Effective Strategies to Support Advocacy Campaigns: Considerations for Funders and Advocates

This report shares collected insights from funders and advocates across the country, in the hope that their observations will helpfully contribute to other funding and campaign efforts. The respondents noted that while considerable attention has been paid to factors informing the development of sound campaign strategy, comparatively less attention has been paid to the structural and operational issues that undergird successful campaign efforts. Our research accordingly focuses on these matters

Building Capacity to Sustain Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

Most funders agree that effective grantmaking requires pursuing a range of complementary approaches.Direct grants are the lifeblood of organizations and the cornerstone of funder practice, but grantmakers also provide critical value when they help grantees develop organizational leadership and governance, strengthen strategic collaborations with peers, network with new allies, and expand field knowledge, among other things.This report explores how grantmakers can leverage their investments by coupling direct grants with strategically delivered capacity building supports. It focuses on building capacity for community organizing and advocacy groups, though many of its lessons are more broadly applicable

Strengthening Collaborations to Build Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

This report explores how grantmakers can help strengthen collaborations among supported groups to advance ambitious social change goals. As noted by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in Many Hands, More Impact, grantmakers can play a number of critically important roles in supporting social movement building: investing in a broad range of organizations, change strategies, and issues; brokering relationships among groups and their allies; connecting grantees to one another in impactful ways; fostering learning to grow a field; and influencing peers and policy through these supports. We focus on grantmakers' "connector" role because we see it as a crucial -- and often underexamined -- strategyfor expanding impact. But how, specifically, can grantmakers nurture connections -- and productive collaborations that may eventually arise from them -- while remaining attuned to the strategic intentions of supported groups and the relationships they themselves want to cultivate? And how can the enhanced capacity that genuine collaboration requires be reflected and resourced in ways that meet funders' expectations of collaborative impact? Our perspective on these questions is grounded in the experience of Communities for Public Education Reform (also referred to here on as "CPER" or the "Fund"). CPER is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. Maximizing collaborative potential has always been central to CPER's DNA, and is encoded in the Fund's vision, strategy, and operational structure. In sharing lessons learned by CPER funders, staff, and grantees over the Fund's eight-year lifespan, we hope to contribute to the conversation about how grantmakers can nurture collaborations that advance building social movements for opportunity and justice

Greater Power, Lasting Impact: Effective Grantmaker Strategies from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

CPER (also referred to here on as the "Fund") is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. CPER originated in discussions among funders active in Grantmakers for Education's Working Group on Education Organizing.They launched the collaborative in 2007, in partnership with NEO Philanthropy (then Public Interest Projects), the 501 (c)(3) public charity engaged to direct the Fund. CPER's founding funders saw that, in the education debates of the day, the perspectives of those closest to the ground were often left out. These funders recognized that students and families have a crucial role to play in identifying, embracing, and sustaining meaningful school reform. Students and families know their own needs and see first-hand the inequities in schools. Organizing groups help them get a seat at the decision-making table and develop workable solutions, building on community assets that are vital to addressing the cultural and political dimensions of reform. These grassroots groups are essential to creating the public accountability and will needed to catalyze educational reforms and ensure they stick. They can be the antidote to the ever-shifting political conditions and leadership turnover that plague reform efforts. At the same time, they help community members develop leadership and a grassroots base, building individual civic capacity and community power that strengthens our democratic infrastructure for the long term. Because educational improvement requires tackling persistent inequities in race and income, supporting leaders in low-income communities of color also helps build the social capital needed to solve integrally related social challenges. CPER was initially conceived to run for a minimum of three years -- a timeline consistent with most foundation grants but short for the transformative kinds of changes the Fund hoped to achieve. CPER's lifespan eventually stretched to eight years because of the recognized power of its supported work. Over this period, NEO Philanthropy engaged a highly diverse set of 76 local and national funders in the CPER collaborative. Incentivizing new resources through matching dollars, CPER raised close to $34 million and invested nationally in some 140 community groups and advocacy allies in national coalitions and in six target sites of varying scale (California, Chicago, Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Philadelphia). These groups, in turn, developed local leadership, national coalitions, and cross-issue alliances that helped to achieve over 90 school-, district, and state-level policy reforms that strengthen educational equity and opportunity. CPER's history of impact illustrates the efficacy of community organizing as an essential education reform strategy, along with the more commonly supported strategies of policy advocacy, research, and model demonstration efforts. But CPER's story is also more broadly instructive. In this period of "strategic philanthropy " when focused, foundation-led agendas are increasingly seen as the surest route to achieving desired ends, CPER offered a very different, bottom-up, multi-issue alternative that proved effective. In sharing CPER's story, we hope to deepen understanding of the value of community organizing for education reform while contributing to the larger conversation about how grantmakers can effectively support social movements to strengthen opportunity and justice

Foundations Need Capacity, Too: Initial Findings from the Foundation Core Capacity Assessment Tool

For many years, the social sector has paid substantial attention to the issue of nonprofit effectiveness. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to the capacities that foundations themselves need to achieve impact. What capacities are essential to advancing a foundation's own mission? How do these elements compare to the capacities their grantee partners need?TCC Group believes that foundation capacity – like nonprofit capacity more broadly – is essential to impact. In developing the FCCAT and sharing aggregate findings in this report, the core purpose is to elevate attention to this important issue

Education Policy Impacts: 2007-2014

Communities for Public Education Reform (CPER) is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. A project of NEO Philanthropy, CPER has engaged 76 local and national fund members, investing $34 million in 140 community groups, advocacy allies, and national coalitions over the Fund's eight year lifespan.Powered by multi-year campaigns that involved organizing, advocacy, research, communications, and alliance building, CPER grantees played a key role in securing more than 9 policy wins at the school, district, state and federal level between 2007 and 2014. This summary of selected wins begins with those achieved at the federal level and follows with district- and state-level reforms grouped by CPER's six investment sites across the country. Organizations must remain united to defend these wins, monitor their implementation, and ensure that policies will stick

Approaching the Intersection: Will a Global Pandemic and National Movement for Racial Justice Take Philanthropy Beyond Its Silos?

How is the philanthropic sector responding to the interconnected inequities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and the national movement against policy brutality and racism? Is this time of acute social upheaval leading funders to reevaluate their generally siloed approaches and consider what it will take to address today's challenges in transformational ways? Approaching the Intersection: Will a Global Pandemic and National Movement for Racial Justice Take Philanthropy Beyond Its Silos? explores these questions through conversations with place-based funders and national philanthropy-serving organization (PSO) leaders. It presents a snapshot of a sector that appears receptive to new ways of working, has access to approaches that suggest promise for making transformational change, but is moving cautiously and at times hesitantly toward undertaking the types of fundamental institutional realignment that will enable approaches with the greatest promise for delivering systemic equity and justice

Trends in Education Philanthropy: Benchmarking 2018-19

Grantmakers for Education's 10th anniversary edition of Trends in Education Philanthropy: Benchmarking 2018-19 offers insights on the current and evolving priorities of the education funding community. This new report identifies significant and profound shifts in education investments toward social and emotional learning and postsecondary and early education, and away from the core K-12 reforms that have largely defined the last decade of policymaking, as well as other relevant findings

The Missing Link for Maximizing Impact: Foundations Assessing Their Capacity

A rapidly changing, global sociopolitical environment requires foundations to be nimble in maximizing opportunities to advance their agendas. At the same time, grantmakers are establishing ever more ambitious goals that often require grantees to function at peak capacity. Why, then, have more foundations not assessed their own institutional capacity? This article discusses an assessment of 54 foundations that participated in taking a new tool, developed for funders by TCC Group, to explore five core capacity areas shown to be central to organizational effectiveness. The Foundation Core Capacity Assessment Tool’s findings should not be seen as a report card, but rather a data-driven prompt for reflection and collective learning. While a diverse set of funders participated in this assessment, a larger pool will be needed to make broader statements about sectorwide trends. Nonetheless, the preliminary findings shared in this article do offer an unprecedented first look at how foundations are holistically assessing their institutional capacity as part of their efforts to maximize impact at a critical point in history