New Profit Opens Applications for Connected Futures — A New Funding Cohort for Bridge-Building Organizations

New Profit, a venture philanthropy organization that has invested over $350 million in social entrepreneurs since 1998, has launched Connected Futures, a new Catalyze cohort offering $100,000 unrestricted grants and a year of structured support to organizations that help people bridge active divides and work together toward collective goals. The cohort targets organizations whose core programming builds the skills, relationships, and structures needed for productive dialogue, civic participation, and collaborative problem-solving across differences in background, belief, or identity. Discovery Forms are open through May 26, 2026, for U.S.-based nonprofits with annual expenses between $250,000 and $2 million and at least two years of programmatic operation. Connected Futures represents a direct and significant funding opportunity for NCDD members whose work strengthens the relational and structural conditions that make dialogue, deliberation, and democratic participation possible.

---

---

New Profit, a venture philanthropy organization with more than two decades of experience investing in high-impact social entrepreneurs, has launched Connected Futures — a new cohort within its Catalyze funding initiative designed specifically for organizations that help people move across active divides toward collaboration and collective problem-solving. Discovery Forms are now open through May 26, 2026, and eligible organizations working at the intersection of bridge-building and systemic change are encouraged to signal their interest. The cohort reflects a timely and deliberate investment thesis: that solving entrenched problems in education, economic mobility, democracy, and health requires more than diverse participation — it requires rebuilding the relational and structural conditions that make genuine cooperation possible across lines of difference.

New Profit's Connected Futures cohort is explicitly designed for organizations whose core model addresses the hardening of difference into mistrust, contempt, or disconnection — and creates pathways for people to work together despite those divides. Eligible organizations must be U.S.-based 501(c)(3)s with annual expenses between $250,000 and $2 million, at least two years of programmatic operation, and leadership by a full-time social entrepreneur. Selected organizations will receive a one-year $100,000 unrestricted grant, a $10,000 leadership development stipend, and a structured year of peer learning, capacity-building workshops, in-person convenings, and one-on-one strategic advising from the New Profit team. The cohort model is built on the premise that organizations with similar approaches learn best in community with one another — and that proximity to the communities they serve is itself a strategic asset.

​For NCDD members and the broader dialogue and deliberation community, Connected Futures represents one of the more precisely aligned funding opportunities to emerge in recent years. New Profit's stated criteria — building skills for productive dialogue and civic participation, cultivating relationships rooted in trust and mutual accountability, and creating structures for collective action and shared decision-making — map directly onto the methods and values that define the D&D field. Organizations in the NCDD network that have been building this work steadily, even at modest scale, are encouraged to review the eligibility criteria carefully and submit a Discovery Form before the May 26 deadline. Full details, eligibility requirements, and the Discovery Form submission link are available at https://newprofit.org/new-profit-launches-connected-futures-cohort-discovery-forms-now-open/