Support PEAK’s Evolution as a Next-Level Nonprofit

As a key stakeholder in our work, we’re excited to share how PEAK Grantmaking is preparing for an evolutionary move in our nonprofit journey to empower our most valuable asset, our members.

Today, PEAK sits at a critical turning point. We have a new story and plan that we’re ready to share—and we need you to help us realize our vision. To be transformative, we are bringing more thought leadership to the sector and our members, refreshed resources, enlightened programming, customized learning engagements anchored in our Principles, and more career development support.

In recent years, we have utilized philanthropic investments to become a next-level nonprofit. We onboarded new staff to strengthen our organization and expand the ways in which PEAK is leading the sector. We’ve made significant investments in technology to better bring together an emergent learning community of philanthropy professionals. We’ve also deepened our own Principles work to ensure that our team and our community are driving equity in all that they do. And between our educational programs, like Grants Management 101, and the launch of four identity-based peer groups, we are supporting a diverse pipeline of highly effective, equity-focused grants management practitioners.

Now more than ever, we hope you share in our collective resolve so that PEAK can continue to offer thought leadership and support philanthropic professionals as change agents for equitable grantmaking practices.

But the path to securing PEAK as a thriving, next-level nonprofit requires us to shift to a new revenue model—one that goes beyond membership. Starting now, we plan to diversify and increase our revenues. In addition to membership, increasing our income through our successful programmatic and knowledge work, resource development, and convenings will build a consistent, robust grant funding revenue stream. It’s a significant change since 2020, when we were a much smaller nonprofit capable of covering most of our expenses with membership dues, annual convening revenue, and a handful of grants and programs.

To help us start on this path to diversifying and increasing our revenues, we ask for your support in going beyond membership by also advocating for grant funding, a sponsorship, a sustaining membership, or by making an individual contribution to support an organization you value.

For many members of the board and staff, we found our professional home and family here alongside peers with similar opportunities, common challenges, and a determination to use our collective expertise to move dollars more expediently toward those in need. And PEAK’s call to action is resonating. 

Today, we represent more than 500 contributing institutions and 8,500 grant professionals across 200 job titles, joined by consultants and academics whose work focuses on the philanthropic sector. Over the past five years, our Organization Membership numbers have grown by more than 60 percent. We demonstrate our commitment to the value of inclusivity through Individual Membership, extending the opportunity for any philanthropic professional who shares our vision to participate in our peer networks and online forum without requiring a donation or fee. Our past two annual convenings and our learning cohorts have all been at capacity. We’ve been a leading force in supporting members’ career growth and positioning them as strong advocates for change—personally, across teams, institutionally, and sector-wide. We’re so appreciative of the credit that this community has given us—and it has been deeply humbling, and immensely gratifying, to hear how PEAK has made a meaningful impact in your work and career.

With all this expansion, it’s been critical for us to reimagine our business model to ensure that this amazing growth can continue. Over the past year, PEAK’s staff has worked alongside the board to develop new technical systems and capacities to better support our members, new revenue models, and impact measurement tools to ensure we can be sustainable and thriving until all funders put those imperative, transformational practices in place to drive positive impact in their communities.

We’ll soon release a wide array of support and sponsorship opportunities. We have been successful in securing unrestricted grant funding, given that our work is not bound to any one mission area, and we will continue to pursue that while being excellent stewards of the flexible funding foundations provide. And because much of our impact comes from sharing members’ stories of transformation to both challenge and provide a road map for others, we’ll be organizing more vehicles and more spaces for us to learn, share, and evolve together.

Last, but not least, PEAK will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2026! This milestone offers an amazing opportunity for a targeted capacity-building campaign that will launch in early 2025 and run through 2026. Our last capital campaign, launched in 2015, exceeded our goals and we hope to do the same this time around with your support.

We could easily lament the falling support for philanthropy-supporting organizations like PEAK as well as those organizations who are focused on advancing equity and racial equity. But we aren’t reaching out to ask you to respond to our immediate challenges. We’re calling you in to support our future and the future of our community so that we have a more just world to live in. PEAK stands undeterred, and we invite you to join us in doubling down on supporting how PEAK brings unique value as a philanthropy-strengthening organization. Every day, our staff wake up with a mission to invest in our members, their practices, their transformations. Isn’t that worth investing in? To lift up the headline from our 2023 Impact Report, which encapsulates our fervent belief: “Yielding is not an option if we want to undo the systemic damage that keeps people from opportunity and abundance.”

Together, we can turn this moment into a movement for change and transformation. What we need more than anything, right now, is the commitment of our champions to support us as we go beyond membership to support a robust, future-focused nonprofit.

In solidarity, and with appreciation,

Satonya Fair, JD
President and CEO

Janet Disla
2024 Board of Directors Cochair
Director of Asset Management, The Nathan Cummings Foundation

Ify Mora
2024 Board of Directors Cochair
Managing Director, Program Operations, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies