In February 2015, the nation’s leading foundations made a public commitment to jointly address the challenges and opportunities of the digital age and established the NetGain Partnership.

The partners recognized that the rapid growth of the internet created challenges and opportunities in every area of contemporary life, ushering in enormous change and touching virtually every area of concern to philanthropy. Each organization wanted to understand how the internet and digital technologies, through systems such as online journalism, public interest technology, or algorithms, would undermine or advance the issues they were developed to address.

The creation of NetGain marked the first time these foundations would work together formally to strengthen digital society, united by a shared set of principles that guide strategy and collaboration.

Over the past nine years, more partners have joined.

The NetGain Partnership maintains the belief that our digital world can be fair and just, and that regulation and accountability can deliver on the internet’s earliest promises of fostering community, advancing equity, and democratizing the world’s knowledge.

Each partner pledges resources and commits to shared exploration and learning about emerging issues at the intersection of technology and philanthropy and, collectively, NetGain aims to make its investments more efficient and better coordinated, allowing the group to address the internet’s most pressing challenges – those too large for any one organization to tackle alone.

In the face of rising digital threats to democracy, we have redoubled our efforts to collectively advance work on three distinct strategies: platform research, regulation and governance, and philanthropic engagement and education.

PARTNERS