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The Silicon Valley Out-of-School-Time Collaborative invested in a cohort of regional nonprofit organizations to sustain and strengthen their ability to serve more students with stronger academic and social-emotional programming. Partners in the collaborative included three family foundations that together made an initial $1.6 million pooled investment over three years, and eight nonprofits that collectively served more than 7,000 low-income middle and high school students outside normal school hours. From the start of the partnership, funders and grantees held regular meetings focused on shared learning, trust building and dialogue. A midcourse evaluation of the collaborative showed that grantees were stronger, programs were better and are reaching more students, and funders had adopted new, collaborative grantmaking practices. The funders invested another $900,000 into a second phase of the work and committed to more flexibility –– letting grantees drive the group’s planning and learning efforts, and manage consultants, budgeting and group communications. Grantees also opted to redirect the focus of the collaborative from capacity building to program development and evaluation, with the added goal of sharing effective afterschool and summer program models with others, both inside and outside the region.
A new nonpartisan resource, Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy, provides data about foundations and their democracy-related grantmaking in a structured, contextualized, and visual format. Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy was created through a partnership of eight funders in the field, including the Rita Allen Foundation, and is being developed by the Foundation Center.
The tool allows funders, nonprofits and other interested parties to sift through data on the $1.7 billion (and counting) granted by foundations to strengthen civic engagement in the United States since 2011. For the first time, we have an open tool for visualizing who gave how much to whom for what. While the tool and the data will continue to develop, it already gives a tremendously useful view of opportunities for greater partnerships and knowledge in the field—both for funders and for the organizations, small and large, established and emerging, working to strengthen our democracy. As Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation, another of the project partners, writes in a post introducing the tool: “As useful as this data set and visualization will be for foundations already working in the field or new funders considering entering it, the real killer app for this work will be to help grant seekers.”