Your Donor-Advised Fund Could Be Funding the Solutions (But It Is Probably Funding the Problem)

More than $326 billion now sits inside donor-advised funds in this country. If one of those accounts has your name on it, a piece of that pile is your responsibility. You already claimed the deduction. The money has left your estate for good, legally bound to charitable purpose. But bound for charity is not the same as working for it. While your dollars wait, they sit in a standard market portfolio, throwing off fees for an asset manager, parked in the very companies and instruments that created the damage your grants are meant to repair. Look at the menus at the biggest sponsors and you will find plenty of holdings no impact-minded donor would pick on purpose: fossil fuels, weapons, tobacco and alcohol.

Maybe you're thinking your account is different, because your sponsor offers a sustainability fund and you picked it. Prepare for a jolt. By our analysis, those sustainable pools show more corporate-conduct problems than the plain pools that hold the oil and arms companies directly. Take Fidelity's sustainable pool: it is three times as likely to hold companies running tax-haven subsidiaries, and close to twice as likely to hold corporations paying their CEO 500 times the median worker or beyond. Next week's post goes deeper on this. In the meantime, sit with one question. Taxpayers already subsidized this money through your deduction. Don't you want it doing more for the world while it waits? Because it is not idle. It is working. The only question is who for.

We built Unlock Ownership so that money would be building solutions rather than funding the problems. The structure is simple. You contribute exactly the way you would make a grant. An investment committee of best-in-class practitioners decides where the capital goes. And it lands in funds and cooperatives that are putting ownership into the hands of people who have never had any.

Why ownership? Because people who share in the value of the place they live or the business they work in get something most Americans lack: a stable footing, a reason and a means to build wealth, and a stake that pulls them into civic life. Given the wage and wealth gaps tearing at this country, gaps that belong on any honest list of the crises of our time, the need could hardly be more urgent. And there is a wave coming. Baby boomers own most of America's small and medium businesses, and most of them will want to sell within the decade. Left alone, plenty of those companies will simply shut their doors, profitable or not, beloved by their communities or not. Converted to employee ownership, they survive, the community keeps its anchor, and the workers who built the place finally own a piece of it.

The downstream effects run deep. Workers with stability show up differently in the life of a town. They engage civically at higher rates. They care more about the climate. They vote. They absorb shocks without falling onto public assistance.

So here are three places where this is already working, and where DAF dollars like yours could spare the next generation of builders years of unnecessary struggle.

Noni Session's grandparents arrived in Oakland in the early 1940s and made their home in West Oakland, just off Seventh Street. Back then Seventh was a blues corridor, the Harlem of the West. For roughly half a century Esther Mabry held court at Esther's Orbit Room. Session's parents ran businesses of their own in the neighborhood. She calls that stretch of pavement the place "where my family's future developed."

Session went east for graduate work in anthropology at Cornell, then came home. She ran for a seat on the Oakland City Council in 2016. She lost. By that point the neighborhood that raised her family had spent thirty years coming apart. Oakland was 47% Black in 1980; today it is about 20%. Freeway and BART construction had taken Seventh Street apart in pieces. Esther's hung on longer than everything else on the strip, then closed the year after Mabry died in 2010. Mabry summed up the block in six words: "This is where people's roots are."

One evening a group of housing organizers showed up at Session's book club and invited her onto the board of a real estate cooperative they wanted to launch. She turned them down.

Then she reconsidered, and gave the next several years of her life to raising money for the very thing she had refused: a cooperative that would buy West Oakland land and take it off the market for good. Not to develop. Not to flip. To hold, permanently, so that someone else's grandparents could stay on the block.

Lender after lender gave her the same answer, including the ones that called themselves mission-aligned. The verdict, as she has put it, was that this "is a bad investment." Earning a yes meant enduring what she called "so many demeaning conversations."

September 2021. The building had sat empty for ten years when the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative purchased it for $1.5 million. Inside, the calendar still read May 2010 and half-empty bottles lined the twenty-foot wooden bar. Walking through it, Session told the Oakland Post, "It's like life just stopped here."

Unlock Ownership invested in EBPREC in December 2025. Let's be clear about what we were not: we were not the money Session couldn't find. She found it herself, a thousand dollars at a time, across years no founder should have to spend proving the obvious. What a fund like ours exists to do is make sure the next Noni Session gets to yes faster, and finance precisely the features catalytic capital is made for.

EBPREC is a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Its owners are its residents, its community members, its staff, and its investors. Every owner holds exactly one vote, no matter how many shares they bought. A share always costs $1,000, enabling buildings in Oakland to stay permanently out of the speculative market, with the residents as owners. Of the five elected board seats, investor-owners choose two.

Read that again: the people who put up the money hold the least power in the building. That is the design. A conventional lender looks at that structure and sees a flaw to price. We looked at it and wrote the check.

And it worked. Everyday people have bought 5,779 of those shares, about $5.8 million worth, filed with the SEC like any other public offering.

What lenders told Session was never about her, and never about Oakland. Change who owns something and the same verdict follows, state after state, asset class after asset class. David Lidz can tell you.

Lidz was 58, and in recovery, when he began hiring others in recovery, and people fresh home from prison, to rehab vacant houses in West Baltimore. He had heard that the surest way to stay sober is to help another person stay sober. For him the houses and the crews are the same work: "When we reach the bottom, we look like those houses inside. We're just full of remorse and regret and guilt and pain. And we're trying to clean all that out, so we can become a vessel of utility and service and spirituality and love."

Now picture his loan application on some banker's desk. A contractor staffing crews of people with criminal records and addiction histories. Buying derelict houses in one of America's most disinvested neighborhoods. No collateral. Nothing personal to pledge. There is no bank in this country that underwrites that loan.

Seed Commons underwrote it. Through its Baltimore member fund, it put $5 million into Waterbottle's restoration of vacant West Baltimore homes. Along the way the company converted to a worker cooperative, and its HR director, Xiomara Rivas Brown, handed The Guardian the only number you need: "We raised our wage rates from $11-$17 an hour before we converted to co-op to $18-$48."

Here is what Lidz tells the new worker-owners: "This is your company, too. You're a worker-owner. You own the hell out of this house."

Seed Commons can make that loan because every deal it does carries the same rule, and it is the cleanest sentence in our entire portfolio: as a lender, its returns "never exceed the wealth generated for the borrower and their community."

Think about the implications of that. Credit scores don't matter. Neither do personal guarantees. A security interest only in assets their own money paid for. No repayment until the business can cover its expenses, living wages included. And a cap on their own return, typically half the profit the loan itself creates. How often does a lender volunteer a ceiling on its own upside?

Their promise to borrowers: you "will never be worse off after working with us than before working with us."

In Argentina, after the 2001 collapse, Brendan Martin wanted to learn why no one would lend to workers who had taken over their own shuttered factories. Kate Khatib was working the same problem in Baltimore. Over two decades the two of them have grown Seed Commons into a network of 39 member organizations, governed by the members themselves rather than any head office, with roughly $130 million out the door across some 500 loans.

Cooperatives and lending networks are collective forms of ownership. But it also shows up one household at a time, and at that scale you can see exactly what it does to a life.

Vanessa Ferrer had given herself an ultimatum: own a house in Boise by May 2024, or give up on Boise. On February 29, 2024, Leap Day of all days, she closed on a 986-square-foot, four-bedroom house for $287,000, on a street with "Leap" in its name, through an organization called Leap Housing.

Afterward, this is what she told the Idaho Press: "I told my son I can let go of my side hustles and play more soccer and I can read more books. I can kind of chill."

Go back and read that as an economic outcome, because that is what it is. She quit her second and third jobs. The reason is one structural move: somebody stripped the land cost out of the house price.

She needed the help. Idaho is the second least affordable state in America for homebuyers, trailing only Montana. A household earning $100,000 can afford 17% of the listings statewide, and 10% of Boise's. Idaho's median household income is $74,000. And while Idaho did create a housing trust fund back in 1992, it has never funded it.

So Leap builds affordability without the state. The organization keeps the land. The buyer owns the house sitting on it, under a 99-year renewable ground lease. And the price stays within reach for the next family, and the one after that. Founder Bart Cochran puts it plainly: "the first homeowner is income qualified and, when they move, they sell to another that is income qualified, and it ensures that it stays affordable forever."

Put differently: nobody will ever get rich off this house. That is the point. It is also why financing this model is so hard.

The same logic drives their manufactured housing work, where the math gets even more brutal. In Mountain Home, a gap loan from Leap let the residents of a 35-lot park buy the ground under their own homes, and lot rents went up $65 a month instead of $165. In Caldwell, at what became Idaho's first resident-owned park, residents there told KTVB that without the purchase, many of them would have ended up living in their cars. Angela Green remembers her first reaction when she heard the residents could buy the place: "We all thought it was a scam."

We approved an investment in Leap Housing in February 2026.

Three places. Three entirely different shapes of ownership. And all three were turned away by conventional capital for the exact feature that makes each one work: one vote per owner, a capped return, a house that cannot appreciate.

So ask yourself: how would you have found any of them?

Our investment committee is made up of experts who understand the complexities of ownership and can read a multi-stakeholder cooperative's bylaws carefully enough to tell real governance from decorative governance. They know how to source these deals that have deep and lasting impact in communities. Joining together allows us to collectively fund the  hundreds more of these that are out there. We search constantly, and the list grows every quarter. No individual donor can run that search alone.

And even if you did find one, your donor-advised fund would very likely refuse to fund it.

At Fidelity Charitable, the giving account menu is a list of pools. Asset allocation pools. Single asset class pools. Sustainable and impact pools. DonorFlex, the program that opens the door to private investments, requires at least $5 million in your account. Call your sponsor and ask to move $25,000 into a West Oakland cooperative selling shares at $1,000 each, and the answer is no. Most donors who try this discover they can't, and quietly give up.

That is the gap we occupy. Your charitable dollars sit on one side of it. On the other, an entire asset class your sponsor's system cannot process.

Two things bridge it. First, who decides. The people making the decisions are not the people making the gifts. Our investment committee is made up of practitioners: community leaders, emerging fund managers, people who have spent their careers inside this work. Decision-making authority sits with Smitha Das of World Education Services, Henry Noel Jr. of Boston Impact Initiative, and Santhosh Ramdoss of Gary Community Ventures. In nearly every other philanthropic vehicle, that power belongs to whoever wrote the check.

Last November, they said no to a deal that several funders had already fallen for. The problem was governance: who would actually hold a say in the decisions that matter. They told the manager exactly what had to change, and sent the deal back. The manager restructured it. In January, the committee approved it, six votes to none.

The funders would have written the first version of that check. The restructure would never have happened, and none of us would have known what was missing. But what an incredible difference to the people those investments reached!

Second, plumbing. Impact Charitable, our partner in Denver, has moved more than $100 million doing the unglamorous labor that lets charitable dollars land in an Oakland real estate cooperative instead of a mutual fund. Because of them, the phone call that goes nowhere at a commercial sponsor goes somewhere here.

Which brings it all back to your account.

Noni Session heard for years that her plan was a bad investment. David Lidz could not get a single bank to look at him. Bart Cochran got Leap off the ground with a thousand dollars.

None of them needed persuading. What they needed was someone willing to go first.

If you're able to send money straight to any of these three, do it. We will happily send you the documents ourselves. But if you have a donor-advised fund, and you want to be a part of this solution, consider Unlock Ownership. We have removed the friction of minimums, legal fees, and due diligence complexity as well as enabled experts to make the money be incredibly catalytic, not to mention streamlined for the funds. You contribute the way you would make a grant, and your money goes to work on Seventh Street, in West Baltimore, and in Boise, steered by people who have given their lives to this. We would love for you to join us.