Fifty-two nonprofits got word on November 4 that they had won grants from a funder most of them had never applied to before. Unlikely Collaborators, the Los Angeles nonprofit founded and led by Elizabeth R. Koch, announced $7.2 million in awards drawn from its first national request for proposals, a competition it opened in April 2026 and built around a single question: what helps a person notice the lens through which they see themselves and the world?
The money comes with that question attached. Every funded program works from Koch’s Perception Box framework, her term for the invisible lens of biology, beliefs, expectations and life experience that shapes what each person perceives. The grants range from $25,000 to $250,000, an average of roughly $138,000 per organization. The list splits exactly in half: 26 nonprofits are new partners, and 26 are organizations Unlikely Collaborators has funded before and chose to fund again.
The portfolio is deliberately scattered. New grantees include Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, 826 National, which teaches young people to write, Girls Inc. of Los Angeles, and Defy Ventures, which trains people coming home from prison to run businesses. Represent Justice and Get Lit – Words Ignite, a youth poetry organization, are also on the list. Among the renewals are the American Red Cross, the Dougy Center, the national grief center for children and families, the Prison Yoga Project, Baltimore’s Holistic Life Foundation, the Veterans Breakfast Club and Swan Songs, which arranges private concerts for people near the end of life.
“I’m deeply moved by the creativity and care these organizations bring to their work, often with people navigating incredibly difficult circumstances,” Koch said. “These non-profits come to us with an intimate understanding of their communities, enabling them to help these demographics from the inside out, and we have so much to learn from them.”
Some of the funded programs work through writing, poetry or theater. Others use mindfulness, dialogue, movement or grief support. What applicants were asked to show, under a multi-reviewer evaluation, was the specific moment in their program when a participant might catch sight of their own assumptions and become open to seeing things differently. Funders usually ask what a program will deliver. This one asked where the shift happens.
Koch is a daughter of Charles Koch, and her organization reported $151 million in assets in its 2024 IRS filing. She is also co-founder of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, which funds scientific research on perception and identity. The family name will draw its own reading of this grant round, but the structure argues for itself: an open national competition, published criteria, and a grantee list weighted toward small organizations doing close work with people in hard circumstances.
The framework behind the grants gets a fuller public airing next spring, when Koch’s book, The Perception Box, is published by Avid Reader Press in April 2027. The 52 organizations are not waiting for the book. Their work starts now, each of them running the same experiment in a different room: a hospital ward, a classroom, a prison, a grief group, with $7.2 million riding on whether people can be taught to see their own seeing.
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