Abstract: Promoting the high-quality development of social organizations is an important measure for advancing the third distribution. As social governance continues to develop toward greater refinement, the significance of community foundations in aggregating social charitable resources and participating in social governance has gradually become apparent. Drawing on cross-sector collaboration theory and the TOE analytical framework, this study constructs a theoretical framework for the aggregation of charitable resources by community foundations, and employs the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method to analyze 32 community foundation cases from across China. From six perspectives namely the structure of resource dependence, departmental span, scale of collaborating entities, maturity of collaboration, organizational maturity, and organizational functional attributes, it explores the different paths that influence community foundations’ aggregation of social charitable resources. The findings reveal that cross-sector collaboration among government, enterprises, and social organizations constitutes a necessary condition for community foundations to achieve a high level of charitable resource aggregation, and that there are two distinct paths for community foundations to aggregate charitable resources: a resource-driven aggregation path and an organization-growth aggregation path.

Key words: cross-sector collaboration, community foundations, charitable resources, social governance