Leap Fund
Taking on the benefits cliff so a raise never leaves a working family worse off.
Leap Fund takes on the benefits cliff, also called the cliff effect: the moment a worker earns a dollar or two more an hour and, as a result, loses public benefits worth far more than the raise. People end up earning more and netting less. Leap Fund builds the tools, education, and data to expose these cliffs and help people make informed decisions, while pushing for the policy changes that would end them. Leap Fund came to us through the Reconstruct Challenge, winning our 2022 Employment challenge with a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 grant.
Why we backed them
Work is meant to be a path forward. The benefits cliff turns that path into a trap. When taking a raise or a promotion can mean losing food assistance, childcare, or healthcare worth more than the added pay, many people make financially conservative decisions out of fear, and often they never see the cliff coming until after it has hit. That is a broken incentive at the heart of the system, and it falls hardest on the people working to climb. Leap Fund removes the guesswork. Its work fits squarely with our belief that dignity comes through contribution, and that people deserve both the opportunity to advance and the information to do it safely. By making the cliff visible, Leap Fund lets workers, coaches, and employers plan around it, so a step up at work is actually a step forward in life.
Our role: Reconstruct Challenge winner, Phase 1 and Phase 2 grants
Type: Nonprofit organization
Focus: Solving the benefits cliff through tools, coaching, education, and policy
Image from our Story of Impact on LeapFund
From the Reconstruct Challenge to real scale
Leap Fund is another example of our innovation work paying off. Through the Reconstruct Challenge, we help organizations test and prove ideas that expand access and opportunity, then back the ones that work with follow-on funding. Leap Fund won our 2022 Employment challenge, which focused on barriers to work in Louisville and Southern Indiana, and received support across two phases. Since then, Leap Fund has grown well beyond that start, partnering with employers, coaching programs, and workforce systems across the country and helping shape benefits-cliff policy, including a first-of-its-kind New York City workforce pilot.
What Leap Fund does
Benefits cliff calculator: predicts how a change in income or household size will affect someone's benefits and net income, before they make a decision. Benefits Cliff Coaching Program: trains coaches and case managers to have clear, actionable conversations about cliffs with the people they serve. Education, data, and advocacy: research and tools embedded across the public benefit, direct service, employment, and policy sectors, paired with a push for lasting policy change. The need is real: in 2025, 22% of clients discovered through Leap Fund's tool that they would hit a benefits cliff, and 44% of clients who already knew about cliffs said they had made decisions out of fear of hitting one.
Why it matters to us
Leap Fund fixes an invisible penalty that punishes people for getting ahead. Making that penalty visible, and working to remove it, is a direct investment in economic mobility and the dignity of work. Helping launch and grow it through the Reconstruct Challenge is one of the ways we put philanthropic capital to work as risk capital for solutions that are impactful, scalable, and enduring.