Faced with a need and desire for more robust conversation about and enhanced coordination and effectiveness in HIV/AIDS funding, the Bernard van Leer Foundation first convened a group of European funders concerned with HIV/AIDS in 2002 to share experiences and perspectives; learn from each other’s successes and failures in this complex funding area; and discuss opportunities for better information exchange, coordination and cooperation in addressing the HIV/AIDS challenge worldwide. This initial meeting was also supported and attended by Funders Concerned About AIDS (the U.S.-based HIV/AIDS Affinity Group) and by the Ford Foundation. 

This initial gathering built on a series of conversations held prior to the European Foundation Centre gathering in 2002, and reflected a growing desire and need among private European funders to connect better with each other as well as with their bilateral and multilateral counterparts, both in Europe and the United States. In fact prior to this first gathering of the EFG, the Bernard van Leer Foundation commissioned a survey of over sixty foundations in Europe then involved in some way in HIV/AIDS funding. The survey was the first of its kind in European philanthropy and it surfaced the diversity of issues, geographic regions covered, and broad range of strategies and practices employed by different European private funders to address HIV/AIDS.

Since then EFG continued to work towards these original aims. Its work has included annual resource tracking research and publications, a website, funder gatherings and briefings at EFC Annual Meeting and major stand-alone funder convenings and the establishment in 2009 of a Secretariat housed at the EFC.