Kyle Matthys

Kyle Matthys learned early what it feels like to be part of a small system where everybody has a role.

As a teenager, he spent a semester at a school on a working farm in Vermont, where 45 students shared responsibility for everything from feeding animals to keeping the farm running. He later taught martial arts before studying Economics and Environmental Policy at Middlebury College.

Sustainability initially looked like the direction he would take.

After working across climate and technology projects while at university, Matthys joined Turtle in 2024 as the century-old electrical distributor’s first sustainability hire. His work there focused on decarbonisation, targets and new initiatives as the business considered its role in the energy transition.

At the same time, another problem was becoming harder for him to ignore.

Young people can build serious nonprofit organisations while still at school or university, but the support around them often disappears just as those organisations need to become sustainable. Venture-backed founders have accelerators, investors and startup networks. Their nonprofit counterparts have far less equivalent infrastructure.

Matthys founded TRIIBE in 2024 to help fill that gap.

Today, it provides next-generation nonprofit founders with funding, mentorship, operational support, community and visibility. Its fellowship supports founders through university with unrestricted funding and long-term guidance, while the TRIIBE 100 identifies nonprofit founders under 30 whose organisations are already creating measurable impact. TRIIBE describes what it is building as a “startup engine for the nonprofit sector.”

In 2026, Matthys left Turtle to lead TRIIBE full-time.

The move took him from thinking about how established organisations become more sustainable to a different kind of resilience altogether – what young founders need around them if the organisations they start are going to survive.

I think that last thought is the real Future Forum story here. It avoids overstating TRIIBE’s current scale while making the lane-crossing clear.

I’d also remove “featured in the New York Times” unless Kyle has supplied the specific coverage – I couldn’t substantiate it. ESG News has profiled TRIIBE, but “one of the more closely watched new entrants in the philanthropic infrastructure space” is editorial puffery we don’t need.