Philanthropy Is Funding Boys and Men Again. The Last Wave Didn’t Build Enough to Last.

Foundations are putting new money behind education, mental health, fatherhood and economic mobility for boys and men. Whether they are building institutions or funding another moment is a question the sector already has an answer to.

Drew Lindsay reported for The Chronicle of Philanthropy on August 20 that a field once considered awkward terrain for mainstream philanthropy is becoming easier for major funders to enter. The American Institute for Boys and Men, founded by scholar Richard Reeves in 2023, generated more than $7.3 million in revenue in its second year and now counts the Lumina, Packard and Walton Family foundations and Arnold Ventures among its supporters. Melinda French Gates gave Reeves and Equimundo CEO Gary Barker $20 million each to distribute, and another group of philanthropists is preparing a collaborative focused on education, fatherhood and men’s sense of belonging. The money is arriving faster than the infrastructure it would need to outlive the current attention cycle, which is the condition under which this sector has failed before.

The underlying problems are well documented. Men trail women across several educational measures, and the higher-education gender gap has fully reversed from the era when women were the underrepresented group. Male labor-market participation and earnings have weakened, most sharply among less-educated workers. The health disparity is the starkest figure in the set: the U.S. suicide rate among males was 22.2 per 100,000 in 2024, nearly four times the female rate of 5.6, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Philanthropy has been here before

The last major funding surge centered on Black and Latino boys and men during the Obama era, when foundations directed hundreds of millions toward education, criminal justice, economic mobility and leadership initiatives. The Open Society Foundations’ Campaign for Black Male Achievement invested or helped leverage roughly $320 million over 12 years. In 2014, grantmakers participating in what became the Executive Alliance for Boys and Men of Color pledged another $200 million, alongside the launch of My Brother’s Keeper.

Parts of that infrastructure survive. My Brother’s Keeper continues through the Obama Foundation, Cities United remains active in violence prevention, and local organizations built during the period still serve boys and men of color in the communities where they were founded.

The coalition did not. The Campaign for Black Male Achievement closed in 2020. The funder alliance that once included more than 40 partners now has eight members and commitments below $10 million as it reorganizes into the Executive Alliance Fund. Ford stopped funding the coalition in 2020, and Kellogg no longer organizes its work primarily around boys and men of color. The programs outlasted the money in some places, but the connective tissue between funders — the thing that turns a set of grants into a field — dissolved within a decade of its peak.

The failure mode is worth naming precisely, because the new wave is exposed to the same one. The previous surge did not collapse because its programs did not work. It collapsed because the money was organized around a moment rather than around permanent capacity, and when the moment passed, the coordinating institutions had nothing to draw on.

A crisis can raise money faster than it builds institutions

Reeves is explicitly working against that cycle. Rather than framing the condition of boys and men as an emergency, he is building research organizations, policy capacity and programs designed to persist after political attention relocates. His argument is that crisis language moves large checks quickly and produces almost none of the durable network — researchers, service providers, advocates, committed funders — that sustained work on a problem requires over decades.

The comparison with women’s philanthropy shows the scale of what does not yet exist. Lindsay reports an estimated 60,000 organizations working on the rights, health and advancement of women and girls. Nothing comparable exists for men and boys. Reeves is not attempting to match that footprint but to build enough parallel capacity that male outcomes are continuously studied and addressed instead of rediscovered each time they turn politically useful.

The distinction carries weight because the underlying problems run on their own timeline. A boy struggling in school does not become less important when donor attention shifts to democracy or climate. Neither does a working-class man disconnected from employment, a father without support, or a young man experiencing depression. Funding cycles have periods. The conditions they address do not.

The new movement has another test to pass

A racial question sits inside the broader frame. The Obama-era movement concentrated deliberately on boys and men of color because their outcomes reflected overlapping racial and gender disparities. Reeves favors a coalition built around boys and men generally while keeping Black boys and men as one of his institute’s focus areas, arguing that some male disparities cut across race and that a wider frame can attract more durable political and philanthropic support.

The critique of that approach is grounded in an observable pattern rather than speculation. Attention and funding tend to increase once a problem affecting Black and brown communities is understood to affect white Americans as well, and the populations facing the deepest barriers tend to become less central to the solution as the frame widens. The last wave’s institutional collapse gives that concern additional weight: the organizations built specifically for boys and men of color are the ones that lost their funding coalition, and they would now be asked to compete inside a broader field for the same philanthropic dollars.

The challenge is not choosing between boys and girls, or between men of different races. It is whether philanthropy can hold multiple inequalities simultaneously. Women remain underrepresented at the highest levels of corporate and political power. Men can at the same time face worse outcomes in suicide, education, incarceration and economic disconnection. Neither fact cancels the other, and the sector’s tendency to treat them as competing claims is part of why the previous coalition fractured.

What happens next

Expect the first real signal around 2028 to 2030, when the current cohort of major gifts completes its initial grant periods. The number to watch is not total dollars but funder count — whether the collaborative now forming holds more than a dozen committed institutions past its founding grants, or contracts toward the eight-member remainder the Executive Alliance became. Multi-year general operating support versus project-restricted grants will indicate which outcome is coming well before the totals do.

The structural risk is that this wave is arriving during a period of unusual political salience for questions about men, which makes fundraising easier now and the eventual withdrawal steeper. Reeves has correctly identified that crisis framing is the trap. Whether his funders share that analysis is a separate matter, and their grant terms will reveal it before their statements do. The organizations most likely to survive the next attention shift are the ones building revenue that does not depend on any of the names currently attached to this moment.