Innovation for All for Good

Necessity is still the mother of invention. The communities hit hardest by poverty, chronic disease, and environmental distress have brilliant innovators. But they don’t get access equitable funding and training to bring their ideas to fruition for the benefit of their communities and humanity.

Building on our leadership’s and funders’ global networks, WISE finds innovators in the arts, technology, media, community services, and environmental regeneration, providing them with funding, connections, training, and coaching to develop and scale their solutions.

To date, we have supported 10 innovators, who have created water generation systems in Kenya, solar energy in Baltimore’s lowest income communities, portable clean energy in South Africa’s rural areas, and clean cooking stoves in Nigeria positively impacting millions of lives.

The WISE Fund is a funding equity enterprise supporting small scale innovators with big ideas to make a better world.

We provide seed funding and development coaching to promising and scalable projects with small to medium sized companies and nonprofits that improve health, economic inclusion, restore natural environments, and promote equity in community arts.

We support eligible projects and organizations in Africa and the Americas. A blended fund, WISE gets support from individual donors, social impact investors, angel investors as well as institutional philanthropists.

Having just finished supporting our 2020 cohort of WISE Innovators (see bit.ly/WISEleaders), we are not accepting applications at this time.

Instead we are fundraising to create AGAPE: A Global and Pan-African Philanthropic Economy — a platform to make direct Afrodescendant and allied funding more accessible to community-based innovators worldwide.

We are also building our cultural economy program, Soul Fusion, to support innovators preserving and advancing music, art, and dance through the transformative power of Afroarts and culture. Our music, festival, and arts education programming helps us develop funds to support our innovators.