Armillaria Foundation
Capital is not the problem.
Access is.
See the funding programmes
→
Request a proposal
A need routed to a responder.
An offer routed to a funder.
The same organisations, with no route in.
The platform does not charge per seat, so cost is not what excludes them. Connectivity, language, staff time and the price of everything around the software are. That is what philanthropy pays for.
Evidence · North Carolina, 2024–25
226 organisations that had never shared a system coordinated $1.8M through two hurricanes.
North Carolina VOAD ran needs-and-offers matching through Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton on infrastructure that was configured, not built. No integration project. No per-seat licensing. No pilot phase. The organisations doing the coordinating were local.
503
Registered users
226
Organisations
$1.8M
Offers coordinated
$177,140
Value of needs fulfilled
Source · North Carolina VOAD · September 2024 – January 2025. Publishable and independently verifiable. Figures dated at point of extract.
The cost
This is one deployment in one country with functioning infrastructure and a coordinating body already in place. It is the strongest thing we can show you, and it is not proof that the same result arrives in a context with none of those things. The funding programmes below exist precisely because that gap is real.
Supporters, funders and clients
Thirty-one institutions have backed, funded and deployed this work.
Practice engagements · 2015 – 2024
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Puerto Rico Impact Investing Group
Islamic Finance Collective
Innovación Azul
Latin American Ocean Capital Collective
Deployments
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Wealth Hackers Collective
Inclusive Capital Exchange
Earth Foundation
Funders and supporters
◆ Appears in two groups — a practice engagement that became a deployment. Twenty-five of the thirty-one marks are on file; six organisations are named in type. Logos indicate funding, partnership or deployment, not endorsement of this page.
What we build · And give away
Three things, and the third is the one nobody funds.
Armillaria licenses coordination infrastructure to governments, agencies and large NGOs, and that revenue runs the business. These three are the parts that are open, or free, or deployed where there is no customer.
01 · Open access
The Innovation Exchange
One place where projects, organisations, opportunities and needs are visible to each other. Local groups post what they need; funders and suppliers see it and respond. What began as NeedsList — a decade of humanitarian coordination in the field — is now a capability inside a larger system, and community organisations use it free.
Free tier · unlimited users · no seat charge at any tier
02 · Standards · unfunded
A schema nobody will pay for
The impact sector runs on more than 600 competing measurement frameworks. Every incompatible system is a tax on the organisations least able to pay it. We have the schema the platform runs on, and we have proposed publishing it as a versioned, forkable standard that anyone can build on — including people who will never be our customers. Nobody has funded it. A schema is not a programme and it photographs badly, which is exactly why it never gets paid for.
Proposed · unfunded
03 · Hard contexts
Where the network isn’t
Crisis response happens where connectivity fails. We are building coordination that keeps working offline and syncs when the network returns, so a community is not cut off from help by the same event that created the need. Of the three, this is the one still being built.
Status · in development
The cost
Two of these three are real today and one is not finished. We have written it that way rather than letting a roadmap item sit in the same tense as a deployment. If offline-first is the reason you are interested, ask us where it actually is before you commit.
The catalogue
Most problems have already been solved. Somewhere.
11,000
Solutions mapped
Projects, organisations and proven approaches · catalogued in the Innovation Exchange
The difficulty was never invention. It is that a municipality in one country cannot find the thing a municipality in another already built, tested and abandoned the second version of. We have catalogued close to eleven thousand solutions, structured so they can be searched, compared and moved between contexts.
Every solution that transfers is a problem nobody has to solve from scratch again. That is the cheapest form of impact there is, and it only works if the catalogue is open.
Funding · What it buys
Four programmes. Each one finishable.
Open-ended appeals are hard to take to a board. These are the four pieces of work philanthropy funds, what each one produces, and what it takes to do it. Ask us what any of them costs and we will send the current figure.
Programme
What it produces
Cost
Open access accounts
Platform access, onboarding and support for local organisations in crisis-affected regions — the users a commercial model would never reach
On request
Open source release
Cleaning up, documenting and publishing the codebase as public infrastructure anyone can run
$250,000
Standards integration
Making humanitarian data interoperable across agencies and platforms, so information moves without translation loss
On request
Offline-first deployment
Coordination that keeps working when the network does not, for the contexts where response actually happens
$300,000
Cost to a community organisation
$0
Cost to keep it that way
On request
The cost
Fund one of these and you fund a discrete, finishable thing. Fund none of them and the platform still runs — the commercial side pays for that. What stops is the free layer. We would rather you knew that the lights stay on either way than discover it later and feel handled.
One reason among several
No buyer
For the layer philanthropy funds
Some of this work has no buyer.
There is no business case for serving an organisation with no budget, and there never will be. The same is true of documenting code so a competitor can fork it, and of standards work that benefits the whole sector. A commercial company will not fund those things at the scale they need, because it cannot justify it.
That is one good reason to fund this work. It is not the only one, and we would rather not pretend it is. The catalogue is worth funding because eleven thousand mapped solutions is a public asset. The standards work is worth funding because the sector’s fragmentation costs everyone. Crisis deployment is worth funding on its own terms. Pick the one that matches your mandate.
The cost
Armillaria is a commercial company with a charitable programme, not a charity with a trading arm. If your board needs the recipient to be a pure non-profit, the Charitable Partnership Fund sponsorship below is the mechanism — and if that still doesn’t fit, there are alternatives. Let's talk.
Track record · Since 2016
Built where coordination failure costs lives.
Syria. Haiti. The Philippines. Somalia. Ukraine. The matching logic was not designed in a workshop — it was built under conditions where a duplicated shipment is a wasted month and an unmatched need is a person waiting.
Syria
Haiti
Philippines
Somalia
Ukraine
North Carolina
$35M+
Resources mobilised
750,000+
People reached
25+
Countries
750+
Partner organisations
Cumulative · 2016 – 2025.
Case studies
One fix is an anecdote. Nine is a pattern.
Fix 001 · Municipal crisis response
Crisis preparation and response coordination built with public-private partnerships. Needs and offers matched across hundreds of organisations, in advance of the emergency rather than during it.
$1.8M
Coordinated · NC · 90 days
Fix 003 · Impact finance
Mobilising impact finance for BIPOC entrepreneurs in the United States, coordinating capital, intermediaries and enterprises that had no shared infrastructure between them.
US
Capital coordination
Fix 002 · Marine conservation
Digital infrastructure for large-scale marine conservation with COBI in Mexico, mobilising knowledge between conservation organisations across Latin America and the Caribbean.
SDG 14
Latin America & Caribbean
Fix 009 · Community capital
Mobilising community, capital and culture with the cooperatively owned movement, across a member-owned network that had no shared coordination layer between its chapters.
Co-op
Member-owned network
The practice · Who does the work
The people who design it are the people who build it.
In most engagements the senior people appear at the pitch and are never seen again. Here the person facilitating your roundtable is the person who designed the schema and will be in the room at handover.
Cameron Burgess
Co-founder & CEO
Thirty years designing impact finance ecosystems and convening the people who have to agree before anything gets built.
Dr. Astrid Scholz
Co-founder & CFO
Economist and serial founder. Designs the capital structures and ownership models that make coordination financially possible.
Madelynn Martiniere
Co-founder & Senior Advisor
Crisis response and community resilience. The needs-and-offers model at the centre of the platform comes directly out of her work in the field.
Miranda Weston
Head of Product
Owns the product surface and the configuration playbook: what gets set up, in what order, and what a deployment looks like from the client side.
Francisco Romero Conde
Head of Engineering
Platform architecture and the data model. Responsible for the infrastructure every deployment above runs on.
Daniel Forero
Lead Engineer
Delivery and deployment. Builds the light development that sits on top of configuration when a requirement genuinely is not in the platform yet.
Governance
501(c)(3)
Charitable Partnership Fund
Where the money goes, and who watches it.
Armillaria Foundation is a project of the Charitable Partnership Fund, a US 501(c)(3) public charity. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Fiscal sponsorship means your grant is administered by an established charity with its own reporting obligations, not by us alone.
Programme committee: Dr Astrid Scholz, Cameron Burgess, Steve Wright. Budgets, governance documentation and reporting frameworks are available on request and can be aligned to your requirements.
Ways to support
Four routes in. Same destination.
Institutional funders do not click donate buttons and individual donors do not email for a proposal. Pick the row that describes you.
Foundations
Programme and infrastructure grants across the four areas above. Budgets, governance documentation and reporting frameworks aligned to your requirements.
Request a proposal →
Agencies & multilaterals
Bilateral and multilateral partners fund deployment in specific geographies and contexts, usually alongside a technical partnership.
Discuss a partnership →
Corporate foundations
Corporate giving programmes support open access and open source work, with the option of engineering contribution alongside capital.
Talk to us →
Individuals
Recurring gifts fund open access accounts directly, keeping local organisations on the platform.
Give monthly →
Why this page exists
Access to infrastructure should not be means-tested.
Coordination is infrastructure. A community that knows exactly what it needs, and cannot say so in a form anyone can act on, is not a funding problem. It is a plumbing problem. We built the plumbing. Keeping it open to the people with the least money is the part that does not pay for itself.
$0
Per organisation · per year · unlimited users
What it costs a community organisation to use this platform. Unlimited users, every tier, not a launch offer. What it costs us to keep it that way is the subject of this page.