Support Nonprofit Resilience
Grantmakers enable nonprofits to focus on long-term mission fulfillment by providing support that is flexible, reliable and enables grantees to build critical skills. Whether it’s supporting the development of strong nonprofit leaders, helping grantees to build and maintain their capacity or providing the kinds of support that contribute to strong and effective nonprofits, grantmakers can play a key role is supporting the financial resilience and sustainability of their grantees.
To help grantmakers support nonprofit resilience, GEO has compiled answers to some of the most common questions about financial sustainability, capacity building and leadership development. If you would like to propose a new question related to this topic, please contact Amy Shields.
Leadership Development
A nonprofit organization’s resiliency and capacity to navigate change successfully depends largely on its people. Ask any grantmaker about the distinguishing characteristics of strong and effective nonprofit organizations, and the conversation inevitably will turn to leadership. But too often nonprofits lack sufficient time and resources to make their talent and leadership needs a high priority, which ultimately hinders impact. Many grantmakers are making leadership development investments as a means of strengthening nonprofit performance
- What makes for a successful leadership development approach?
- How can we target our leadership development support?
- What is collective leadership and how can grantmakers support it?
- What is coaching and what are the benefits?
- Where can we go to dig deeper on leadership development?
- What do nonprofits need to make leadership development a priority?
- Who is building leadership well?
Capacity Building
Nonprofits need certain core capacities in order to deliver results — strong leaders, financial management, performance measurement and technology, as well as softer things like communications, adaptability and relationships. These needs will also change over time as organizations evolve. Grantmakers can play a key role in helping nonprofits build and maintain their core infrastructure and other capacities.
- What is nonprofit capacity and why does it matter?
- What are three principles for building nonprofit capacity?
- How can we support capacity-building efforts?
- How will we know if our capacity-building support is working?
- What are the key things we need to know about organizational assessments?
- Where can we go to dig deeper on nonprofit capacity building?
- Who is successfully building nonprofit capacity?
Financial Sustainability
The size of many grants, and the strings attached to them, often don’t align with the results grantmakers seek. With GEO’s support, grantmakers are embracing approaches that fuel nonprofit success — such as providing general operating support, multiyear grants, larger average grants and support for leadership development and other forms of capacity building, as well as releasing restrictions on grants and caps on overhead.
- What financial challenges do nonprofits face?
- How can we be more supportive of nonprofit financial sustainability?
- What is general operating support and why is it important?
- How can we evaluate the impact of our general operating support grants?
- How do we know if a grantee is a good candidate for general operating support?
- How can we grow impact?
- What does it take to spend down successfully?
- Where can we go to dig deeper on nonprofit financial sustainability?
- Who is supporting nonprofit financial sustainability?
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