Ktisis Capital

Ktisis Capital serves as a strategic advisor to a mix of progressive individual donors, families, foundations and philanthropic collaboratives. Since 2015, we have worked to mobilize resources to advance racial, social, economic and environmental justice. We work with a wide range of individual donors and families to help them create and refine their grantmaking strategies; manage their charitable, advocacy, and political giving and their impact investing; navigate challenging organizational questions on governance, generational transition, and mission change. We also work extensively with funder collaboratives and donor networks, both newly emerging and long-established, on recruitment, engagement and programmatic strategy. 

Based in Michigan, we work with clients across the United States and internationally from South and Central America, to Europe and Australia, strategizing with each client to develop a confidential and customized plan of action. Our client engagements range from deep ongoing partnerships that span years to quick, targeted work to tackle a specific challenge or question — we adapt to the needs that each client brings our way.

Ktisis was founded by Dr. Jason Franklin, one of the nation’s leading voices on philanthropy and social change. From 2010-2015, he served as executive director of Bolder Giving, an organization credited by Melinda Gates as an inspiration for the Billionaire Giving Pledge. In 2015, Dr. Franklin moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to accept the position as the inaugural W.K. Kellogg Community Philanthropy Chair at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. As the holder of the nation’s first endowed professorship focused on community philanthropy, he spent his time on a mix of research, teaching, consulting, advising, and thought leadership focused on collective giving and community philanthropy, nationally and internationally.

As he began his journey as the W.K. Kellogg Community Philanthropy Chair, Jason launched Ktisis Capital as a complement to his academic work, advising several individual donors and families on their giving. In light of the shifting political landscape in the U.S., increased and resurfaced racial injustices and police brutality, and ever deepening economic and social inequalities, Dr. Franklin stepped down from the Kellogg Chair to dedicate his full time to mobilizing resources for change through Ktisis Capital.

We’re often asked about the origins of our firm’s name.

Our founder first encountered Ktisis (k’-tī-sīs), the Byzantine goddess of generosity or personification of the foundation of a building or city, when he saw the mosaic above at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he moved to New York City in 2002. This mosaic dates to 550 CE and is believed to have been part of a large floor mosaic of a public building of the Byzantine Empire. 

Over the years as he visited the Met, the mosaic always caught his attention and he learned more about the goddess she portrayed and he was captivated by the few surviving mosaics of her around the world. As he sought a name for the firm, the combination of a name from an ancient Mediterranean civilization where he could also trace some of his own familial roots that encompassed both the enduring human impulse towards generosity and the importance of planning to create a stable foundation captured his imagination.