It’s Time for a New Approach to Catholic Philanthropy

by Dennis J. Gerber, Jr
President and CEO, Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund

Note: This month’s column is adapted from an address that Dennis Gerber gave at the Catholic Education Renewal Summit on May 7, 2026.

In my role, I get a view into Catholic philanthropy that is hard to see from anywhere else. And over time, I start to see patterns.

Here’s my observation: People give generously and sacrificially. They care deeply about charitable causes and are trying to do the right thing.

But this is not a story about lack of generosity.

It’s a story about how that generosity is being deployed.

When I say that over time I see patterns, here are two that happen again and again:

The first is an organization that is always one month from crisis.

It has a strong mission. Good leadership. Real impact. But it needs constant fundraising just to make payroll. There’s no margin, no ability to plan and no capacity to grow. It can do its mission, but only in the gaps between survival.

These organizations are never given the chance to become durable, and this leads to their eventual downfall.

The second pattern is the opposite, and in some ways more dangerous.

A donor sees an organization doing meaningful work. They believe in it and want it to succeed, so they step in and provide the capital it needs.

For a while, this works: The organization is funded, and there’s no immediate pressure to constantly raise money. But over time, something subtle happens. The business model is never fully tested, and it never develops the discipline that comes from having to earn broad support.

Instead of becoming resilient, it becomes dependent on that original donor to continue sustaining it. This was never the intended outcome, but its funding structure led it there.

And here’s the difficult part to say: Even the organizations that claim “if we just had more funding, we could really thrive” ... often wouldn’t.

Resilience doesn’t come from funding alone, but from building something that can endure, attract support and operate with discipline over time.

So what does this mean for donors?

A donor can make a very good decision at the individual level but still not contribute to the strongest possible outcome at the system level. As donors, our questions can’t stop with, “Is this a good organization?” We also need to ask, “Is this the best use of capital to strengthen the ecosystem as a whole?”

I’ve seen some philanthropists do this very well. About a year ago, I was introduced to the Flourish Fund, a group of donors who deploy capital collectively around a shared mission. Most importantly, their giving is structured and disciplined. They believe that complex problems require coordinated investment, not isolated decisions.

So, with their first major initiative — a five-year, $40 million effort focused on foster care — they didn’t start by writing checks to a handful of organizations but by asking the questions that will help them understand the problem.

Where are the breakdowns?

What actually leads to better outcomes for children and families?

Which interventions work and which don’t?

Where are the gaps in the system?

And where can capital make the biggest difference?

From there, they are building a portfolio — identifying organizations whose work helps answer those questions and beginning to underwrite them. This creates relationships between those organizations so that now they aren’t operating in isolation, but as part of an ecosystem.

The Flourish Fund isn’t operating like a traditional foundation, but more like a private equity firm. And they are optimizing for the success of the whole.

It's a profound shift in how to think about philanthropy, and it's very different from how much of Catholic philanthropy operates today.

Too often, we’re not talking to each other about what we’re funding and why. There is no shared map or research, no common understanding of where the gaps are — and this means there is no coordinated view of which efforts are most likely to improve outcomes.

If you wouldn’t build a serious investment portfolio without research, underwriting and a clear strategy, why would we approach our giving that way?

I’ll briefly share another example.

As part of my work with KCCF, I have the privilege of serving as president of the RBN Foundation, founded by Rob and Berni Neal.

When we began this work, we asked a simple question: What are we trying to accomplish over the next 30+ years?

The answer was our mission: to promote faith, family, marriage and virtue through K–12 education.

That was step one.

Step two has been doing the work to understand how to actually achieve that.

It means working with leading social scientists. Collecting research. Studying outcomes. Trying to understand what is most effective and, just as importantly, what is not working. Where capital can make a real difference — and where it can’t.

And sometimes those findings are very significant.

The difference between a good investment and the right investment is what determines whether we actually rebuild something versus sustaining what already exists. We don’t just want to fund good organizations; we want to know how each investment contributes to a larger system.

Are we willing to evolve how we give? Can we build something that no one owns individually? This requires trust, discipline and long-term commitment to mission.

If we’re serious about building up Catholic education, the culture of life, or any other worthy causes, then we have to become just as serious about how we invest in them.

I believe this is a real possibility, not just a thought experiment. And I believe there are many people thinking about this and already starting to build toward it. Let’s continue this conversation and this important work.

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