Grantmaker Services
We help funders with grantees and communities to support community-driven solutions and drive lasing change.
We have experience working with foundations of different types, including:
- Private Foundations–We provide tailored guidance and hands-on support to help you set strategy, strengthen nonprofit partners, and drive solutions to complex social issues.
- Corporate Grantmakers–We design strategies and programs that align your philanthropy with your organizational values and business goals, creating shared value that strengthens your partnership with communities.
- Community Foundations—We help you engage donors, grantees, and community partners to create strategies that center community voice, position your organization to be a local leader in creating a thriving community, and sustain your impact.
- Funder Collaboratives—We help diverse groups of funders align around a shared vision and goals, pool and coordinate resources, and take collective action to address complex social issues.
We prioritize relationships in everything we do and work with a spirit of partnership to help you achieve your goals. Learn more about our services below.
Strategy & Implementation
What should our goals and priorities be as we work to advance our mission?
How can we best leverage our power and resources for long-term impact?
How can we effectively engage stakeholders in our strategy?
As a corporate foundation, how can our philanthropy amplify our values and support our corporate goals?
As a community foundation, how can we connect our vision for a thriving community with our donors’ philanthropic goals?
How can we manage the change required to deliver a new strategy?
We work with funders of all types to develop strategies that include clear goals and priorities for grantmaking as well as considering other ways you can share your power and resources to support grantees and advance your strategic goals. Our strength lies in facilitating inclusive processes that center the voices of the communities you serve because the people closest to the issues know best which strategies will succeed. (See more about our approach in our field guide on Sharing Power with Communities.)
Once plans are in place, we bridge the gap between strategy and implementation, helping your team create focused and flexible plans for implementation and managing internal changes that may be required. Our approach ensures clear priorities, purposeful decisions, and agility to navigate changes, giving your organization the confidence to achieve its goals.
QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS
Nonprofit Capacity Support
How can we support our grantees to ensure they have what they need to sustain their impact?
How can we co-create capacity-building offerings in partnership with grantees?
Foundations’ ability to achieve results often depends on the strength of your nonprofit partners. We work directly with your grantees to co-design capacity-building offerings that equip them with the tools, resources, and knowledge they say they need to thrive. Capacity supports are more likely to be effective when they are right-sized and relevant to grantees’ needs. We work with your grantees to design offerings that meet them where they are, combining a blend of supports such as funding, technical assistance, peer learning, workshops or trainings, and/or leadership coaching.
Acting as an intermediary and capacity-building provider, we draw on our experienced team and network of affiliate consultants to bring in the skills and expertise your grantees need to meet their goals. We also manage all aspects of a capacity-building program, including regranting funds, administering payments and stipends, contracting with technical assistance providers, and assessing the program along the way to ensure we are achieving the desired results.
See more about our approach in our field guide, Making Capacity Building More Equitable.
QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS
Supporting Collective Action for Long-Term Impact
How can we partner with our grantees to work together to address complex social issues?
How can we help break down the silos that exist among our grantees and equip them to learn and try new approaches together?
Funders and nonprofits know that addressing complex, systemic social issues requires collaboration, yet default ways of working continue to reinforce siloed, fragmented approaches. Funders have an opportunity to support their grantees in coming together around a shared vision for change.
We partner with funders and their grantees to design and facilitate collaborative efforts that allow organizations working toward a shared goal to build knowledge, relationships, and skills to help them address systemic barriers and make progress toward the long-term outcomes they seek. From co-creating collaborative plans and goals with participants, to facilitating learning and supporting changes in practice and collective action, we help collaborative members build trust with one another, foster ownership of the work and outcomes, and create lasting progress together.
In our role as facilitator and intermediary, we manage all aspects of the collaborative effort, including facilitation, coordinating the work of outside partners, We also draw on our experienced team and network of affiliate consultants to bring in added skills and expertise where needed.
QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS
Evaluation & Assessment
How do we assess our foundation’s progress and impact?
How can we understand the impact of our investments in capacity building?
We can help you create evaluation plans, logic models, dashboards, or other assessment tools and partner with you to determine the systems, processes, and resources needed to support a culture of continuous learning.
We also partner with funders to help them assess the impact of investments in capacity building and inform their approach for future grantmaking. (See an example of our work here.)
Our approach to learning and evaluation prioritizes three core values:
- User-focused: We work closely with you to identify essential stakeholders who will use evaluation tools for learning, decision making, communication, or influence purposes.
- Flexible: We create evaluation plans and tools that you can use and adapt as needed when implementation plans evolve.
- Equitable: We are committed to helping you understand the extent to which your strategies are leading to more equitable outcomes and prioritize equitable evaluation practices in our approach and recommendations. This includes practices like disaggregating data to understand how experiences may differ by race or other aspects of identity, ensuring data collection considers a broad range of perspectives, and considering how the people affected by what is being evaluated have the power to shape and own how evaluation happens.
