Foundation Strategy: Your thought partner and team member
I think of strategic philanthropy as a diversified and values-driven approach to seemingly intractable problems that balances the discipline of long-term goals with experimentation, nimble learning, adaptation, and risk tolerance. The complete foundation toolkit includes grants of different types, multi-sector approaches, impact investing, transparency and stakeholder engagement, strategic communications, research, and other tools for achieving mission impact. Breakthroughs come from challenging weakly supported assumptions, questioning customary approaches, examining implementation failures, mapping gaps and systems, supporting change-makers, and listening to authentic and quiet voices. An effective strategy is aligned to your foundation’s unique resources, values, and expertise and is clear and precise enough to guide decisions.
How we might work together:
1.
Foundation or Program Strategy Review
Guide and support leadership and staff to develop high-impact strategies using the full foundation toolkit from grantmaking to communications.
2.
Blank-slate Strategy Development
Work from a blank slate with benefactors to shape a new foundation's emergent identity, values, and mission.
3.
Program Research and Analysis
Work with staff to research program issues and develop a strategic analysis of potential partners, grantees, influencers, beneficiaries, and levers for change.
An actionable strategy places your foundation in a clear and meaningful position relative to stakeholders, other funders, and the ultimate beneficiaries of your work.
Portfolio Innovation: Seeking Synergy and Systems Change
How we might work together:
1.
Do your grants reflect strategy?
Guide and support leadership and staff to develop high-impact strategies using the full foundation toolkit from grantmaking to communications.
2.
Innovation Scan
Convene and analyze discussions among staff, grantees, and other field experts to generate and assess innovation in the field and the foundation portfolio to recommend “portfolio rebalancing” and design measures of success.
3.
Program Research
What does your team mean when you say "innovation" and are you sure you'll know it when you see it? We'll work with staff, research, and interview external stakeholders to map innovations that might transform your program fields and impact for your mission.
A grant portfolio that is deliberately diversified in multiple dimensions can accelerate your learning and the impact of your investments.
Responsive Grantmaking: Equity and Impact Takes Listening
We believe that people support that which they help to create. Foundations are one step removed from the ultimate beneficiaries of their grantees. Therefore, foundation teams must work hard to understand the populations that they ultimately serve. Foundations must assess how closely their grantees provide locally appropriate solutions that are equitable and that may be sustained in the long term. Grantmaking that is responsive to grantee and beneficiary needs is a mindset, practice, and process that can be applied along the entire axis of grantmaking from RFPs through proposals, interactive application processes, project assessment, adaptive implementation, and ongoing evaluation.
How we might work together:
1.
Benchmarking Your Practices
Review current foundation practices and compare them to inventories of responsive methods and tools in consultation with staff and grantees to generate a matrix of actions for greater engagement and stakeholder voice.
2.
Responsiveness in Your Community
Survey grantees and partners regarding what responsiveness means to them. Facilitate conversations to map new pathways for grantee input to shape program design,
3.
Thinking Outside the Box
What would innovation in grantmaking look like to you? Explore and analyze new ways to increase transparency, engagement, and responsiveness in a way that shifts power while preserving strategic aims and intent
Closing gaps in information, understanding, power, and participation among Board, staff, grantees, and beneficiaries promises a new, more equitable, and just philanthropy.