FORGE (Funders Organized for Rights in the Global Economy) is a collaborative of leading donors working towards a global economy that works for all people and the planet, shaped by and accountable to worker and community-led movements. FORGE is designed to enable participating funders to engage in shared learning, aligned funding strategies and pooled funding.

FORGE funders collaborate and amplify their impact by:

  • Co-creating strategies that seek to address root causes of human rights abuses in the global economy by shifting power, bridging gaps in accountability and enforcement, and generating greater impact across sectors and issues;  

  • Building cross-movement power across human rights, gender, climate and economic justice movements, and connect local movements with international strategies and campaigns; and 

  • Fostering a learning agenda within and beyond philanthropy to inspire other funders from diverse fields to take bold collaborative action.  

The SAGE Fund is proud to be a part of FORGE, as a strategic thought partner in operationalizing and launching FORGE (beginning in 2020) and in leading FORGE’s collaborative grantmaking (ongoing). SAGE spurs innovation in strategies at a targeted project level and extends the reach of funders across fields. FORGE builds on SAGE’s opportunity-spotting model and expands it by adding layers of field-building initiatives, cross-movement building, and global economy strategy development.  

FORGE funders include the Ford Foundation, Fundación Avina, Humanity United, Laudes Foundation, Open Society Foundations, SAGE Fund, True Costs Initiative, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Foundation for a Just Society, Omidyar Network, and Wallace Global Fund.


FORGE Grantmaking for a Just Global Economy
The global pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities – economic, gender, racial and other – that are caused by a power imbalance between financial and economic actors driving investment on one end of value chains and workers and communities suffering harms from its impact on the other. These include a critical lack of economic, social, labor, environmental and human rights rights protection. FORGE seeks to leverage the opening created by the Covid crisis and its economic recovery to advance economic, gender and climate justice approaches to transforming the global economy into a more equitable and sustainable one.  

FORGE funders aim to respond collectively and in partnership with groups in the field to help seed and accelerate a necessary shift in this global paradigm, by catalyzing support through its collaborative grantmaking. FORGE grantmaking supports promising strategies which achieve impact now, and provide the opportunity to translate lessons to scale. SAGE is leading FORGE’s longer-term vision grantmaking to advance systems-change approaches to shifting the economy in a more just and sustainable direction.

Learn more about FORGE’s collaborative grantmaking and its 2021 Vision Fund round of grants on Debt and Post-Covid Recovery, led by SAGE.