Charitable Ventures

Transformed, empowered, healthy communities, where all people can thrive.

Charitable Ventures did not start as a fully formed institution. It started as a belief: that when emerging nonprofit leaders have the right infrastructure behind them, transformative ideas become real, sustainable programs that change communities. Founded in 2007 with seed funding from the Orange County Community Foundation and operational support from The Olin Group, a for-profit firm dedicated to nonprofit sustainability, Charitable Ventures began by doing exactly that: incubating new projects, providing operational infrastructure, and helping mission-driven leaders stay focused on their communities instead of their overhead.

As the projects Charitable Ventures incubated grew, so did the organization. Over the years, Charitable Ventures hired its own staff, expanded its services, and deepened its roots across Orange County and Southern California. Both organizations continued to grow and stay connected, sharing resources, office space, and executive leadership, until, at the end of 2018, the leadership of Charitable Ventures agreed to consolidate with The Olin Group. The legal and operational complexities of consolidation took over six months, but on June 30, 2019, the two companies and teams became one organization, bringing together nearly two decades of combined expertise in nonprofit sustainability, consulting, and community development.

The result is what you see today: a nonprofit support organization that has sponsored more than 100 projects, supported hundreds of nonprofits through consulting, and regularly manages a budget of over $20 million supporting programs across the region. Charitable Ventures currently holds more than 30 active fiscally sponsored projects and creates community impact across four integrated pathways: Build & Sponsor, Consult & Strengthen, Manage & Deploy Funds, and Amplify Community Impact. Anne Olin, who founded Charitable Ventures in 2007, continues to lead the organization today as President and CEO, a continuity of leadership that has shaped Charitable Ventures' growth from a single incubated idea into the regional infrastructure organization it is now. The Catalyst Fund is one of the most recent expressions of that same founding instinct: find the gap where nonprofits are falling through, build a real solution, and get out of the way so the work can happen (see Core Services for the full Catalyst Fund description).

Charitable Ventures is proud to have incubated more than 100 projects and a growing number of regional initiatives in Orange County and beyond.  Founded in 2007 to provide fiscal sponsorship for local initiatives, CV’s sponsored projects now span such important issues as community development, mental health, child welfare, immigration, and health for children and adults.     

1. Nonprofits are being squeezed from both directions at once
Orange County nonprofits are facing rising demand for services at the exact moment their funding has become the least reliable in a generation. Nationally, nearly three in four nonprofit CEOs report increasing demand for services, even as many have had to cut staff, pull back programs, or close entirely. Six in ten nonprofits say the current funding environment poses moderate to significant risk to their ability to keep operating.

The disruption is concrete, not just a feeling of uncertainty. About one in three nonprofits experienced some kind of government funding disruption within a single recent six-month stretch, whether that meant losing funding outright, sitting through a delay or freeze, or receiving a stop-work order mid-contract. Federal grant terminations, funding freezes, and proposed changes to the rules governing how federal dollars reach nonprofits at all have made what used to be a predictable revenue stream into a source of constant risk.

2. The ripple effect: one cut becomes many
A canceled or delayed contract rarely stays contained to the organization that lost it. When a nonprofit's funding is disrupted, the people it serves lose services first, but the damage doesn't stop there. Partner organizations who relied on referrals or shared programming absorb the overflow. Staff and expertise built up over years leave the sector when organizations are forced to lay off or shut down. And the collaboratives, coalitions, and regional initiatives that depend on many organizations moving together lose participants right when coordination matters most.

What nonprofits need in this environment isn't just more money, it's trustworthy capacity: the staffing, systems, expertise, and financial infrastructure to keep operating and delivering services even as funding becomes less predictable. Some organizations lose the cash reserves to weather a delayed contract payment. Others lose the staff capacity to write the next grant, manage a new compliance requirement, or run an evaluation a funder now expects. Others simply lose the administrative bandwidth to keep the lights on while trying to do the mission work at all. Charitable Ventures exists to answer several of these gaps at once, not just one.

3. Trust in nonprofits isn't the problem. Capacity is.
It's worth being direct about one thing: public trust in nonprofits has not collapsed. Current national research shows 56 to 57% of Americans report high trust in nonprofit organizations, a level that's held steady since 2024 and remains higher than trust in government, media, business, or philanthropy itself. Nonprofits remain the most trusted sector in the country.

That distinction matters. The nonprofit sector's crisis right now isn't a crisis of legitimacy or public confidence, it's a crisis of infrastructure, cash flow, and capacity to withstand funding shocks that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of the work being done.

Charitable Ventures provides services throughout Orange County and works with counties throughout California to help duplicate successful initiatives.

In 2019, Charitable Ventures embarked on a new and dynamic journey, merging with a regional consulting firm to greatly expand its mission and services. We had big plans for growth and change, to live up to our goal of being a true center for social change in the region.

In March 2020, Charitable Ventures, like the rest of the world, woke up to a global pandemic, sent all staff home to work remotely, and began the process of figuring out how to achieve our mission in the new, difficult environment.

The good news is that we did. The pandemic and the recession that quickly followed gave Charitable Ventures a new opportunity to serve – through the distribution of $17.9M in rapid relief funding and small business grants.

We continue to provide practical and innovative consulting services to our nonprofit and foundation clients and comprehensive nonprofit management services to the 40+ sponsored projects on our platform. As we look ahead, our vision for growth over the next five years will be guided by the following objectives: to deepen our engagement in communities, to expand our services to meet the needs of more foundations, nonprofits, businesses and public agencies, and to pursue innovative collaborations to achieve social impact.

I am thankful for the leadership and staff at Charitable Ventures along with our network of dedicated philanthropic partners who work hard to bring the resources, thought leadership, services and trainings to strengthen regional nonprofits and foundations.