Bringing more than money to the table: insights from the Foundation’s work “beyond the grant dollar”

Blue Shield of California Foundation is committed to supporting grantee partners beyond the grant dollar. Partnership is a core value of the Foundation and to us, it means more than direct funding. The Foundation has long provided connections to other funders or allied organizations, technical assistance, and capacity building opportunities. However, over the last year, we made a deliberate effort to understand more about grantees’ needs, better align what we offer to those needs, and learn from our activities to improve our work moving forward. Here are some of our key takeaways.

Making connections

Grantees want connections to other funders. We do this in a formal way, such as hosting funder briefings, and informally, like making an email connection. This year, our grantee Pilipino Workers Center wanted to increase awareness and gain support for one of their initiatives which we fund, the Home Care Cooperative Initiative. We decided to partner with them and their network of collaborators to host a virtual funder briefing. The goal was to engage funders, gather feedback, and create an opportunity to share why the work is important to California and needs funding. The outcomes were positive, including new funding opportunities for the initiative and highlighting connections to diverse funder interests (e.g., health, workers’ rights, immigrant rights, etc.). Overall, heightened funder knowledge of the critical work being done adds tremendous value for grantee work and the field.

Building skills and capacity

Another opportunity to go beyond the grant dollar is to provide direct training and skill building for grantees. One example from this year is a storytelling training that our public affairs team provided to a select group of grantees. The training, hosted by Berkeley Media Studies Group, focused on using storytelling to influence decision-makers and how to customize stories to reach specific audiences. The Foundation also offered free tailored workshops to strengthen and expand grantee policy advocacy capacity through the Alliance for Justice Bolder Advocacy initiative.

Grantees have a range of communications, evaluation, policy, and other needs. Throughout this year, the Foundation leveraged all of our departments — program, policy, communications, and evaluation — and external partners to maximize grantee access to these and other resources. Providing access to training resources is a way to support multiple grantees at the same time, rather than one-on-one.

Building community

One important role of foundations is to hold a broad view of the field and share connections or build bridges across issues, grantees, and allied organizations. Throughout the year, Foundation staff made connections between organizations working on related topics (e.g., around emergency response and 911 systems), between organizations working to address different issues but in the same geographic area (e.g., systems change in Los Angeles), and between grantees looking to hire similar types of staff. When one of our grantees was rethinking their fiscal structure, one of our staff members connected them to some organizations that could advise them on whether to evolve from a fiscal sponsorship model to becoming an independent organization.

In these examples, Foundation staff helped to facilitate peer-to-peer connections that built capacity across organizational need, common concern, and opportunities.

Key lessons

Through this process, we learned valuable lessons that will serve us as we work to support grantees in the future. These include:

• “Beyond the grant dollar” does not mean “free.” For the Foundation, providing trainings and resources required new contracts and grants. In-person funder briefings involved funding for logistics, including but not limited to food, space, and travel. While this was not prohibitive, it did require planning and budgeting. For grantees, these activities require staff time, so it is important to offer and design for what will add value to their goals.
• Having a clear goal is valuable. Supporting grantees beyond the grant dollar was a Foundation-wide goal this year. Staff were continually given encouragement around this work. That encouragement seemed to help staff think more broadly and creatively about their support. We are hopeful that staff will take lessons and integrate their offerings into future years.
• Supporting our partners beyond the grant dollar builds trust. Grantees see that the Foundation wants them to succeed and by asking about their needs, it shows that we understand broader organizational needs outside of our funding. And, the honesty we express about what we can and cannot do is another way of building trust.

Over the last year, the Foundation’s work to provide, track, and assess our actions beyond the grant dollar has been meaningful, educational, and strategic. We asked grantees to share their needs and heard things big and small that would help them move their work forward and strengthen capacity. Providing support beyond the grant dollar is rewarding and expands the way we partner. Foundation staff are dedicated to collaborating with each other, other foundations, allied organizations, and grantees themselves to help grantees achieve their goals. Moving forward, we’re looking for more ways to partner with grantees and support their success with creative resources beyond the grant dollar.