust-based philanthropy and participatory grantmaking. Why have those been priorities?
Dageville: The why is people. Everything I do is based on people and relationships. From the beginning, I wanted to fund under-represented communities, and a mentor instructed me to provide multi-year, operating support grants. I didn’t want a model where the donor held power; I wanted an approach where grantees made the decision. We started by making large grants to a smaller number of organizations, but we wanted to be as fair and as distributive as possible, so we decided to make smaller grants to more people. Collaboratives are great for that.
A recent survey conducted by The Bridgespan Group found that donors who leverage collaboratives typically allocate 23 percent of their grants to them. But we are going to shift 50 percent of our budget to collaboratives. This is the only way for us to really live with our values of shifting the decision-making power to the people on the ground.
We are living in interesting and challenging times. We see more and more collaboratives and intermediaries emerging, but they are not well understood and definitely not well funded. What can we do to respond?
Garcia: “Interesting and challenging times” is an understatement! I have always been in grassroots philanthropy and collaboratives. I think it’s not so much that we are misunderstood, but that there is an unwillingness to understand us.
We are placed in a position by design in the structures of philanthropy where the biggest challenge is inequitable flows of funding. The last thing we want to be doing is concentrating more wealth. That is why we step away when our grantees connect with bigger philanthropy. But still only 1 percent or 2 percent of funding is reaching grassroots movements.
The problem is that power continues to hold itself. In the quest for climate justice, if we don’t give up power, there is no narrative that will be good enough to balance things. We have to continue to ask, are we centralizing power? Or creating a decentralized, equitable structure [that can support communities’ interests]?
[You] can talk to donors better than I can and influence them to provide money to movements. Having [you] as our ally is really important. What advice do you have for other donors trying to navigate the moment we are all in?
Dageville: Because of the times we are living in, the future of philanthropy can be great, and there is a lot going on around the world and outside the United States. Communities working to better their lives have been doing it a very long time, and philanthropists should seek to be their partners. I appreciate you cautioning donors creating collaboratives that their efforts could concentrate power. All donors should question: “Why are we doing it?” and “How are we doing it?” We need to focus on what is possible; trust local leaders; provide flexible, long-term funding; and fund at the fast pace of the crisis. I don’t care about legacy. We need to do all we can now.
What lessons have you learned from doing this work that you want to share with other collaboratives?
Garcia: I want to talk about impact, because it’s the word I hear over and over again. Movements have the most power to change systems, and we need to talk about the thousands of local solutions that generate change. But how do we tell that story in a way that attracts funding?
The difficulty has to do with rationales and narratives forced upon the way we understand impact. In climate, we measure carbon emissions—donors want to know about what’s sequestered, what’s reduced. But many of our Indigenous grantees don’t measure that. They take care of their mangroves and trees; they are the people taking care of the earth, and they are the best people at it. Funding them is impact. We need philanthropy to think expansively about impact and not feel paralyzed by government funding shifts.
Dageville: I have to talk about impact and scale. I hate these words. How do you measure people? If we fund an organization and the people we fund can keep doing their work, that is great impact, no? We need to agree on the common goal—that everyone should have a good life. Everyone on Earth should be allowed to have that.
Garcia: You have become a great advocate for collaboratives and for philanthropy in general. Why is that important to you?
Dageville: When we started in philanthropy, we wanted to stay anonymous, but we realized pretty quickly that if we really wanted to change things, we couldn’t stay anonymous, so we signed the Giving Pledge, a community bound by a promise to give the majority of our wealth to charity in our lives or our wills. I figure the more I speak, and the more people hear me, the more things will stick.
I’m getting more and more comfortable telling my story. I have no problem talking to big groups of people, but I’m also always happy to do one-on-ones with other philanthropists. I don’t try to force my approach on others—we want to get funds to move. If we can get more and more donors to work with local leaders and shift power, that’s great.
Read more stories by Marie Dageville & Laura Garcia.