OREF's career-development grants have a 20% success rate in securing larger federal funding, unusual in healthcare philanthropy. The organization launched the Horizon Fund in May to help past grantees bridge the gap to bigger funding sources, partnering with a venture-capital firm to blend philanthropy with VC expertise.
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How do we capitalize that and help these ideas go on to get over that valley of death and getting more funding? By the way, I should say that we have a really great history. About 20% of the grants that we fund go on to get more significant federal funding, which, and I don't know of any other foundation in all of healthcare that has the success rate that we have of our career development grants. So we, we looked at that and we we decided that we were going to start this fund that would be focused primarily on those, those individuals that we've, uh, uh, already awarded grants to. We started in May of last year, uh, and, uh, after the academy meeting, we're probably going to open it up to, uh, anybody that has good ideas, uh, to come forward. What we did at OREF when we decided that we would do this, we started started interviewing a number of venture capital groups to see if they'd be interested in working with us. We met with a number of groups, decided on the one that we're currently partnering with, and together with that group, we created this Horizon Fund.