Grantmaking Strategy

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For Grantmakers

Grantmakers have a unique opportunity to partner with nonprofits to address some of today’s most intractable challenges.

As you share your power and resources to drive the change you seek, we roll up our sleeves and work by your side to clarify your bold vision of what’s possible and turn ideas into reality.

We partner with institutional, family, and corporate foundations, as well as other grantmakers and donor collaboratives, on the services listed below. In addition to those services, we have expertise in creating grantmaking strategies, including designing and facilitating collaboratives, coaching leaders and leadership teams, augmenting your team’s capacity, and more. Explore our nonprofit services page to see other ways we can support your nonprofit partners in getting what they need to make progress on their missions.

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Strengthen Nonprofit Capacity

To create a world where everyone can thrive, we need a strong nonprofit sector equipped to address the root causes of inequities. Here’s how we can work together:

  • Capacity-Building Programs: Design, manage, and evaluate capacity-building programs tailored to meet the needs of nonprofits or cohorts; deliver services to strengthen organizations and collaboratives; and provide coaching to strengthen leaders
  • Capacity Assessment: Partner with you and your grantees to create customized assessment tools that illuminate organizational strengths and challenges and inform how you invest in capacity building

“As our team was just getting started in exploring how to approach our work in nonprofit support, Community Wealth Partners was instrumental in providing us with their capacity building and systems change expertise, so we could think more broadly about our role and potential impact.”

— Jim Boyle, Vice President of Programs and Communications, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation

“Our grantees all have different needs and time available to devote to capacity building. Community Wealth Partners understood that. They led a robust process to understand what our grantees needed, and then co-designed a capacity building program that meets those needs in the ways grantees want."

— Neesha B. Modi, Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

“The Casey Foundation believes that our success very much depends upon the strength of our grantees, so we feel enormously grateful to Community Wealth Partners for rolling up their sleeves, getting in the trenches, and doing the hard work necessary to build the capacity of our grantees and partners.”

— Bonnie Howard, Director of National Partnerships, Annie E. Casey Foundation

QUESTIONS?

Connect directly with one of our team members.

Idalia Fernandez Senior Director
REACH OUT TO IDALIA
Carla Taylor Vice President
REACH OUT TO CARLA
Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY

Set Strategy & Make It Happen

Achieving big, lasting change requires a bold vision coupled with concrete plans to make it happen. We partner with grantmakers and collaboratives to help them dream big and turn those dreams into reality. Here’s what we can do together to create a grantmaking strategy:

    • Landscape Analysis: Understand the landscape in which you operate and where you can uniquely contribute to systemic change
    • Organizational Strategy, Collaborative Strategy, and Theory of Change: Determine your desired outcomes and grantmaking strategies that drive toward those outcomes and engage stakeholders in shaping your strategy
    • Program Strategy and Management: Design, launch, and manage high-impact programs
    • Implementation Planning: Identify and align on key decisions, needed resources, and clear action plans so you know what to do in the coming days, months, and years to bring your strategy to life
    • Additional Capacity: When you have more work than time, we serve as an extension of your team to turn strategies into reality and launch and manage programs within your timeframe and budget
Related Case Studies

“Community Wealth Partners is a trusted partner that I’ve turned to for support on everything from storytelling and strategic planning to executive consulting and meeting facilitation. They have a unique ability to listen and really understand an organization’s vision—even when there are many different stakeholders involved. They are masters at streamlining processes, building consensus, and translating amorphous ideas into the tools that organizations need to achieve their goals. Their expertise helped me bring together the stakeholders I work with and crystalize their strategies and goals so that we could ultimately develop a path forward that would drive sustainable improvements in community health across the country.”

— Emily Yu, Executive Director, BUILD Health Challenge

“Community Wealth Partners helped us think through ways to make our program strategies stronger. We're constantly learning and improving how we support grantees and contribute to the change they're making. Community Wealth Partners provides coaching and expertise in thinking boldly and practically about strategies that will contribute to change that lasts."

— Neesha B. Modi, Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

QUESTIONS?

Connect directly with one of our team members.

Amy Farley Senior Director
REACH OUT TO AMY
Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY

Strengthen Culture & Navigate Change

Our research shows the importance of intentionally shaping organizational culture to achieve the impact you desire. While building culture and navigating change inside organizations can sometimes feel ambiguous, we bring focus and clarity to the process with a methodology and a team that provides empathy and support through coaching. Here’s how we can work together:

    • Culture Change: Take a close look at your values, systems, and processes, and work with leaders and leadership teams to align behaviors with the results you seek
    • Change Management for Organizations and Collaboratives: Gain clarity on how your needs are shifting as you respond to external changes and as your organization or collaborative matures; understand your strengths and challenges, and then build the capacities and operating systems you need to adapt and evolve; and work with leaders and leadership teams to navigate changes and drive toward the results you seek
    • Coaching: Coach leaders and leadership teams as they navigate change
Related Case Studies

“Our relationship with Community Wealth Partners is longstanding—they are our go-to partner for organizational effectiveness. They bring deep expertise, talented staff, a disciplined process that moves organizations where they need to be, and a commitment to equity and inclusion as critical in any organizational improvement effort. The more our staff and grantees work with Community Wealth Partners, the more they want to work with Community Wealth Partners.”

— Bonnie Howard, Director of National Partnerships, Annie E. Casey Foundation

“We’re a different organization today than we were two years ago thanks to our culture work with Community Wealth Partners. We’re now better positioned to retain talent, and our external partners have noted a change in how the foundation engages with the community.”

— Paul J. Luna, President & CEO, Helios Education Foundation

QUESTIONS?

Connect directly with one of our team members.

Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY
Idalia Fernandez Senior Director
REACH OUT TO IDALIA

Learn & Evaluate

Driven by our value to “listen and learn,” we partner with you to listen deeply, learn, experiment, and shift direction as needed to keep you on track to achieve your goals. Here’s how we can work together:

  • Learning: Create a learning agenda; change processes, structures, and behaviors to help you implement the agenda and integrate learning and evaluation into your day-to-day work; and ensure your team has the necessary knowledge and skills to maintain a learning culture so you can better understand your impact and continually learn what works
  • Evaluation: Conduct developmental and summative evaluations, collecting and analyzing data to adapt your strategies and programs to have greater impact and bringing expertise in areas such as evaluating capacity-building programs

“We asked Community Wealth Partners to take a risk with us to determine a better methodology to assess impact aligned with the mission and structure of our large and diverse community foundation. Neither we nor they knew where this journey would take us, but they never hesitated and even reveled in the risk. We are now discovering insights, outcomes, and frames of thinking that we might never have found without the openness, creative instincts, and design capabilities that Community Wealth Partners brought to this project and to us.”

— Steve Seleznow, President & CEO, Arizona Community Foundation

QUESTIONS?

Connect directly with one of our team members.

Carla Taylor Vice President
REACH OUT TO CARLA
Strengthen Nonprofit Capacity
Set Strategy & Make It Happen
Strengthen Culture & Navigate Change
Learn & Evaluate

Strengthen Nonprofit Capacity

To create a world where everyone can thrive, we need a strong nonprofit sector equipped to address the root causes of inequities. Here’s how we can work together:

  • Capacity-Building Programs: Design, manage, and evaluate capacity-building programs tailored to meet the needs of nonprofits or cohorts; deliver services to strengthen organizations and collaboratives; and provide coaching to strengthen leaders
  • Capacity Assessment: Partner with you and your grantees to create customized assessment tools that illuminate organizational strengths and challenges and inform how you invest in capacity building

“As our team was just getting started in exploring how to approach our work in nonprofit support, Community Wealth Partners was instrumental in providing us with their capacity building and systems change expertise, so we could think more broadly about our role and potential impact.”

— Jim Boyle, Vice President of Programs and Communications, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation

“Our grantees all have different needs and time available to devote to capacity building. Community Wealth Partners understood that. They led a robust process to understand what our grantees needed, and then co-designed a capacity building program that meets those needs in the ways grantees want."

— Neesha B. Modi, Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

“The Casey Foundation believes that our success very much depends upon the strength of our grantees, so we feel enormously grateful to Community Wealth Partners for rolling up their sleeves, getting in the trenches, and doing the hard work necessary to build the capacity of our grantees and partners.”

— Bonnie Howard, Director of National Partnerships, Annie E. Casey Foundation

QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS

Idalia Fernandez Senior Director
REACH OUT TO IDALIA
Carla Taylor Vice President
REACH OUT TO CARLA
Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY

Set Strategy & Make It Happen

Achieving big, lasting change requires a bold vision coupled with concrete plans to make it happen. We partner with grantmakers and collaboratives to help them dream big and turn those dreams into reality. Here’s what we can do together to create a grantmaking strategy:

    • Landscape Analysis: Understand the landscape in which you operate and where you can uniquely contribute to systemic change
    • Organizational Strategy, Collaborative Strategy, and Theory of Change: Determine your desired outcomes and grantmaking strategies that drive toward those outcomes and engage stakeholders in shaping your strategy
    • Program Strategy and Management: Design, launch, and manage high-impact programs
    • Implementation Planning: Identify and align on key decisions, needed resources, and clear action plans so you know what to do in the coming days, months, and years to bring your strategy to life
    • Additional Capacity: When you have more work than time, we serve as an extension of your team to turn strategies into reality and launch and manage programs within your timeframe and budget

“Community Wealth Partners is a trusted partner that I’ve turned to for support on everything from storytelling and strategic planning to executive consulting and meeting facilitation. They have a unique ability to listen and really understand an organization’s vision—even when there are many different stakeholders involved. They are masters at streamlining processes, building consensus, and translating amorphous ideas into the tools that organizations need to achieve their goals. Their expertise helped me bring together the stakeholders I work with and crystalize their strategies and goals so that we could ultimately develop a path forward that would drive sustainable improvements in community health across the country.”

— Emily Yu, Executive Director, BUILD Health Challenge

“Community Wealth Partners helped us think through ways to make our program strategies stronger. We're constantly learning and improving how we support grantees and contribute to the change they're making. Community Wealth Partners provides coaching and expertise in thinking boldly and practically about strategies that will contribute to change that lasts."

— Neesha B. Modi, Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS

Amy Farley Senior Director
REACH OUT TO AMY
Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY

Strengthen Culture & Navigate Change

Our research shows the importance of intentionally shaping organizational culture to achieve the impact you desire. While building culture and navigating change inside organizations can sometimes feel ambiguous, we bring focus and clarity to the process with a methodology and a team that provides empathy and support through coaching. Here’s how we can work together:

    • Culture Change: Take a close look at your values, systems, and processes, and work with leaders and leadership teams to align behaviors with the results you seek
    • Change Management for Organizations and Collaboratives: Gain clarity on how your needs are shifting as you respond to external changes and as your organization or collaborative matures; understand your strengths and challenges, and then build the capacities and operating systems you need to adapt and evolve; and work with leaders and leadership teams to navigate changes and drive toward the results you seek
    • Coaching: Coach leaders and leadership teams as they navigate change

“Our relationship with Community Wealth Partners is longstanding—they are our go-to partner for organizational effectiveness. They bring deep expertise, talented staff, a disciplined process that moves organizations where they need to be, and a commitment to equity and inclusion as critical in any organizational improvement effort. The more our staff and grantees work with Community Wealth Partners, the more they want to work with Community Wealth Partners.”

— Bonnie Howard, Director of National Partnerships, Annie E. Casey Foundation

“We’re a different organization today than we were two years ago thanks to our culture work with Community Wealth Partners. We’re now better positioned to retain talent, and our external partners have noted a change in how the foundation engages with the community.”

— Paul J. Luna, President & CEO, Helios Education Foundation

QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS

Amy Celep CEO
REACH OUT TO AMY
Idalia Fernandez Senior Director
REACH OUT TO IDALIA

Learn & Evaluate

Driven by our value to “listen and learn,” we partner with you to listen deeply, learn, experiment, and shift direction as needed to keep you on track to achieve your goals. Here’s how we can work together:

  • Learning: Create a learning agenda; change processes, structures, and behaviors to help you implement the agenda and integrate learning and evaluation into your day-to-day work; and ensure your team has the necessary knowledge and skills to maintain a learning culture so you can better understand your impact and continually learn what works
  • Evaluation: Conduct developmental and summative evaluations, collecting and analyzing data to adapt your strategies and programs to have greater impact and bringing expertise in areas such as evaluating capacity-building programs

“We asked Community Wealth Partners to take a risk with us to determine a better methodology to assess impact aligned with the mission and structure of our large and diverse community foundation. Neither we nor they knew where this journey would take us, but they never hesitated and even reveled in the risk. We are now discovering insights, outcomes, and frames of thinking that we might never have found without the openness, creative instincts, and design capabilities that Community Wealth Partners brought to this project and to us.”

— Steve Seleznow, President & CEO, Arizona Community Foundation

QUESTIONS? CONNECT DIRECTLY WITH ONE OF OUR TEAM MEMBERS

Carla Taylor Vice President
REACH OUT TO CARLA