by Bahar Aldanmaz Fidan, PhD
A single mother trying to build greater economic security rarely faces one barrier at a time.
Returning to work after years of caregiving may need updated digital skills, and help navigating a job market that has changed while she was away. But training alone may not be enough if she cannot access childcare. These challenges are interconnected in people's lives. Philanthropy, however, often funds them separately.
Employment may sit in one portfolio, parenting support in another, and mental wellbeing, financial literacy, and digital inclusion in several more. Each may be supported by a different donor, delivered by a different organization and measured against a different set of outcomes.That fragmentation matters because solving one part of a problem does not necessarily change the conditions surrounding it.
In Türkiye, single-parent households with children now account for 11.3 percent of all households, and in 8.5 percent of households, a mother lives with her children. ¹ Behind those numbers are women managing multiple responsibilities and barriers often at the same time.
That reality led us at Turkish Philanthropy Funds to ask a different question:
What if philanthropy were designed around the complexity of the problem people experience, rather than around the separate categories through which we traditionally fund it?
TPF's EmpowerHER–Single Mothers Fund is an effort to test that idea.
The program brings together five local nonprofit organizations with complementary expertise around a cohort of 35 single mothers. Rather than funding five unrelated programs, it coordinates support across peer networks, parenting, emotional wellbeing, financial literacy, employment readiness, and digital skills toward a shared objective: helping women build greater economic independence and long-term resilience.
The program itself matters. But the model behind it may have broader implications for philanthropy.
Starting with the Problem, not the Grant
Turkish Philanthropy Funds’ EmpowerHER-Single Mothers Fund began with the vision and support of a TPF donor, Seray Incoglu, who wanted to improve conditions for single mothers in Turkiye.
But translating that intention into impact required asking a bigger question than which organization to fund: What barriers were single mothers experiencing, and how did those barriers interact?
TPF then worked with five local nonprofit organizations with complementary expertise to develop a coordinated program around a cohort of 35 single mothers: Bekar Anneler Derneği (Single Mothers Association), Women’s Entrepreneurs Association of Turkiye (KAGİDER), MaviKalem Derneği (MaviKalem Association), AÇEV–Eşitliğe Değer (Mother Child Education Foundation-Equality Matters), and YenidenBiz Derneği (YenidenBiz Association). Each partner brings a different area of expertise, from peer solidarity and parenting support to emotional wellbeing, financial literacy, employment readiness, and digital skills.
The important part is not simply that several services are being offered. It is that they are being intentionally brought together around the same women and a shared objective.
We designed the program this way because employability is shaped by much more than a resume or a training course. A single mother may complete employment training and still be unable to accept a job because she lacks childcare, while another may have the skills to return to work but need updated digital or financial knowledge. These are often treated as separate problems because our institutions and funding streams are organized separately.
Yet they may belong to the same person.
From Grantmaker to Orchestrator
This model is also forcing us to think differently about the role a philanthropic intermediary can play. Traditionally, philanthropy often works through a relatively linear relationship: a nonprofit develops a program, a donor or foundation funds it, and the nonprofit delivers and reports on the work.
There is enormous value in that model, and individual organizations should continue to be supported for the expertise they bring. But complex social issues may require an additional role. Philanthropic organizations can become orchestrators.
Rather than attempting to provide every service themselves, they can identify a challenge, bring together organizations with complementary expertise, create shared infrastructure, establish common outcomes, coordinate learning, and give donors a way to support the broader solution.
That is the role TPF is playing in the Single Mothers Fund. And, there is another reason this matters.
Local nonprofits are expected to deliver services while also fundraising, managing grants, reporting to donors, collecting impact data, and maintaining community relationships. For smaller organizations in particular, that infrastructure can consume significant staff capacity.
The TPF EmpowerHER-Single Mothers Fund was designed with this reality in mind. The program was co-created with implementing partners who bring deep knowledge of the communities they serve and the barriers single mothers face. TPF provides much of the surrounding philanthropic infrastructure, from fundraising, due diligence, donor communications, coordination, and shared monitoring and evaluation, while partners lead from their own areas of expertise.
This does not mean the funder designs the solution and asks local organizations to implement it. It means building a structure in which local expertise shapes the program while philanthropy helps create the conditions for organizations to work together.
That distinction is critical.
Funding an Ecosystem Rather Than Five Separate Programs
The model also changes what a donor is funding, and reflects a broader opportunity for philanthropy.
A donor interested in economic opportunity for single mothers could theoretically make five separate grants to five different organizations. But doing so would not automatically create one coordinated intervention.The organizations might serve different women, measure different outcomes, operate on different timelines, and have little opportunity to understand how their interventions interact.
A coordinated fund can do something different. It allows the philanthropic investment to be structured around an outcome rather than an institution.
For individual donors, this offers a way to support several dimensions of an issue through one fund. For foundations and institutional donors, it creates an opportunity to invest in a portfolio of local organizations while building common measurement and learning across them. For participating nonprofits, it can help reduce the administrative burden of sustaining separate funding streams and allow more attention to remain with the communities they already know well.
Perhaps most importantly, it allows us to ask a different kind of impact question.
Philanthropy is relatively good at measuring individual activities: how many women completed training, attended workshops, or gained new skills. Those figures matter.
But they do not necessarily tell us whether a woman's life became meaningfully more stable. Because participants move through one coordinated program, we can look at how different forms of support interact rather than evaluating each intervention in isolation. We can ask whether stronger digital skills lead to better employment opportunities, or whether economic stability and peer support reinforce one another over time. The opportunity, therefore, is not merely to provide more services. It is to understand how those services work together.
Scale Should Follow Learning
Our first cohort began on September 22 with 35 single mothers.
Thirty-five women will not tell us everything about single motherhood in Türkiye, and one program will not resolve the structural barriers that shape women’s economic lives. Nor should it claim to.
There is often pressure in philanthropy to talk about scale early. How many people can we reach? How quickly can we expand? How can the model become national? Those are important questions but they should come after another one: What are we learning?
This first cohort gives us an opportunity to observe, evaluate, and refine. The goal is to understand what works, where the model needs to change, and what can be strengthened before expanding it.
If the approach proves effective, scale should not necessarily mean TPF delivering an ever-larger program itself. It could mean developing a model that other donors, philanthropic intermediaries and local organizations can adapt to other populations, geographies or challenges.
That may ultimately be the more valuable form of scale.
Building Philanthropic Products Around Complex Problems
There is a broader lesson here. Increasingly, donors come to organizations like ours not simply asking, "Which nonprofit should I give to?"
They come with a problem they care deeply about: How can I help women participate more fully in the economy? How can I improve opportunities for young people? How can communities become more resilient after disasters? How can we address educational inequality?
These are not single-organization questions. They are systems questions. And philanthropic organizations should become better at helping donors respond to them. That means developing what we might call philanthropic products: carefully designed vehicles that begin with an issue, draw upon multiple forms of local expertise, coordinate complementary interventions, establish common outcomes, create shared learning and allow capital from different types of donors to support the whole.
The role of the philanthropic organization is not to replace local nonprofits or decide from afar what communities need, but to create the infrastructure through which local knowledge, donor resources, and different forms of expertise can work together.
Single mothers make the limitations of fragmented funding particularly visible because employment, caregiving, economic security, wellbeing, and social support often converge in the same life. But the lesson extends beyond this program. Youth unemployment is rarely only an employment problem, and disaster recovery is rarely only a housing problem. Complex social challenges rarely fit neatly within one grant category or one organization.
If the hardest social problems are systems of interconnected barriers, philanthropy needs ways to build more interconnected responses.
That requires moving beyond the question of which organization should we fund, toward questions such as: What outcome are we trying to achieve? What stands in the way? Who already has the expertise to address those barriers? And how can philanthropy help those pieces work together?
The EmpowerHER–Single Mothers Fund is one attempt to answer those questions.
Thirty-five women are where we are beginning.
What we hope to learn from them may help us think much more broadly about how philanthropy itself can work differently.
¹TurkStat, Family Statistics, 2025 (İstatistiklerle Aile, 2025).