The Flood We Need: The Next Wave of Opportunity for Philanthropy
July 2026
What is a functioning democracy worth? A more equal society? A peaceful one? These questions share one answer: the broader return on investment we should all be seeking, and the role capital plays in delivering it.
Philanthropic grants alone have never met the scale of need. Neither has government funding alone. Both are essential to a healthy civil society — but between them lies a gap that investment capital can fill: patient, purpose-aligned capital, channelled into organisations and communities that are underserved and under-capitalised, so they can do more of what they already do well.
Since inception, GoodWolf has worked alongside trusts, foundations and family offices to help them apply their capital in these ways. Our work has taken many forms: a multi-year workshop series helping boards and trustees bring an impact lens across their corpus, support for the design of new social impact investment vehicles, panel and masterclass presentations, and resources examining the role of trusts and foundations in leading the way.
Conversations invariably span the full range of grants through to more innovative approaches under the umbrella of ‘impact investing’, using the corpus as a change lever. There remains huge untapped potential in the latter — like a reservoir upstream waiting to release its stored wealth into the communities and organisations waiting down below.
In this Thought Piece, we explain why now is such an important time to get on board with this agenda, and to open the flood gates. Accumulated wealth in philanthropy, and beyond, continues to grow, while downstream a ‘polycrisis’ of intersecting issues is pushing social progress into reverse, pushing the environment to the brink, as inequality reaches generational peaks and quality of life markers begin to fall.
We need greater capital innovation, and courage. Now.
Capital Reservoirs
Based on 2023 figures, the net assets of endowed philanthropy across different vehicles in Australia are $51b [1]. Total grant-making both in Australia and beyond amounts to approximately $5.5b. If just 10% of Australia’s $51b corpus were invested with a focus on positive social and environmental impact alongside financial return, we could almost double the capital directed to bettering our society.
10% is the tipping point Sir Ronald Cohen — widely acknowledged as the father of impact investing — uses as his yardstick for the capital needed, with a focus on risk, return and impact, to rewire our capitalist system toward more sustainable and equitable outcomes.
Beyond the reservoirs of wealth already stored by philanthropy, Australia remains relatively awash in capital; our superannuation system holds $4.5tr in assets and underpins one of the largest investment management industries in the world for a population of just 28m people. And as our population ages, we’ll enter the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, with an estimated $5.4tr set to pass from one generation to the next over the coming 20 years.
And while Australia, and the world at large, has never been richer, it is the concentration of that wealth that presents the greatest threat. Our political discourse, for example, has grown increasingly rancid as extremist views purporting to represent ‘the forgotten’ or ‘the left behinds’ take hold. Migrants, who for generations have brought their human and financial capital to prop up this country, are now in the crosshairs. There is also a dark irony in the first trillionaire being minted off the hype of the next ‘space race’. For all its intergalactic hyperbole, the fuel for this misadventure — and the gargantuan capital it has attracted — has been extracted from an increasingly depleted Mother Earth, which will be left behind in its vapour trail.
[1] 2023 data for 10,165 grant-making charities that submitted their Annual Information Statement to the ACNC
Capital Urgency
Attend any for-purpose sector conference lately, and you’ll hear that we’re living through a polycrisis: climate change, job insecurity in the face of AI, strained education systems, entrenched inequality, geopolitical conflict and democratic backsliding are compounding one another through entangled systems, each making the other harder to solve.
Government has recognised this urgency to act: the recent budget sought new ways to unlock greater public revenue, redress distortions in the tax system, meanwhile focussing on reforms to double philanthropic giving by 2030 and draw more capital into civil society. Globally, the picture is more urgent still: the annual gap in financing needed to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) now sits at around $4tr [2], while official development assistance covers only a fraction of that need. This gap is set to grow to $6tr by 2030.
There’s a deeper reason this matters beyond the numbers. A widening wealth gap isn’t good for anyone. Research consistently links rising inequality to weaker trust in institutions, more polarised politics and a heightened risk of democratic erosion. A less equal society is a less safe, less cohesive one — which should concern every capital holder, not just those seeking a fairer world. While we sit on an extraordinary pool of capital, it isn’t reaching the capital-starved segments of civil society: the segments best placed to ease the challenges of the polycrisis.
[2] OECD (2025), Global outlook on financing for sustainable development 2025
Capital Innovation
The structures that created these problems are unlikely to be the ones that solve them. We need new mechanisms, some of which have already been trialled.
There’s real energy in this space locally. We’ve seen a range of financing innovations from local funds [3] and some early-investor trusts and foundations [4], each hoping others will crowd in. The Foundations Group for Impact Investing (FGII), Impact Investing Australia (IIA) and others in this space are key market builders — seeking to build knowledge, capability and action.
We’ve contributed to this thinking ourselves. At the 2026 Impact Investing Summit, we spoke alongside SEFA, Snow Foundation and the Department of Social Services on ‘impact capital stacks’ — how different types of investors and backbone coordinating organisations can work together to provide market and capability building, private investment capital, and demand-side coordination that grows social and environmental innovation. We’ll soon publish a report, commissioned by the Paul Ramsay Foundation, on ‘Catalytic Capital’, which looks at how the timing of capital — not just its quantum — can be the difference between a promising idea and a scaled solution.
Despite good efforts so far, none of these models, at their current scale, meets the growing need in front of us. More experimentation — and more capital behind it — is required. We need new financing models that adopt what’s useful from traditional finance, with the mindset to adapt to a pace and format that supports social and environmental innovation.
[3] Including but not limited to, First Australian Capital, SEFA, Conscious Investment Management, Giant Leap, Aboriginal Investments NT, White Box Enterprises
[4] Paul Ramsay Foundation, Minderoo Foundation, Snow Foundation, Hand Heart Pocket Foundation, Australian Communities Foundation
Unlocking the Gates
Unlocking capital at the scale required is an opportunity for trusts and foundations, who can treat their whole (or part of) balance sheet — not just their annual grants — as a tool for impact. ‘Unlocking’ requires planning, considered conversations, and ultimately building the trust or foundation’s impact capital capability toolkit.
We’ve seen what’s possible. GoodWolf’s ‘Endowments for Impact’ workshop series, run over several years, helped trusts and foundations rethink how their corpus could shift into a mission-aligned position, rather than sit apart from their purpose. That work led to the ‘Endowments for Impact Challenge’, headlined by the Reichstein Foundation and a cohort of eight other philanthropies — Australia’s first open tender to find the country’s best mission-aligned investment advisors, won jointly by Australian Impact Investments and Koda Capital.
We’ve also helped Hand Heart Pocket Foundation establish a fund called ‘Backing The Bold’, designed with SEFA to close a capital gap no other source currently fills — giving purpose-driven organisations the kind of patient, flexible finance that lets them do more of what they’re already good at. Other organisations named in this article are doing similar work with their own stakeholders.
Our work with the Paul Ramsay Foundation on catalytic capital builds directly on this. It looks at how well-timed capital can de-risk an opportunity enough to bring larger pools of capital along with it — making possible what wouldn’t otherwise happen, through new vehicles and models.
The Catalytic Capital report will be launched in August 2026, register your interest to receive communications about the report launch and webinar.
More of this needs to happen — and it needs more trusts and foundations at the table.
Contact Us, Trailblazers!
If you’re interested in using your corpus to generate positive social and environmental returns alongside financial ones, get in touch with Nina Yousefpour and Simon Lewis at hello@goodwolf.com.au, or read more of our resources here.
