Fund, Consult, Build: How We're Trying to Make Support Actually Last with Impact Investing

A while ago, we sat in on a conversation with a local organization in Southeast Asia. The group ran a warehouse stocked with food items – some durable, some nearing expiry – donated by a range of well-meaning supporters, with new stock arriving frequently. The warehouse was running out of capacity. Some of the perishable items had to be thrown away before they ever reached the people they were meant for.

The bottleneck wasn't the generosity of donors. It wasn't even the day-to-day operation of the warehouse, which the team ran competently. It was reach – the ability to move stock, especially the perishable stock, out to the right people before it expired.

That gap is a small, specific version of a much bigger question the social impact field has been wrestling with for years: what does it actually take to help something last?

From relief to investment

For decades, the dominant story of social change was one of relief – donations, grants, and in-kind giving that met urgent needs quickly and directly. That story mattered, and still does; there are crises where immediate aid is the only responsible response, and no amount of long-term thinking substitutes for it. We don't want to understate that.

But relief-oriented giving has a well-documented limitation: it's built to address a moment, not a trajectory.

A school gets built without a maintenance budget.

A training program runs once and isn't repeated.

A grant ends and the organization it supported has to start over, or shut down.

Over the past two decades, a different model has grown alongside traditional philanthropy – often called venture philanthropy or impact investing. Its core premise is straightforward: pair capital with the kind of ongoing support (strategic, operational, sometimes technical) that a growing organization needs to become self-sustaining, rather than treating a single grant or investment as the end of the relationship. US organizations like Acumen, the Skoll Foundation, and others spent years building the evidence and practice behind this approach. A number of Asia-focused funds have initiated approach behind this too. We are learning a great deal by practices that they have accumulated on how they work.

So we're not the first to think this way, and we don't claim to be. What we offer is our own attempt to apply this thinking specifically to the intersection of technology, capacity, and community-led work across Asia. And to be honest and transparent about where that attempt is still a work in progress.

What we believe in Impact Investing, and why

Three convictions guide how we choose what to support. We do not claim to be the origin of such ideas. They are convinctions informed by our experiences working in for-profit sectors and non-profit sectors.

Sustainability to be designed in from the start, not bolted on later.

We look for projects with a credible plan to eventually operate without us. A plan that depends indefinitely on outside funding is a plan that could be terminated after just one bad year of struggles.

In practice, this means asking uncomfortable questions early: who pays for this in year five? What happens if we're not in the room?

The goal is for a community to need us less over time, not more.

This is easier to say than to measure. Some of the most useful support we can offer – a strategy conversation, an introduction, a piece of software – can quietly become a dependency if we're not paying attention. We try to treat "we're no longer necessary here" as a marker of success, not a loss of relationship.

Impact has to show up in outcomes we can actually point to.

We care about the numbers – income, enrollment, health indicators – because numbers are how we stay honest with ourselves and accountable to the people we work with. At the same time, we've learned some of what matters most, like a shift in who holds decision-making power in a community, doesn't reduce neatly to a metric. We try to hold both: track what's countable, and stay attentive to what isn't.

Where we're trying to go further: Fund, Consult, Build

Capital alone rarely solves a problem that's really about capacity, market access, or infrastructure. That's the starting point for how we've structured our own model, which we describe internally as Fund, Consult, Build.

Fund. Like many peers in this space, we provide seed and growth capital to social enterprises and community organizations working across Asia. This part of the model isn't distinctive – it's the baseline expectation of any funder in this space.

Consult. Where we try to add more is in ongoing strategic support: helping a partner think through pricing, operations, or how to structure a partnership with a corporate buyer, for instance. This is not a one-off workshop. It's closer to an extended, informal advisory relationship – usually a handful of structured conversations over the first year of a partnership, adjusted to whatever the organization actually needs rather than a fixed curriculum.

Build. This is the part of our model we're most protective of, because it's also the easiest to overstate. We have an in-house technology team that can build specific tools – a booking system, an inventory tracker, a simple e-commerce storefront – when a partner's bottleneck is genuinely technical and an existing off-the-shelf tool doesn't fit their context (unreliable connectivity, a need for offline-first design, a language or literacy gap most software doesn't account for). We don't build by default. Most of the time, the right answer is to point a partner toward an existing platform rather than construct something new. Building only makes sense when we've genuinely tested that nothing simpler works.

Going back to the warehouse: more capital wasn't the answer – donations were already arriving faster than the organization could move them. The first step would be testing whether an existing logistics or inventory tool could solve the reach problem, perhaps with help setting it up and training staff to use it. Custom software would only be worth building if nothing existing could handle the specific constraints on the ground – patchy connectivity, the need to prioritize by expiry date, coordinating pickup with multiple downstream recipients who may not have reliable phone or internet access themselves. We raise this not to claim we always get the sequencing right, but because getting it right requires resisting the urge to build something impressive when something simpler would do the job.

A model with real limits

We want to be direct about where this approach is still unproven, rather than presenting it as a finished answer.

We're early. Fund, Consult, Build is a framework we're actively testing, not a track record we can point to across dozens of partners yet. Some of what we believe about it may turn out to be wrong in practice, and we'd rather say that now than discover it quietly later.

"Build" carries real risk if we're not careful. A custom tool that only our team can maintain is a fragile thing to leave behind. We're working through what long-term ownership and maintenance should look like once our direct involvement winds down – including whether "build" sometimes means training a partner's own team to maintain something, rather than us maintaining it indefinitely.

Focus is a trade-off, not just a stated intention. Our work centers specifically on women and children across Asia. We believe targeted focus lets us build real depth rather than spreading thin – but we're also aware it means turning away work that might matter just as much outside that lens.

What partnership means to us

The language of "beneficiaries" and "recipients," sometimes flattens the relationship into something more one-directional than what we're actually aiming for. The organizations and communities we work with generally understand their own constraints, markets, and culture far better than we ever will from the outside. Our role is closer to a contributor with specific, limited expertise than an architect of someone else's future.

That means our best partnerships tend to start with a fairly plain question: what do you actually need, and does what we have to offer – capital, strategic input, or technical capacity – genuinely match that?

Sometimes the honest answer is no, and the more useful thing we can do is point an organization toward someone better suited to help.

An invitation, with a specific next step

If your organization is exploring how funding, strategy, and technology might work together to support a partner's growth – or if you've tried something like this and learned things the hard way – we'd like to hear about it. Not as a pitch, but as a genuine comparison of notes: what's worked in your experience, where has "more support" quietly become "more dependency," and how have you drawn that line.

If you'd like to talk specifics – including where we think Fund, Consult, Build is working and where we're still uncertain – reach out to our team directly, and we'll set up a real conversation.

We don't think we've solved this. We think we've found one reasonably honest way to try, and we're paying close attention to what it teaches us as we go.