Thrive Advisory Service
how it works
What is the Thrive Advisory Service?
Thrive was birthed and inspired by the LeadersTrust and the Resilience Initiative, and is now a project housed within the LeadersTrust.
Thrive’s purpose is to support the ability of foundations to co-design and offer capacity strengthening programs which are truly helpful to the organizations they fund.
We achieve our purpose by sharing practical insights, information, connections and hands-on support during the design process.
Our long-term goal is to contribute to scaling the idea and ideal of trust-based capacity resources for leaders, organizations and the movements of which they are part.
What We Do
Thrive partners with foundation staff to facilitate their discernment and planning about the design and launch of capacity strengthening initiatives. We are co-planners. We serve as resources, guides and project managers to foundation staff as they consider how they want to approach supporting the organizations they fund.
Design Facilitation and Hands-on Support
- We facilitate decision-making processes and discussions within the foundation as they design their capacity strengthening initiative.
- We work over time and as needed with foundation staff to organize their plan for an initiative and prepare it for internal review and approval.
- We help the foundation identify its internal staffing needs for its capacity initiative including support for search and recruitment of staff.
Sharing of Models & Resources
- We point to existing models, examples, and principles of trust-based capacity strengthening in action.
- We research and develop information about potential implementation consulting partners locally and nationally, and provide support for capacity-strengthening partner selection including brokering introductions and managing and resourcing the selection and contracting process.
Coaching and Thought Partnership
- We serve as an ongoing thought partner, including engaging in problem solving and offering resources as needed, during the implementation of the capacity strengthening program.
Why is Thrive Needed Now?
Foundations are aware that in this political moment social justice organizations are increasingly under attack. In times like these, attention to supporting leaders in building strong, compassionate, and more sustainable organizations is more than just a useful companion to program funding – it is a necessity and ethical responsibility.
So foundations are coming to recognize that investments in their grantee partners’ people, practices, systems, culture, and policies constitute a profoundly strong companion strategy to their Multi-Year General Operating Support funding for those grantees. However, too often, well-intended efforts to offer capacity-strengthening replicate structures that make it hard for groups to deeply benefit from them. We outline some examples of positive and problematic approaches here.
The good news is that foundations are looking for resources and guidance about how to organize their approach and resources to capacity strengthening in a values-aligned manner which follow the tenets of trust-based philanthropy. Thrive supports funders interested in taking this more liberated approach.
Our Perspective
INTRODUCTION TO THE THRIVE PERSPECTIVES SERIES
Funding trust-based capacity-strengthening: what it is, why it matters, and how we know.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY TRUST-BASED CAPACITY-STRENGTHENING?
A framework for the most important areas of capacity that organizations need now more than ever, and that foundations should make clear they are willing to invest in.
WHAT SHOULD FUNDING FOR CAPACITY-STRENGTHENING LOOK AND FEEL LIKE?
Some key Do’s and Don’ts for how funders can invest in organizations’ capacity in ways that show they really listen, cede power and decision-making, and create space for transformation.
WHAT FORMS CAN TRUST-BASED CAPACITY STRENGTHENING FUNDING TAKE?
MYGOS of course! But trust-based foundation investments can take other forms each of which builds on the last. We share four ways to help grantees get stronger.
MAKING THE CASE FOR CAPACITY STRENGTHENING FUNDING
Despite positive results and glowing feedback from grantees, foundation staff still find it hard to make the case for capacity support. We offer some of the strongest arguments and evidence.
REFLECTION: REIMAGINING CAPACITY BUILDING – THE LEADERSTRUST
How integrating a systems perspective is a crucial but sometimes neglected principle for integrating racial equity within capacity strengthening efforts.
The Thrive Team
Led by Holly Delany Cole and Paula Morris, Thrive will be supported by members of the LeadersTrust and Resilience Initiative staff, its larger consultant community, and other advisors as needed.
Holly Delany Cole
About Holly
Holly Delany Cole is a former Program Director and current Advisor consultant with The LeadersTrust which designs responsive, high-touch, long-term capacity strengthening collaborations with philanthropy that are based in trust to accelerate change. Until June 2014, she was co-director of Community Resource Exchange (CRE), having been part of CRE’s team for 18 years including as staff consultant, director of consulting and deputy director for programs. Immediately before CRE, she was a freelance consultant for human services and grant-making organizations in Chicago and NYC and helped to formalize the National Funding Collaborative for Violence Prevention. Her work included program evaluation, program development, coalition-building, and proposal writing.
Early in her career, Holly served as a program associate and program officer at the New York Community Trust, managing grant programs in youth services, human justice, employment, and aging. Now a citizen of Oakland, California, Holly has increased her engagement with local decarceration efforts and serves on the boards of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Equity in the Center. She has been an 8 year trustee of the NY Foundation, stepping down in June 2023. Holly has a BSW form Adelphi University and earned her masters at the School of Social Service Administration/University of Chicago. She is a social worker with a life-long interest in how practice in community can and should inform social policy and is co-author of Working with Teen Parents – a Survey of Promising Approaches with Phyllis Smith Nickel (1985).
Paula Morris
About Paula
Paula Morris has worked to strengthen social change organizations over four decades, most recently as the first Director of the Resilience Initiative (RI), a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which launched in 2017 with funding support from the Packard Foundation. Paula led the design and growth of the RI until September 2022, and it now provides a range of coaching, training, cohort learning and other support offerings for over 800 organizations. Paula was a consultant member of the Packard Foundation’s Civil Society and Leadership team from November 2019 to December 2023. She was also the first Program Director for the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund’s Flexible Leadership Awards (FLA) Program, forerunner of the LeadersTrust. She worked with the FLA from its inception in 2005 until 2015 and led design and implementation of coaching, consulting, training, and peer learning for over 70 social justice organizations.
As Program Director and Interim Executive Director at the Horizons Foundation, the nation’s first LGBT Community Foundation, she led the Foundation’s capacity building and community-led grantmaking programs and donor advised funds. In the mid-1990s, Paula was Education Director and then Executive Director for IDEX, now Thousand Currents, and is a past Co-Chair of the Board. Paula has also worked as a consultant to scores of advocacy organizations and foundation initiatives. In the 1980s, she worked for seven years in Indonesia and Zimbabwe, where she was Field Director for VSO. Paula was born and raised in Birmingham, UK, in a family of teachers and union leaders. She prides herself on being a baby whisperer.
Resources
Other Tools for Funding Capacity-Strengthening and Answering Questions about Its Impact:
- Community Wealth Partners’ “Making Capacity Building More Equitable: A Field Guide for Funders” offers ways to rethink funders’ capacity-building offerings with equity at the center. It outlines questions to hold, decisions to make, and intentions to set before you launch new capacity-building opportunities or reshape existing ones.
- Fund the People’s Funder Toolkit on making the case for investment in nonprofit talent has funder quotes, top reasons for investment, myths and realities, and this piece specifically on the ROI of investing in the nonprofit workforce that lists other evaluations in the field.
- GEO’s “How Will We Know if our Capacity Building Support is Working” publication offers practical steps that foundations can take towards shared learning with grantees, together with a case study example from the Deaconess Foundation.
- The Ford Foundation’s BUILD Program’s final evaluation offers rigorous review and specific examples of change in terms of strategic clarity, resilience, financial stability, programmatic impact etc. Follow-up longitudinal review will also happen.
- GCIR’s California Dignity for Families Fund Final Report shares the impact of support that includes both participatory MYGOS grantmaking and infrastructure investments. Results include improvements in staffing capacity, financial stability, and sustainability planning.
- The Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund’s Evaluation of the Flexible Leadership Awards’ inaugural cohort tracked results over five years of capacity funding for organizations and their ties to impressive program impacts and budget growth (even when that was not an explicit goal). It also showed how organizations were able to weather and thrive through successful transitions from long-term leadership, often a moment of setback.
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