This publication from Movement Tapestries offers insights and guidance for organizations navigating equity-embedded transformations, and the challenges that can come with embarking on such journeys.
We are a small family foundation funding in Dane County, Wisconsin, interested in collaborating more formally with other Dane County funders to elevate the effectiveness of our nonprofit sector. I am looking for examples of other collaborative efforts, namely place-based funders working together to: identify capacity needs, bring and/or develop learning opportunities for nonprofits, and evaluate capacity gains.
As part of our capacity building program, we would like to provide scholarships for our grantees to attend trainings and conferences (both local and out-of-town) focused on racial equity. From GEO members who do provide scholarships, I'd love to hear more of the details of your program.
We are exploring the possibility of co-funding shared, back-office services for a group of mutual grantees (shared-services is essentially pooling and “outsourcing” administrative functions to alleviate the burden on small-staff and emerging nonprofits).
We’d like to hear from other grantmakers who have successfully funded this type of work for their communities. Specifically, has anyone identified and funded a suite of services like HR or bookkeeping, to build the capacity of their emerging nonprofits? If so, what was your experience like? What did you consider in the evaluation process?
Or, if you’ve developed your own shared-services model as part of your broader capacity building work, how did you go about this?
In your first year of GEO membership, to help you stay informed of the emerging trends and promising practices from the field, we'll point you to GEO's publications, research and peer conversations. Below, find some of GEO’s tools and resources on learning and evaluation. We hope these are helpful as you explore how GEO can support your work.
Hello GEO Members,
The McGregor Fund is interested in hearing from other funders that offer grants (either in addition to programmatic funding, or as stand-alone grants) for grantee evaluation capacity and/or data infrastructure. These grants might support evaluation consultants, or experts in data management or data system acquisition. They might support training to strengthen grantee data collection, evaluation, or performance measurement.
In my scan of GEO archives and the web so far, I have found numerous foundations that fund research, or evaluation of the impact of their funding, and some who fund IT infrastructure, but less that are focused on building grantee capacity to better manage and use their data to inform programmatic and strategic decision-making.
If you know of any funders that do this, or do something similar yourself, I would love to hear from you, and am curious about how these grant opportunities are assessed by staff, and any reflections on the value of these grants.
Over the last 20 years, the GEO community has worked to transform a desire for results into real improvements by creating spaces where grantmakers learn together and use that learning to drive concrete changes in the way grantmaking work gets done. As a field, we've made progress. And, as we continue learning together, our understanding of effective philanthropy evolves.
Allegany Franciscan Ministries is interested in utilizing various methods other than traditional grant-making to support communities in our place-based initiative, such as social impact funds, micro-grants/loans, loans (directly or through a CDFI), payments to for-profit entities and consultants to deliver a service such as community outreach and marketing or leadership development, and others. I am both looking for resources and example, AND looking for someone who can present to my board of directors on June 19 as part of a panel, describing an alternative practice from the lens of a foundation.
Through our research over the past 20 years, Grantmakers for Effective
Organizations has identified a set of grantmaker practices that help
nonprofits achieve better results. Every three years, GEO conducts a
study to help us understand how we are doing as a field, including trends over time as well as new areas of inquiry.
We are interested in obtaining names of entities who could partner with us to identify gaps and opportunities to increase the capacity of our sector to work with their communities and serve their audiences.
