Acknowledgements and Methodology

The following individuals graciously shared their time and wisdom through interviews or other sharing of information for this series on Funder Advocacy Collaboratives:

Annmarie Benedict, Senior Program Executive & Director of Grants Monitoring, The Atlantic Philanthropies

Paul DiDonato, President, Proteus Fund

Betsy Fairbanks, President/CEO, Fund for Nonviolence

Melinda Fine, Director of Philanthropy & Strategic Partnerships, TCC Group

Taryn Higashi, Executive Director, Unbound Philanthropy

Henderson Hill, Executive Director, Eighth Amendment Project

Helena Huang, State Voices

Ben Kerman, former Head of Strategic Learning and Evaluation, The Atlantic Philanthropies

Anita Khashu, Director, Four Freedoms Fund

Michele Lord, Co-President, NEO Philanthropy

Geri Mannion, Program Director, U.S. Democracy and Special Opportunities Fund, Carnegie Corporation of New York

Suzette Brooks Masters, formerly Program Director for Migration, JM Kaplan Fund

Ami Nagel, GIST Co-Director, GIST/EITC/State Priorities Project

Rebecca Rittgers, former Director, Themis Fund

Stephen McConnell, President, Civic Participation Action Fund

Katherine Peck, Senior Vice President, Civic Participation Action Fund

Martha Toll, Board Member, Funders Together to End Homelessness

Monona Yin, Program Consultant, NEO Philanthropy/Four Freedoms Fund

Additionally, we drew from conversations with grantees of several donor collaboratives, to whom we extend our gratitude.

For this suite of resources, we captured the wisdom of philanthropic leaders who have participated in multi-party advocacy collaboratives and conducted a literature scan of how foundations talk about advocacy-focused collaborative work. Drawing on additional themes and ideas explored in earlier GrantCraft pieces about funding advocacy and donor collaboratives, we synthesized new information to dig deeper and understand the pain points and levers of success. Examples have been anonymized to ensure candor and clarity, as well as to broaden the appeal and applicability of wisdom derived from a specific collaborative example. The bite-sized articles are intended to make this work easy to reference and share, and to read either as a full body of work or in shorter spurts as is helpful and relevant to your work.

Research was conducted by Cynthia Gibson, Ph.D., and reviewed by Jen Bokoff. For questions, please email [email protected].

All articles in this series are licensed for sharing and reprinting, with attribution to GrantCraft, a service of Foundation Center.

The Atlas Learning Project is an initiative coordinated by the Center for Evaluation Innovation to synthesize and share lessons from advocacy and policy change efforts that The Atlantic Philanthropies and other funders have supported in the U.S. The project aims to help push philanthropy and advocacy in bolder and more effective directions. To learn more, go to atlaslearning.org.

About the author(s)

Principal
Cynthesis Consulting