Resources

What strategies have your organizations developed that help leaders and donors to empathize?

To guide us in the formulation of a proactive grants program, we are seeking information on guidelines and procedures of other foundations for proactive grants, especially from foundations that have both responsive and proactive grants programs.

The urgency and complexity of the problems nonprofits and grantmakers are trying to solve demands that we come together to exchange knowledge and insights from our work and combine resources. Convenings are powerful vehicles for amassing shared knowledge, building trusting relationships and laying the groundwork for collective action. And, grantmakers are well positioned to provide the types of support to catalyze, develop and sustain these efforts.

Many grantmakers agree that an increased focus on evaluation and learning can help us tease out insights on our true impact and how we can continue to do better. However, despite significant investments in evaluation in recent years, philanthropy continues to struggle to measure its work.

Is your organization currently engaged in or thinking about becoming involved in collective impact? For those who are currently immersed in this work, what are you doing? How can GEO be a resource and/or a resource connector as you engage in this work?

We are looking to develop a set of criteria for evaluating proposals that request funding to support litigation. If your foundation has a set of criteria you use for such a purpose, we would really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us and learning from you.

Many grantmakers are recognizing that in order to ensure better results, we need to tap into the knowledge experience and energy of key stakeholders — nonprofits, community members, other funders, thought leaders.

Grantmakers of all kinds care about tangible progress on tough problems, but we also seek harder-to-measure results. Networks for social change can help on both of these fronts, building new capacity for making progress on complex problems and achieving significant measurable results. Tapping into network connections is becoming the norm for social change makers, whether we’re mapping influential relationships for an advocacy campaign, coordinating a protest to fight climate change or spreading an approach to community engagement

A priority for grantmakers and our grantees is to create a space to reflect and learn so that our organizations can become more relevant, and more effective in achieving our goals. Learning, and evaluation, that is specifically focused on improvement provides grantmakers and grantees with the information and the perspective we need to better understand both how we’re doing in our work and how to get better results.

Grantmaker focused on education for Jewish young people embraces multiyear grants, funder collaboration as priorities.