Advocacy Funder Collaboratives

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.

This project is supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies and the Center for Evaluation Innovation, and is part of the Atlas Learning Project. 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. All articles in this series are licensed for sharing and reprinting, with attribution to GrantCraft, a service of Foundation Center. Research was conducted by Cynthia Gibson, Ph.D., and reviewed by Jen Bokoff. For questions, please email info@grantcraft.org.