Panorama's 2021 Annual Report

Making out-of-the-box connections to power progress

From our health to our environment, today's problems are all connected. At Panorama, we believe that we must connect to find solutions, so the creation of coalitions among philanthropists, government, and institutions is a key thread running through all our work.

Panorama hosts and supports Collaboratives, which unite a finite group of organizations around a single complex challenge, as well as an array of more flexible Networks, in which members have different perspectives on a big issue but are bound by a common vision. Our fluid, customized approach to these coalitions means a philanthropist could be a grantee of one project and an advisor or collaborator on another, potentially amplifying the impact of both.

Collaborative or Network, Panorama supports all its coalitions by creating opportunities and resources that extend the impact of the partners' joint efforts. We connect critical yet unexpected dots, fill big and small knowledge gaps, and offer programs and forums for partners to share insights and bring progress faster. Working together, coalition members drive stronger, more unified messages, confront challenges more effectively, and access large-scale funding and opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach.

Driving collective action to pandemic proof our future

Pandemic Action Network is a groundbreaking coalition born in-house at Panorama, co-founded by our CEO Gabrielle Fitzgerald who helped fight the 2014 Ebola outbreak and had been striving behind the scenes to avert and mitigate future crises. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, Gabrielle and her three co-founders immediately brought together a multi-sector network to advocate for bringing an end to this pandemic and ensuring the world is better prepared for the next one.

In its first two years, Pandemic Action Network has brought together more than 250 multi-sector partners globally — including advocates, communicators, strategists, campaigners, project managers, researchers, organizers, analysts, problem-solvers, business leaders, creatives, activists, and more — not only to end the COVID-19 crisis but also to prepare the world for future threats.

Working collaboratively, the Network’s members have mobilized essential resources to slow the spread of COVID-19, have produced critical policy papers, have developed urgent public health campaigns including #WorldMaskWeek (which engaged partners in 171 countries), have provided advisory support to key global bodies working on long-term pandemic preparedness, including the EU, the G7, and the G20, and have ensured that COVID response and pandemic preparedness remain on the top of political agendas.

Pandemics are too big, too numerous, and too complex for any one single stakeholder or sector to tackle alone. The power of Pandemic Action Network is its ability to harness the capacity and influence of a diverse and growing network of partners across sectors and geographies and turn it into impactful change, both to accelerate a global response to this pandemic and strengthen the global health security architecture to reduce the impact of pandemic threats in the future.

Keeping health workers safe during the pandemic and addressing long-term needs

Early in the COVID pandemic, Panorama joined with four other organizations — Community Health Acceleration Partnership, Community Health Impact Coalition, Direct Relief, and VillageReach — to stand up the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa (CAF-Africa), with a mission of delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) to community health workers in Africa.

CAF-Africa was built on a principle of radical collaboration and brought together 30 organizations who collectively achieved far more impact, more rapidly and effectively than individual organizations could have managed independently.  

Together, CAF-Africa mobilized over $21 million in financial and in-kind contributions to distribute more than 121 million units of PPE to close to 500,000 community health workers in 18 African countries.

As this initiative wrapped up, CAF-Africa worked with the Pandemic Action Network to develop a policy brief, “Personal Protective Equipment for Frontline Health Workers: An Essential Component of Pandemic Preparedness & Response.”  The brief outlined the progress that had been made in providing PPE to community health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also detailed recommendations to how to ensure health workers had access to sufficient PPE in the future, including the need to scale up domestic production and create stockpiles.

Powering organizations to help initiatives scale faster

Entrepreneurial leaders need space and time to drive change effectively. To support them, Panorama offers a range of legal, financial, technical, and administrative services to help accelerate emerging ideas and projects; catalyze bold action on pressing issues; and support change agents, social entrepreneurs, and funders to scale solutions quickly, efficiently, and sustainably.

We leverage our values-aligned expertise, resources, and network to support the operational capacity of sponsored projects, create efficiencies that shorten ramp-up times, extend capacity and reach, and multiply impact. Partners in all stages of growth choose from our à la carte menu of services and tools to reduce the weight of operational requirements such as budget and financial management, human resources, grant-making and grant management, contracting, and more.

Panorama's ambition is to serve as a vehicle for collaboration between fiscally sponsored partners and our vast network of change makers. Our goal is for our partners to connect and learn from others facing similar challenges and working toward complementary goals.

Panorama currently provides Fiscal Sponsorship support to more than 30 social change initiatives that address a wide range of issues. In 2021, we welcomed 16 new partners.

Creating systemic change in the American workplace

Gender-based violence in the workplace is shockingly prevalent in our country: nearly half of employed women in America report experiencing some form of harassment, abuse, discrimination, or retaliation at work.  Lift Our Voices is a nonprofit initiative that is dedicated to creating positive, systemic change in the American workplace through the eradication of nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration clauses that so often prevent toxic work issues from coming to light.  Lift Our Voices was established in 2019 by Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky in the wake of the #MeToo movement and after they experienced harassment and retaliation at Fox News and boldly fought for justice for themselves.

"Our partnership with Panorama and the services they provide create the space for Lift Our Voices to focus on what is most important: our work to create safer American workplaces for those facing all forms of workplace toxicity. We know we can rely on customized solutions from Panorama's team that will support our organization's growth and help us scale our work to achieve our mission."

‍Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, Co-Founders, Lift Our Voices

Lift Our Voices came to Panorama in April 2021 from their former fiscal sponsor. They were attracted to Panorama because of our operational expertise, the diversity of services we offer, and our flexible fee structure. For the last year, Panorama has provided  Lift Our Voices with a full suite of infrastructure services, ranging from compliance support and financial management to grant management and staffing solutions.

Co-founder Gretchen Carlson spent 2021 focusing on advocacy in the U.S. Congress. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act bans forced arbitration in cases involving sexual misconduct and allows victims the option of bringing up the dispute in federal, tribal, or state court. In early 2022, it was signed into law by President Biden, signaling a huge victory for workplace reform.

Making the Internet Safe for Women and Democracy

Globally, women in politics and journalism experience relentless, overwhelming volumes of gendered disinformation - and things are even worse for those facing intersectional discrimination and bias.#ShePersisted is fighting back to protect democracy from digital harms.

Like many important efforts, #ShePersisted was formed around a passion for addressing a targeted issue. Their co-founders were familiar with Panorama's commitment to women's rights and women's political participation, and were impressed with the achievements of The AscendFund. So, when the time came to find a fiscal sponsor to minimize delays and maximize their impact, Panorama was at the top of their list.

Panorama Global has fiscally sponsored #ShePersisted since 2019. We provide them with compliance support, grant management, and financial management, among other services, leaving #ShePersisted with more time, energy and money to do vital mission-focused work.

Since 2019, #ShePersisted has been dedicated to tackling gendered disinformation against women in politics. They do that by researching digital harms, supporting women leaders to build digital resilience, and advocating for improved digital standards.

They have produced original research, articles, events, webinars, and digital roundtables with some of the world's most authoritative media outlets and think tanks to ensure that gendered disinformation is recognized and addressed. And they have created powerful advocacy campaigns, including a video campaign to hold Facebook accountable, and the letter to Facebook, launched byU.S. Representative Jackie Speier and signed by 100 U.S. women lawmakers from30 countries.

"Panorama's support was instrumental in enabling us to focus on the core of our work - the research, advocacy, and support to women leaders who are under attack, without having to worry too much about the administrative side of things. We could not have been as productive - and nimble - without their support. I'm grateful to Panorama's wonderful team for their thought partnership and their support!"

Funding changemakers and changing funding models

Because funding is a critical driver of social impact, a significant slice of Panorama’s work is about connecting philanthropic dollars to organizations working for change. But Panorama’s grantmaking approach elevates support beyond money, accelerating the pace of change.

As you might expect, investment in Panorama funds helps donors find their way into complex issues and enable support for diverse organizations leading change. We also aim to ensure that our grantee partners and projects have the resources and support they need to do their work.

Before investing a single dollar, though, we create a strategy informed by need and opportunities to catalyze change so that our investments will have the most impact. Sometimes that means we fund work to reduce barriers; other times, we fill a critical gap. Where possible, we prioritize multi-year operating grants that nurture big picture thinkers and solutions.

Then, we go further.

For every Fund we host on our platform, Panorama leverages its own expertise, operational capacity, and network to increase the speed, reach, and impact of our philanthropic investment.  

We help grantees develop shared strategies, establish systems and resources that foster collaboration and knowledge sharing, and we enable organizations to benefit from each other’s expertise.  

And, we center our giving both on organizations doing hands-on work to meet an immediate need and on initiatives focused on changing the bigger system over time.

Panorama’s funds are designed  to not only allocate resources, but also to advance entire fields. Dollars get where they need to go sooner, replication is replaced by multiplication, and strategic, sustainable change happens better, faster, and more comprehensively than ever before.

"Thank you for your partnership. I've never had a funder so genuinely interested and involved in our success and helping us to connect dots. I truly feel like this is a great opportunity and appreciate all that you do."

‍Dr. Kathryn Fox, Assistant Professor, Fox Lab

Removing the Roadblocks to Equity in Politics

Women comprise 51% of the U.S. population but only 30% of our country’s elected leaders so, in 2020, seed funding from Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures enabled the launch of The Ascend Fund to accelerate the achievement of gender parity in the U.S.

On its most basic level, Ascend aggregates capital and invests it in nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that break down the barriers keeping women from elected office. In practice, though, it does so much more.

Like all Panorama funds, Ascend partners identified a single, clear strategic pathway to long-term impact and united grantees around this goal: increasing the number of women serving in elected office to 50% representation in all 50 states by 2050. Following investment in partners working nationally, we launched a three-state pilot that will inform future state-level efforts and ensure philanthropic dollars are doing the most good they can.

Panorama also enables partners to collaborate to maximize long-term impact. We established shared communications and data platforms, convened working groups, provided technical resources, and built connections among leaders, investors, and organizations. We also help grantees develop creative, collaborative approaches to dismantling underlying structural roadblocks that hold women back. As always, we keep a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion because more voices lead to better ideas.

The result: in 2021 alone, Ascend’s 12 grantee partners trained more than 16,000 women to run for political office. Of the women who trained with our partners and ran for office in 2021, 68% won their general elections. The national pipeline now includes more than 55,000 future women candidates. As we continue to accelerate the pace of change, our goal is to reach a level of self-sustaining parity that will ultimately render Ascend obsolete.

Providing Effective, Inclusive Mental Health Care for Youth

Adolescents of color and LGBTQ+ youth face significant barriers to accessing mental health care and services. The Upswing Fund for Adolescent Mental Health, created in response to increased demand for care caused by COVID-19, was formed to support organizations serving these youth.

The aim of The Upswing Fund’s giving is to get critical funding to front-line organizations quickly yet responsibly so they can serve these communities. Upswing ‘Surge Capacity’ grants have helped partner organizations expand services swiftly and procure technology and telehealth resources rapidly to reach and serve youth immediately.

Not content to stop there, Upswing also keeps a lens focused on eliminating the systemic barriers to adolescent mental health care and addressing the longer-term problems that are contributing to the current crisis. Advised by a renowned panel of mental health experts, Upswing has made “Systems Enabler” grants to support forward-thinking organizations developing approaches to make more inclusive, resilient care systems. And the Fund released a report, based on input from partners that documented four systemic barriers to accessible, culturally responsive care along with actionable recommendations to close critical gaps.

Upswing partners are on the front lines of the recently declared national child and adolescent mental health emergency, elevated as a priority by the U.S. Surgeon General in December 2021. And, in the last year alone, the efforts of our 92 Upswing partners benefited more than 127,000 adolescents who otherwise would not have received services.