Resources

I am writing today to see if you have guidance at your foundation for program staff about working well with grantees that you could share with us. We are embarking on a cross-foundation effort to create guidance for program staff on many dimensions doing excellent work with grantees. This might include guidance for how to engage grantees (i.e, communications, responsiveness, site visits, frequency of contact) or guidance on what to cover (i.e., how success will be measured, the role of and plans for evaluation, full/true costs of grantees’ work, D/E/I topics, and so forth).

For those of you who have been through foundation strategy shifts, I am wondering what you have learned about communicating with grantees and non-grantees throughout the process? What worked well, and what did not seem to go so well?

Our foundation is interested in creating a grant opportunity for local faith communities to apply to support the creation or ongoing support of an existing program. If your foundation has this type of opportunity, I’d be interested in your grant criteria, etc.

As the professional fall gets underway, I write with a question about payment of peer reviewers. We are currently examining our practices, and I am curious if there is an implicit consensus about compensation for reading and evaluating grant applications among funders.

I am interested in any frameworks or tools, best practices or top three tips for doing focus groups well while respecting the community's time.

I am exploring the idea of funding quality improvement collaboratives that focus on maternal care and infant health up to one year of age. I’m tossing around some ideas in my head but I would love to learn from others who have done something similar in a rural context. What were some of the lessons learned? How was the funding opportunity structured given some of the constraints in terms of providers, geographic variations and organizations?

Do you know of any examples or best practices on how to serve grantee cohorts and grantees when they speak different languages? Democracy Fund is part of a state funder collaborative in North Carolina that will support a cohort of local news and information nonprofits through grants, and probably will have at least one organization that has leaders that speak primarily Spanish. We also are hoping to support some convenings, as well as other types of resources such as informal mentorships, readings, etc. We hope to continue to make this funder collaborative’s offerings, as well as other work we do beyond NC, more accessible to organizations that have staff and leaders that speak languages other than English. We started by making this collaborative’s application and guidelines available in Spanish, and provided an interpreter for conversations during the application process, but know that we could do more. Thanks for any thoughts, ideas, feedback or links!

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.

Christina Canales Gorczynski highlighted the Simmons Foundation's work to address the power dynamics inherent in philanthropy and how the foundation identified avenues for communities to drive and direct change.

Organizations seeking to support authentic change on complex, multi-layered issues often find that listening to and being in relationship with impacted communities is central to the work.