There is overwhelming evidence that general operating support grants can have significant impact on nonprofits and communities. This guide provides an introduction for trustees and boards on general operating support grants. Foundation leaders can use this piece as a way to broach this topic and have candid conversations with their boards.
GEO frequently hears that grantmakers, no matter their role, want to make meaningful changes in how they operate in order to make progress on the issues that matter most to them. The most recent GEO member surveys show that nearly two-thirds of members are involved in some kind of change effort, driven by a desire to better serve the nonprofits and the communities they support. Determining exactly how to lead, implement and sustain that change can be tricky. Grantmakers understand that thoughtful and intentional efforts — a process, a plan, a team-oriented approach — are necessary to make real change.
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.
This piece is written to help foundation trustees navigate their own role in relationship to learning and evaluation and to explore how boards can help build a culture that embraces learning.
This is a publication about microcultures in philanthropy — small groups of people in our organizations with their own assumptions, values and working behaviors. These groups significantly shape the underlying character of our organizations.
In recent years there has been an increased call for more collaboration in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. The problems that we seek to address are large and complex, and a go-it-alone mentality will not result in meaningful impact.
Every organization experiences moments when it has opportunities to tend its culture and to cultivate a more productive one — a culture in which staff and trustees are performing at their best and it is doing everything it can to make sure nonprofits are resilient, successful and strong. Paying attention to culture doesn’t have to happen only at huge, earthshattering moments in the life of an organization or its operating environment.
By supporting organizations to strengthen their leadership and improve the ability of their staff and board members to perform at their best, philanthropy can help ensure that nonprofits have what they need to deliver on their missions over the long haul.
Looking inward and ensuring that an organization has the right elements in place to be a good partner and collaborator is necessary even though the tactics of how to collaborate vary depending on who an organization may work with or on the size, type and formality of the effort.
The discussion starter can be used to delve into questions that are often challenging to raise and to surface issues that may be invisible.
Philanthropy evolves slowly, despite (or maybe because of) very few external constraints or imperatives. Historically, good stewardship of philanthropic resources has focused on preserving capital and growing assets for the benefit of future generations. But given the complex, evolving nature of challenges like poverty and climate change, as well as what we have learned about how best to support nonprofit success and community impact, we must shift our conception of good stewardship in order to make significant progress in solving large-scale problems.
Collaborations — groups of grantmakers, nonprofits and other stakeholders aligning around a shared vision and targeting resources and activities in support of that vision — require partners to play various roles to be successful. Once grantmakers make the decision to work together, the next step is to consider what role(s) we play in the collaboration. This piece outlines a variety of roles grantmakers can play in collaboratives and offers tips for identifying the right role(s) for each organization.