As community-based organizations seek partnerships with the health sector, many discover that the skills, expertise and readiness necessary to secure and sustain these partnerships don’t come naturally. While this is certainly a challenge for them, it is also an opportunity for another type of participant in the ecosystem of health: the philanthropic foundations that provide funding to these CBOs.
Why do I say this? Because by layering capacity building programs on top of traditional funding, these foundations can position their CBO grantees to become more attractive partners for healthcare organizations, more valuable contributors to cross-sector relationships, and more effective in accelerating change in the system of health.
To show what this looks like in practice, I teamed up with two of our foundation clients—Erica Snow from the Colorado Health Foundation and Shirin Vakharia from the Marin Community Foundation—to write How Foundations Can Accelerate Health System Improvement by Investing in Capacity Building Across Sectors for the Grantmakers in Health (GIH) website.
Our article shares four key principles from the Colorado Health Foundation, the Marin Community Foundation, and the SCAN Foundation’s Linkage Labs program that inspired them, that any foundation can apply to realize their potential as a funder of capacity building for health-focused grantees.
Read the full story at GIH Views From the Field. And if you work at a foundation that is interested in providing capacity building programs to your grantees, get in touch.
Lori launched Collaborative Consulting in 2010. With experience in the healthcare industry and a psychology and organizational development background, Lori’s focus areas include cross-sector partnership development, multi-stakeholder initiative design and facilitation, and change activation and implementation.
