Weekly Reads—April 29, 2022

Enjoy PEAK’s weekly roundup of timely insights from the grantmaking community and beyond.

“We’re here to clear the air on what trust-based philanthropy is and what it isn’t. … As longtime grantmakers and co-founders of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, we have evidence that this approach works.” [more]
Carrie Avery, Durfee Foundation; Pia Infante, The Whitman Institute; Philip Li, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Brenda Solorzano, Headwaters Foundation, in Alliance magazine

“Overall, funding of nonprofit capacity strengthening is vibrant but still relatively small. We need many more funders to increase their support, whether as flexible funds and/or supplemental support for capacity strengthening, so that the sector has access to the resources needed to build and sustain strong, healthy organizations and networks. We also need more investment in the evaluation of capacity strengthening strategies to better understand how funders can continue to adapt and refine their approaches to support nonprofit health, resilience, and sustainability.” [more]
Jennifer Wei, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

“Nonprofits too often receive (well-intended) guidance from stakeholders like funders and board members to disproportionately zero in on a single goal: serving the maximum number of beneficiaries. … The right way to expand a nonprofit’s impact is to build programs on three pillars: breadth, depth, and durability. Scaling means advancing all three of these dimensions simultaneously. And while the specific metrics an organization uses will vary, some version of each of those elements must be measured and advanced together to stay on track.” [more]
Mona Mourshed, Generation, in Stanford Social Innovation Review