Capacity building has long been a way for funders to supplement traditional grants, boost nonprofit effectiveness and help nonprofits become more sustainable. By investing in leadership, technology, systems and other internal infrastructure, funders equip their partners with the tools and expertise to meet their missions more fully. As nonprofits now face federal funding cuts and a shifting regulatory environment, more funders are turning to capacity building to fill the gap traditional grants were never designed to fill.
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations has done essential work naming why this matters — reframing capacity building from a “nice to have” into a strategic imperative. But naming the why is only half the equation. The sector’s harder, more persistent question is how: how do you build capacity in a way that’s sustained rather than sporadic, that reaches the smallest organizations rather than just the ones with a development team to apply for it, and that doesn’t ask nonprofits to prove weakness in order to receive help?
The cycle of scarcity
For decades, the nonprofit sector has been trapped in a narrative of “doing more with less.” We see it every day:
- Funding restricted to programs, leaving operations to wither
- Expertise locked behind consultant fees most budgets can’t absorb
- Technology that promises efficiency but demands a “time tax” that two- to five-person teams simply cannot pay
In Catchafire’s network of nonprofits, 44 percent of nonprofits have three or fewer employees. These aren’t organizations that need slightly better tools. They need a fundamentally different kind of support, one that doesn’t assume a full-time operations staff exists to receive it.
The organizations doing the most essential work often have the least access to sustained, high-level support — and the least room to ask for it.
Even traditional skills-based volunteering, for all its impact, has often functioned as a series of snapshots: time-bound projects that solve an immediate need without necessarily shifting an organization’s long-term trajectory. The result is a persistent gap. The organizations doing the most essential work often have the least access to sustained, high-level support — and the least room to ask for it.
Catchafire has spent years inside that “how” question, working alongside funders who are trying to move from one-off interventions to something more durable. As the largest platform for skills-based volunteering and pro bono nonprofit consultants, Catchafire has helped over 15,000 small nonprofits close critical staffing and skill gaps. By partnering with foundations and corporate funders, we give grantees direct access to talented professionals for everything from quick advice to end-to-end projects in marketing, tech, strategy and HR.
Offering on-demand expertise alongside traditional funding helps nonprofits build lasting capacity, without stretching their budgets, so every grant dollar goes further. Three trends are emerging from that work and underneath all three is a layer we think the field hasn’t fully named yet: infrastructure supporting.
Trend 1: Capacity building is becoming infrastructure, not an initiative
The most consistent thing we’re seeing among funders who’ve stuck with capacity building for multiple years is a shift in language. It stops being described as a “program” and starts being described as “core infrastructure” — something nonprofits can count on year after year, the same way they count on a utility.
That shift shows up in the data. Our long-term partners prove how repeating access transforms capacity building into sustainable impact:
- Moses Taylor Foundation: Surpassed $1 million in donated expertise across 65 local nonprofits. Entering year four, the foundation explicitly moved Catchafire from a pilot to permanent infrastructure.
- Pincus Family Foundation: Evolved from quick operational wins (website updates, grant editing) in year one to deep, structural work (succession planning, compensation frameworks) by year three.
- Archstone Foundation: Connected 218 older-adult service organizations in California to volunteers over 1,000 times since 2021, extending platform access to both grantees and declined applicants.
- Michigan Health Endowment Fund: Uses Catchafire as an open-access resource for any health-focused nonprofit in Michigan — democratizing professional consulting to build a more equitable social sector statewide.
Continuous support — rather than one-off access — is what turns a grant into lasting infrastructure.
Continuous support — rather than one-off access — is what turns a grant into lasting infrastructure. By embedding Catchafire into their long-term strategy, these funders strengthen the broader ecosystem well beyond traditional grant dollars.
Trend 2: Capacity building for breadth and depth
Breadth and depth aren’t competing strategies — they’re both required, often for the same cohort of nonprofits. Many capacity-building initiatives carry budget minimums that inadvertently exclude smaller organizations, on the assumption that budget size is a proxy for readiness or impact. It isn’t. Small-to-mid-sized nonprofits — the leanest teams, the ones GEO would call “the missing middle” — often generate the highest return on this kind of support, precisely because they have the fewest existing resources to fall back on.
That means capacity building has to be designed to flex: wide enough to give every grantee, regardless of budget, access to the same professional infrastructure the region’s largest nonprofits already have; deep enough that a single organization can move from a one-time project to a multi-year engagement without switching platforms or funders. Removing the financial floor is what makes both possible at once.
Trend 3: Trust is the actual bottleneck — not capacity
Here’s the uncomfortable trend underneath the other two: the reason so many organizations stay on the hamster wheel of scarcity isn’t a lack of available support. It’s lack of trust.
There is a pervasive fear among nonprofits that admitting they need help with basic infrastructure — human resources, accounting, technology, translation — will be read by the funder as evidence of mismanagement. That fear keeps nonprofits from asking for the very support that would strengthen them, and it keeps funders locked into program-restricted giving that never touches the operational core.
For organizations like Minnesota’s Clean River Partners, capacity building and technical assistance have been invaluable. “One of the things I most value about Catchafire is that often in the nonprofit world you go seeking help and you instead get advice,” said executive director Jennifer Tonko. “Catchafire doesn’t do that. They actually help while building our skills at the same time.” Clean River Partners has turned to volunteers on Catchafire nearly 40 times for requests that don’t need to go through a program officer.
We trust you to know what you need — here are the tools to fix it on your own terms, without having to ask permission or confess a weakness every time a gap comes up.
When a grantmaker offers a capacity-building platform instead of, or alongside, funding, it sends a different signal entirely: we trust you to know what you need — here are the tools to fix it on your own terms, without having to ask permission or confess a weakness every time a gap comes up. That’s not a minor cultural shift. It’s the mechanism that lets funders and nonprofits finally step off the scarcity cycle together.
The layer that’s still missing from the conversation
GEO’s work has given the field the language for why capacity building matters and what strong practice looks like at the strategy level. What’s still underdeveloped is the infrastructure layer beneath it — the actual, dependable, always-on system that makes capacity building something nonprofits can rely on rather than something they have to reapply for.
At Catchafire, that’s the gap we’ve built our work around: not another one-time intervention, but infrastructure supporting — a layer that sits underneath the grant, available continuously, sized to fit organizations with two staff members and organizations with 200, and structured so that asking for help is never mistaken for admitting failure.
Funders don’t have to choose between funding programs and funding capacity. The nonprofits doing the sector’s most important work need both — and they need the second one to actually last.
Tobi Printz-Platnick is a Partner Consultant with Capacity Partners and a Foundation Consultant with Catchafire. She has spent more than 30 years in the nonprofit sector as a grantmaker, fundraiser, lobbyist, advocate and researcher. She is a sought-after public speaker on topics such as philanthropy and fundraising, has led or served on multiple funding collaboratives and performed extensive grant review for local governments and national foundations.