Cause Funds: From Inspiration to Action

It began with courage

Cause Funds are deeply personal to me. 

When one of my closest friends, Greg, was diagnosed with ALS, he was filled with fear and sorrow, but also with gratitude and love for everyone around him. The urgency of these emotions emboldened him. Why can’t we cure this disease, he asked, right now?

Shortly after his diagnosis, Greg and I went for a walk together. He described a vision that has never left me. He saw himself standing in the centre of a circle surrounded by people with their hands interlinked. They were lifting him up, holding him steady, and refusing to let him fall. 

Except that he didn’t just see himself in the centre: he saw every person living with ALS in that spot.

Greg believed that if we were going to end ALS, we needed everyone, from patients, caregivers, researchers, clinicians, charities, to donors, standing in that circle together, holding hands, united by a shared purpose. 

But when Greg looked around, reality showed him a small, fragmented circle full of committed people and important work, but lacking the unity needed to move faster or further together. 

The will was there. But the connection was not.

Where many might have accepted that reality, Greg chose to do something else. He decided to build that circle he imagined and create a community around a cause. That’s when I first truly understood courage: acting beyond yourself, especially when it’s hardest.

And what struck me most was that in the months following, I saw that his courage didn’t stay contained. It spread. It inspired me and others, like Mark Kirton, to step forward and create the ALS Super Fund: a way to unite a fragmented community and ensure that everyone had a role to play — from everyday donors to charities, to researchers and clinicians, and of course to patients and caregivers.

What we built was an entirely new way of approaching philanthropy, rooted in community, shared purpose, and action. We built a community committed to bringing everyone with common goals together to play on the same team. It raised a simple but powerful question: What if this collaborative approach was the new norm — across every cause? 

What if we focused more on shared planning and community building than competitive fundraising? 

What if we built a platform that made it easy for cause leaders to rally their communities around causes instead of charities themselves? 

That idea now guides the Cause Funds program at Charitable Impact.

Building a new model of giving

The people around us care deeply about the issues that plague our world, from illness to mental health to addiction to poverty to the environment. Yet fewer and fewer people are giving to charity each year — not because they don’t care, but because that care too often doesn’t translate into action. People lack clear ways to engage, and the trust needed to feel confident in their giving. 

We saw this in the world of ALS. People all around us signalled their desire to help, to donate, to volunteer. They too wanted to find a cure and make life better for those living with ALS. The problem, we learned, was they didn’t understand how. There was no manual given out to tell people how to choose the best charity to donate to, when there were so many different ones out there to choose from. 

How could people feel confident their donations were really going towards finding a cure?

So instead of asking people who cared about ending the disease to navigate a confusing charity landscape on their own, the ALS Super Fund established a new model of giving that created clarity, trust, and a sense of belonging to something bigger than any one organization. 

Donors can have greater confidence because the Fund is led by a super impressive advisory group composed of leaders in the ALS space, experts, clinicians, neurologists, patients/caregivers of people with ALS. 

They come up with a shared plan and disburse funds out to high-impact charities that are working together on that shared plan.

But something else incredible happened as well. Donors weren’t the only ones who stepped up with confidence. Charities and cause leaders began to confidently work together too. Rather than working in parallel towards a shared goal, leaders in the ALS community began to align their work with each other, supporting one another and creating something bigger than each individual piece alone could have ever accomplished. 

With Mark Kirton’s Courage to Fight campaign, that movement expanded. The NHL and all 32 of its professional hockey teams got involved. More than $2 million was raised in two years, and millions of people were reached with a simple idea: we can beat ALS if we work together. 

The Fund provided structure. The campaign created momentum. The community brought people, resources, and the belief that change could happen.

What began as one person’s courage became a shared commitment, helping close the gap between inspiration and action.

Building the circle

The Cause Funds model builds on the fact that people want to act, and will, when given the opportunity to do so confidently and easily. And it turns out many people like to do it together, alongside a growing community of like-minded givers. The model centres the vision and voice of trusted causal leaders who build portfolios of action aligned with a plan, and invites communities of people who care to join their movement. 

Cause Funds often start with a simple act: someone steps forward and says, “this matters,  so let’s do something about it.”

From there:

• A campaign that people can rally around begins to take shape
• A plan to turn hope into action forms
• Advisors bringing experience and credibility gather
• Champions emerge, carrying the cause into their communities
• Donors contributing the time, talent, and treasure that turn plans into action 
• Stories and results inspire others to join

What begins as one person’s conviction becomes something shared. And importantly, supporting a Cause Fund isn’t limited to donating money. 

Anyone who cares deeply can get involved by:

• learning from the work
• giving alongside others through a Giving Group supporting that Fund
• spreading the word with their friends and family
• volunteering for or attending Cause Fund events
• signing up for newsletter mailing lists from the Fund
• liking, following and sharing stories of the Fund online

Cause Funds are, at their core, an effort to build the circle that Greg had once imagined. 

This is your invitation to act on what you care about, and to do it with others. Because when people act beyond themselves, the circle grows — and what begins as a cause can become an entire movement.