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California and the American South have much in common. They’re both economic powerhouses. They’re both engines of culture, literature and film. And they’re both dynamos of resistance, from the mayor of Oakland’s recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid warning, to today’s Southern youth pioneering movements like their forebears did half a century ago.

Yet philanthropy has built few bridges between these two regions. This gulf constrains our country’s progress. That’s why, as part of our As the South Grows initiative, NCRP, Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) and Solutions Project hosted two “South Meets West” funder briefings last month in California.

The first event took place with Northern California Grantmakers in San Francisco at the James Irvine Foundation.

Attendees at the “South Meets West” funder event in San Francisco.

The second took place in downtown Los Angeles.

Southern leaders Stephanie Guilloud, Dr. Jenny Stephens and Peter Hille present at the "South Meets West" even in Los Angeles.

California-based community foundations, private foundations, rapid response funds and individual donors met with Southern foundations, nonprofit leaders and community organizers from across the South.  

Attendees at the San Francisco "South Meets West" event.

Tyler Nickerson kicked things off by sharing why, as a progressive funder, Solutions Project believes in funding the grassroots in both regions.

Tyler Nickerson of Solutions Project at the San Francisco "South Meets West" event.

NCRP Vice President and Chief Engagement Officer Jeanné Isler and GSP Co-Chair and Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation Program Director Lavastian Glenn shared highlights from NCRP and GSP’s As the South Grows series.

Organizing, advocacy and civic engagement (per capita grantmaking, 2010-2014).

 

Southern leaders shared how the road to national progress runs through the South. They included Stephanie Guilloud from Project South in Atlanta, Dr. Jennie Stephens from the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation in South Carolina and Peter Hille from the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Kentucky (all NCRP nonprofit members).

Peter Hille, Stephanie Guilloud and Dr. Jennie Stephens at the San Francisco "South Meets West" event.

We strategized together and told stories together.

Attendees at the "South Meets West" event in San Francisco.

We even went to happy hour together. 

People left with commitments to move money, make phone calls and visit the South in person.

Attendees at the "South Meets West" event in San Francisco.

And we left inspired with what can happen when the South and California partner together. 

Attendees at the "South Meets West" even in Los Angeles.

These events were a first step. True change in the philanthropic relationship between the South and California will take long-term relationships, as well as a willingness to risk our comfort with the status quo. Here at NCRP, we’re excited to roll up our sleeves.

To learn how you can get involved with NCRP, GSP and As the South Grows, contact Ben Barge at bbarge@ncrp.org and Tamieka Mosley at tmosley@southerneducation.org.

Ben Barge is senior associate for learning and engagement at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

This year’s drought, hurricanes and other extreme climate and weather events have been devastating, and many experts predict that they will become the new normal as a result of climate change.

Unfortunately, foundations and other donors have not stepped up to support communities working to alleviate the impacts of climate change. This is particularly important in the South, which has emerged as ground zero for the effects of climate change.

Our newest As the South Grows report, “As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm,” includes three Do’s and three Don’ts to help foundations and wealthy donors invest in climate resilience effectively and sustainably.

Do's and Don'ts

“Weathering the Storm” is the third report in the five-part As the South Grows series. The fourth report will be released in February.

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We hope “As the South Grows” inspires you to look at the South as an important opportunity for deeper engagement, investment and partnerships.

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Read the first two reports in the As the South Grows series:

Is your foundation investing in a diversity of assets across the communities it serves? Does your organization struggle to get funding because of perceived capacity restraints?

In our first As the South Grows report, “As the South Grows: On Fertile Soil,” NCRP and Grantmakers for Southern Progress revealed five key Do’s and five key Don’ts for how foundations and donors can invest in existing capacity to build power in the communities they serve.

The second and latest As the South Grows report, “As the South Grows: Strong Roots” unveiled three additional Do’s and three additional Don’ts to help foundations and donors build wealth in local economies.

DOs and DONTs
We hope the As the South Grows series inspires you to take a serious look at investing in wealth- and power-building in Southern communities.

The recent widespread rallying behind the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) along with actress Shailene Woodley’s arrest at the pipeline site has brought a lot new attention to an issue that Indigenous people have been struggling with for generations. The fight to preserve tribal sovereignty and sacred sites has long been at the forefront for Native issues.

The U.S. federal government has obligations to protect tribal lands and resources and to protect tribal rights to self-govern. The U.S. first attempted to terminate reservations in 1946 when Congress set up the Indian Claims Commission to hear Indian claims for any lands stolen from them since the creation of the USA in 1776. The commission’s intention was to “get out of the Indian business” by providing only financial compensation instead of the return of land.

The protection of sacred sites is closely tied to treaty rights and sovereignty. In the past, the government has actively discouraged, and even outlawed, the exercise of traditional Indian ceremonies and practices on their own tribal land. To assume that the land is separate from the cultures erases the long-standing history of how these sites are an intrinsic part of continued practices and beliefs.

As an article by Cultural Survival points out, “Most of the disputes between traditional Indian religious practitioners and federal and state governments were resolved in favor of the government – with a resulting impact upon the ability of practitioner to utilize these sacred sites. For example, cases were decided which permitted the following activities to take place: Development of a ski area on the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, sacred to the Hopi and Navajos; Construction of viewing platforms, parking lots, trails and roads at Bear Butte in South Dakota, sacred to many Plains Indians; and Flooding of sacred Cherokee sites by the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Even today, there are struggles Native American communities are facing that are similar to Standing Rock. Bear Butte in Sturgis, South Dakota, is being threatened by encroaching bars and campgrounds. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Black Hills is a well-known struggle and more recently, the tribe has been trying to assert their treaty rights to oppose the transfer of the Black Hills to the state of South Dakota.

In Utah, leaders from five tribes founded the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, representing a historic consortium of sovereign tribal nations united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears buttes cultural landscape, asking Obama to designate the site as a U.S. Presidential National Monument.

After Native American youth first sparked the push back against the DAPL, the Sacred Stone camp at the site of the pipeline has now seen the largest gathering of Native Americans and tribal representatives in more than a hundred years. The camp has been a display of unity and solidarity in Native nations, showing the world the resiliency and endurance of Native Americans, all recognizing that this fight is not just for the local tribes. Choosing to identify themselves as “protectors” instead of “protesters,” those at the frontline are looking at the bigger picture by fighting for a healthier environment for everyone.

With many allies and supporters asking “how can we help?,” Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP), in partnership with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is extending an opportunity for those wanting to make meaningful, long-term investments that will extend past the national spotlight of the protest. A funder tour from October 19-21 is showing the work happening on the ground for the tribe and ways in which they’re looking for help in their priority areas of youth, environmental justice and health.

how-we-strengthened-meet-the-funders-events-to-help-under-resourced-grant-applicantsSarah Eagle Heart is CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP), a nonprofit promoting equitable and effective philanthropy to achieve a vision of healthy and sustainable Native communities. NAP members include Native and non-Native philanthropy, tribal programs, Native nonprofits and national networks, all dedicated to collectively improving equity and well-being for Native peoples across the United States. Follow them on Twitter @NativeGiving.

Photo courtesy of Native Americans in Philanthropy.

In 2014, this email from a grant applicant hit our inboxes:

“Your organization is really not treating people with respect. This is the second time I was told that there would be a delay in your organization’s decision. There were so many excuses such as staff changes, your organization’s uncertainty about my project, and hence the requirement for an external audit.

“Yes, the deadline has been missed and even if there’s a grant now, it is too late. I am disappointed not about not getting the grant, but how you treat others.”

She was right. And worse, she was likely speaking for many applicants before her who did not have the guts to be honest with us about our process.

In our hands was the ability for this woman’s project to be green-lighted or not, and we blew it. But what could we have done differently with a new-ish organization still building its infrastructure, too few staff, not enough time, an influx of applications and a complex process to juggle?

We looked to other foundations to learn how they managed applicants – and we were surprised to learn most foundations just don’t bother. In 2011, Foundation Center noted that 60 percent of the largest foundations in the U.S. do not accept unsolicited applications. Last year, Pablo Eisenberg shared in this commentary on Huffington Post that the numbers have gone up to 72 percent, leaving a considerable amount of foundation funding virtually inaccessible to the large majority of social change efforts.

This lack of access disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color and marginalized groups who are less likely to be in relationships with funders. (Read Vu Le’s brilliant Nonprofit with Balls commentary on this.)

Many foundations that DO accept unsolicited applications often design their systems for their own benefit, not for the benefit of their applicants (with many inspiring exceptions). Applicants frequently receive an automated “Don’t call us we’ll call you” message right after submitting their application and then … they wait.

After an opaque screening process, the majority of applicants might get a form letter rejection with no explanations, no encouragement and no other resources to support them in achieving a future grant.

Many a great social change dream has died at the desk of an unresponsive, un-encouraging funder. Social innovators quickly realize foundation fundraising will suck up all the time they would prefer to use to actually change the world, versus burning themselves out with the agony of impersonal rejections and pounding on closed doors.

As funders, the social sector is counting on us. Our applicants (and potential applicants) are visionaries, optimists, innovators and dreamers. They give voice to new solutions, risky ventures, untested ideas and vulnerably share their project plans with us, leaving their future in our hands for further judgment. And for the most part, we basically blow them off.

What if we took our jobs as not just grantmakers, but as application reviewers and, ultimately, “grant rejectors” to heart? The vast majority of groups who apply for foundation funding will not receive any funding at all, and the selection rate for the largest foundations can be miniscule. The Pollination Project, in contrast, hovers around 15 percent. What if we built our application systems with the needs of grantseekers in mind?

Back when we received “the email that changed everything,” we started asking our applicants what they wanted from our process. The majority said “transparency.” They wanted to know what the timeline was for making a decision, and if they didn’t get funding, why not.

Our little team (three full-time staff who, among many other things, handle nearly 3,000 applications and 500 grants every year) set out to re-engineer our application process around what applicants asked for, not what was most convenient.

This led to our Applicant Bill of Rights, a guiding document that challenges us to interact with applicants in a way that is aligned with the kind of just, generous, compassionate world we want to create.

As it turns out, creating transparent, applicant-friendly systems was easier than we thought. About half of the challenge is clearly communicating your guidelines, and the other half can be answered by a really good database that talks to your application system and reports back to applicants at regular intervals. Everything else is just a question of policy making funding accessible within an open application process. (Read more about The Pollination’s Project’s application workflow.)

Among the many upsides of a responsive, transparent and open application process is giving organized social change efforts a place to tell their story and to be acknowledged whether they get funding or not. Sometimes this is all that is needed for a project to be successful.

Not long ago, and thousands of applications after “the letter that changed everything,” we received this email from another applicant:

“Recently, I submitted a grant application. I learned last week that I wasn’t selected to receive the grant. I’m writing to tell you that you made the right decision! I actually don’t need the grant!”

The applicant went on to share all the ways her organization is raising money and all the successes they have started racking up without our funding.

She closed: “Thank you for helping people to dream. When I first thought of creating this project, I did so thinking I had a good shot at a grant from you. With that belief in the front of my mind, I got to work. So in a weird way, you helped me get started.”

What if our impact was measured not just in the grants we make, but in the grants we don’t make? Funders: It is our job to leave our applicants feeling respected, acknowledged and cared for, whether or not we fund their projects.

Alissa Hauser is the executive director of The Pollination Project. Follow @Pollinationproj on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman’s keynote speech to the 2016 Central Minnesota Nonprofit Summit, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits on May 5, 2016. Read the entire speech here.

In the short time we have together this morning, I promise you two things. My first promise is that you’re going to get mad, maybe even really mad, about how, in spite of the noble efforts of many, there is still a chronic under-investment in rural communities by the vast majority of our nation’s grantmaking foundations. My second promise is that I’ll suggest a handful of ideas about how we can all help turn around this terrible situation.

It’s no secret that outside America’s cities people are faring worse than their urban counterparts. Rural Americans are more likely to be poor on nearly every measure. Rural children are poorer, rural senior citizens are poorer, rural single mothers are poorer, and rural people of color are poorer. One in five children in rural America are living in poverty. One in three Black Americans in rural areas is living in poverty. Nearly half of households headed by a single mother in rural America are living in poverty. And perhaps the most distressing statistic: fully 85 percent of the counties designated by the USDA as “persistently poor” over the last 30 years are rural counties. We know this is just the tip of the iceberg. The rural poor are likelier to have less access to healthcare, to quality education, to fulfilling work, to healthy food and to all the other opportunities that contribute to economic mobility and general well-being. Nowhere are those conditions worse than in places with concentrated, decades-long entrenched poverty. The Great Recession reversed the trend of improving rates of poverty in rural areas. To put it bluntly: Our rural communities are being left behind in an economy and a political environment that has not prioritized their needs.

And what are the nation’s grantmaking foundations doing about it? Sadly, not much.

In fact, we face chronic under-investment in rural communities by philanthropy. The philanthropic community could help begin to address the challenges in rural American but hasn’t. It is an issue that is important to many of you who work in rural Minnesota, and one that NCRP has been calling attention to for years. Unfortunately, since we released our report Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue from Within in 2007, very little has changed. The philanthropic sector continues to neglect rural communities. A changing national economy, entrenched racial inequity and foundations’ reliance on a strict interpretation of strategic philanthropy has meant philanthropic resources for rural communities are few and far between, just when the opportunities for change are most urgent. This has to change if we want to see progress on the issues we all care about.

So how much funding do rural organizations get from foundations? Not very much. A previous study by NCRP found that only about one-half of one percent of all foundations in the U.S. make any grants that even have the word “rural” in the grant description. That means that 99.5 percent of all foundations make zero grants where the word “rural” is in the grant description. A rigorous study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture released in 2015 estimates, generously, in my opinion, that about 6 percent of all grant dollars given by U.S. foundations primarily benefit rural populations. Six percent might sound not too bad until you consider that 19 percent of the U.S. population resides in rural areas. My sense, and I think other observers agree, is that the amount of funding for rural communities has probably been declining in recent years, in spite of some much publicized conferences on the subject sponsored by the Council on Foundations.

…

As the editorial board at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette put it, “There’s a compelling case to be made … that answers to some of our biggest collective issues – climate change, clean energy and global food security – will be found not in a city center, but farther afield.” Our rural communities are full of potential. I know it, and you know it. It’s time for the philanthropic sector to realize it, too.

Keep reading.

Aaron Dorfman is NCRP’s executive director. Follow @NCRP on Twitter. Read the entire speech here.

Editor’s Note: This post follows up on a January webinar that looked at the rural perspective of mass incarceration and philanthropy’s role in reform efforts. Nick was a panelist in that webinar.

For nearly 20 years now, I’ve met with relatives of prisoners freighted to rural prisons. For working class families, the long distance phone calls and road trips required to keep in touch with an incarcerated loved one are hard to manage and put important human relationships at risk. It’s a problem that gets resolved through broad public awareness and popular dissent. What’s the most pragmatic, sustainable way to make that happen?

Even as mental health providers caution that prisoners fare better while incarcerated close to home, where frequent visits from family and friends are possible, the majority of the prison population is transported 100 miles or more from their communities of origin. Exiled from everything and everyone they know, these prisoners lack for nearby advocates, leaving them with few options when they face harsh treatment and civil rights violations.

In response, artists, activists and citizens are undertaking a cooperative endeavor to end mass incarceration, one that spans the urban-rural divide. We organize around everything from releasing aging people from prison to setting up best practices around how prisons impact and are impacted by environmental issues. But these types of enterprises require long-term grantmaking from philanthropists interested in bridging two seemingly disparate locales. Linking urban and rural communities is complex work that takes time, but it pays dividends in optimizing strategic grassroots power.

The vast majority of our country’s prisons are disproportionately filled with men and women of color from struggling urban centers, and are disproportionately located in white, economically-hard-hit rural areas. Urban criminalization and rural exploitation are tandem oppressions, and for as long as our criminal justice system functions as a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment – pitting people against one another in false games of power and fear – the brutality will continue to be routine.

The urban-rural dichotomy is mostly contrived. Talk of out-of-the-way backwaters and insular cities belies the deeper reality: urban and rural Americans live in comparable worlds bound by common values. Very few rural residents are farmers. Instead, they live civic lives similar to those of their urban counterparts but on a smaller scale. By the same token, both communities battle social pathologies like poverty and the drug war.

Rural communities are often depicted as homogeneous, but during the last couple of decades, they’ve grown more diverse. And they’ve always included vibrant communities of color. As Beyoncé Knowles notes in her much-discussed song and video “Formation,” rural Black art has often been a catalyst for the American identity and culture we’ve most benefitted from.

That’s not to minimize what’s emerging as a remarkable urban-rural political divide. As Josh Kron writes in this The Atlantic magazine article, presidential election data indicate that polarizing, ideological rifts along party lines increasingly manifest themselves geographically, giving rise to Democratic cities and Republican states. Red and blue Americans seem to be rushing to their sides of the playing field: “Cities, year by year, have become drenched in more blue. Everywhere else is that much more red,” Kron writes. A recent Pew Research Center report referred to these us-and-them communities as “alien tribes.”

Yet criminal justice issues are one way to unite both sides in solidarity for change. Almost everyone has had an incarcerated relative, friend or acquaintance. As The Crime Report noted, surveys show that Republicans and Democrats favor prison reform equally.

Less than 1 percent of philanthropic funding flows toward rural counties. As philanthropic sources realize how important it is to strengthen inner-city justice movements that push back against systemic criminalization (something we need to see much more of), they’re slow to reach out to remote counties where the infrastructure for criminalization is largely built and people are increasingly subject to it (the bottoming out of rural towns means escalating arrest rates).

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now,” Martin Luther King once said. That couldn’t be truer than for rural and urban communities facing down the prison industrial complex. Dedicating more foundation resources to networking rural and urban grassroots organizations is a simple step toward growing grassroots power and building a robust movement to end mass incarceration.

Nick Szuberla is executive director and co-founder of Working Narratives. Follow him on Twitter @NickSzuberla.

Image by Robert Stringer, adapted under CC license.

Editor’s Note: Updated 12pm November 2, 2015.

Institutional philanthropy in the United States has long neglected rural communities. As recently noted by the Nonprofit Quarterly, it seems rural philanthropic investment levels may be at a low point, despite much talked-about recent efforts to steer funds into rural communities. In a rare breach of the live-and-let-live relationship usually maintained between politicians and the philanthropic sector, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called foundations to task for their complacency. His comments should turn heads, and hopefully, remind philanthropists that the sector’s broken promise to rural communities is a political and moral failure that will take a concerted campaign of organizing, educating and persuading to correct.

In 2004, NCRP released Beyond City Limits: The Philanthropic Needs of Rural America, and followed it in 2007 with Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue from Within. The latter showed that about 1 percent of grant dollars and 0.3 percent of grantmaking foundations were devoted to rural development purposes. Since then, the data on rural philanthropy has been sparse. But most sector leaders agree that, if it has changed at all, it’s gotten worse – even though roughly a fifth of Americans live in rural areas, and rural residents are more likely to be poor than their urban counterparts.

Why are foundations ignoring the needs of rural Americans along with the investment and innovation opportunities that abound in rural communities? NCRP’s 2007 research highlighted a few challenges:

  1. Misperceptions of rural people and places.
  2. Rural communities’ isolation from the foundation world.
  3. Philanthropy’s reliance on big numbers and scaling up.
  4. Rural social sector capacity issues.
  5. Weak local infrastructure.

A few of these are issues of foundation perception or knowledge – issues funders can and should change. An opinion poll commissioned by the W.K. Kellogg foundation in 2002 noted that many funders held what one rural nonprofit director call the “Norman Rockwell picture of rural America.” Self-reliance, mutual aid and pastoral splendor certainly are facets of rural life, but just as common are struggling education systems, environmental degradation and generationally entrenched poverty. It is up to sector support groups like NCRP, as well as foundations themselves, to commit to discerning and disseminating an accurate picture of rural needs.

Just as important, however, are rural opportunities. Rural giving offers a chance for foundations to strengthen rural nonprofit infrastructure through grants, and spark the economies of capital-starved rural communities through mission investing. As the editorial board at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette put it, “There’s a compelling case to be made … that answers to some of our biggest collective issues – climate change, clean energy and global food security – will be found not in a city center, but farther afield.” The dearth of funding for rural communities deprives the social sector of opportunities to develop innovative solutions to pressing problems.

The rural funding gap makes clear social sector leadership has failed rural communities. In 2007, then-Montana Senator Max Baucus, chair of the committee with legislative oversight of the foundation sector, called for a doubling of philanthropic investment in rural communities, as reported by Nonprofit Quarterly. This was followed by silence and a disappointing lack of follow-up from Baucus himself. Rural philanthropic investment only declined.

In 2011, the trade association Council on Foundations — arguably then the most powerful organization in the sector — signed a memorandum of understanding with the USDA to inject capital and other resources into rural communities. A handful of summits and research products followed, but once again rural philanthropic investments declined.

It’s time we acknowledge that institutional philanthropy is unlikely to embrace rural funding through a top-down approach. In hindsight Senator Baucus’s demand looks like cynical political posturing. And the Council is, to a large extent, governed by its foundation members, not the other way around. It will take a grassroots campaign of organizing rural voices to demand foundations live up to their public trust and move institutional philanthropy toward a more just, effective strategy in rural America.

A campaign for rural philanthropic investment would mobilize underrepresented voices to educate foundation leadership about the reality of life in rural America, and about the opportunities that exist there. It would build the power of rural organizations, connecting them both with one another and national funders. It would suggest ways to measure impact that don’t rely on raw numbers or the potential to rapidly scale up. And it would remind foundations that they ought to invest in rural social sector capacity – instead of using its relative weakness to excuse their neglect.

Secretary Vilsack’s comments distilled over a decade of frustration with the philanthropic sector from rural constituents and their champions. Now it’s time for leaders like Vilsack, and others in the social sector who care about equity and opportunity, to build a campaign that will make philanthropy pay attention.

Ryan Schlegel is research associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Located in rural Ashfield, MA, Double Edge Theatre describes its work as “creating a ‘living culture’ by developing the highest quality of original theatre performance – based on artists’ interaction with the communities in which the work takes place.”

While maintaining a permanent center of performance, training, research and cultural exchange in western Massachusetts, Double Edge travels throughout the United States, South America and Europe, residing in communities for several weeks. The company works with residents, including local artists and tradespeople, to integrate the community and its history into each performance.

Double Edge’s goal is to elevate both artistic expression and the relationship between artists and their communities. This approach starts with their work in Ashfield. Each summer, the Theatre hosts educational programs for emerging artists, indoor and outdoor performances, community events and international artistic exchange. It was just as important for the program to become embedded in the community of their hometown as in their traveling programs. Double Edge knows first-hand that rural communities especially can be skeptical of, and even resistant to, arts and artists arriving on the scene and seeking connections. Yet residents came to see the value of the organization’s investment in their town, and it now enjoys tremendous local support, selling out its summer performances. Arts organization like this one are especially important in rural America, which is often overlooked by philanthropy.

Between 2010 and 2012, Double Edge received three annual grants from Hess totaling $18,000, with an additional $50,000 over the next two years focused on operations and infrastructure. Working at the nexus of arts, culture and community and offering both local and traveling programs, engagement of public schools and promotion of diverse performance and visual artists, Double Edge both aligns and contrasts with Hess Foundation’s arts and culture portfolio. Although Hess primarily funds large arts and cultural institutions, foundation board member Constance (Hess) Williams discovered Double Edge in Washington, D.C. when the group landed at Arena Stage, a prominent theater with a mission to produce “diverse and innovative works from around the country and nurture new plays.”

Williams met with Double Edge to discuss a possible grant, ultimately resulting in Hess’ investment in, “a distinct initiative to address Double Edge’s growth management, including support for a consultant to help us with board development and strategic planning.” According to actor, writer and co-artistic director Matthew Glassman, this project has proven critical to the organization’s sustainability. Moreover, the support targeted an area of nonprofit management that is too often ignored by most funders: organizational development and strategic planning. Glassman said:

“The fact is few other foundations … were able to help us deal with the issue of growth. If it had not been for the type of grant Hess gave us, our own growth, based on our good work, could have overwhelmed us. Hess support gave us the gift of time to focus on the business of growth, the development of our board, to hire strategic consultants. It has been vital as we have reimagined our scaffolding. … Where can an organization go when it is actually effecting change in the community, and really growing and succeeding but it is not clear how to grow and respond to success well?”

Hess Foundation support for Double Edge Theatre resulted from a bit of luck as well as both parties’ understanding of the challenges arts and culture organizations face when growing. Beyond the grant, the Hess Foundation has requested very little in terms of reporting or follow-up. Glassman notes, however, that he reports regularly on his own: “There hasn’t been a time that they’ve asked for more [information]. Given how impactful this grant has been for us, my reporting is pretty thorough.”

The relationship between Double Edge Theatre and Hess Foundation represents the best of Hess Foundation’s grantmaking, offering funding at the right time, in the right size and toward the right focus. However, examples like this, while promising, throw the Hess Foundation’s unrealized potential into stark relief. Much more common, in fact, are large unrestricted grants to established and elite institutions. By supporting the status quo, the more typical Hess grants, which go to institutions such as Harvard College and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, may or may not result in increased access or innovative connections between communities and the arts.

The Hess Foundation clearly recognizes the need for unrestricted grants for nonprofits to survive. Building off of lessons learned from Double Edge, Hess has the opportunity to be more responsive to the communities it serves, not just elite institutions. NCRP’s assessment of the foundation recommends that Hess include peers and grantees in the decision-making process to better envision the systemic impact it can have, especially among marginalized communities. The foundation would also benefit if it were to engage and learn alongside these grantees and to share what is learned with nonprofit and philanthropic peers. Strong, community-focused organizations attracting the support they need to sustain their missions is a success story for philanthropy and one from which foundations, first and foremost the Hess Foundation itself, can learn.

Elizabeth Myrick is an independent consultant with nearly 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. She has served as principal researcher on NCRP’s Hess Foundation and Woodruff Foundation Philamplify reports.