Introducing Candid Learning for Funders

Welcome to Candid Learning for Funders, your new destination for field guides, blogs, training, and tools designed to improve the practice of grantmaking.

Beginning today, Candid’s funder field guides, self-paced courses, and learning tools that were previously found on Grantcraft.org will now be part of Candid Learning for Funders. The new site is designed to become an easy-to-find destination for all of our learning experiences for funders, and toward that goal, later this year, our GlassPockets tools for improving foundation transparency will also be integrated here, along with other resources to help you improve grantmaking practices, advance field and grantee capacity building, build data capacity, and learn to leverage Candid tools to work more effectively.

How we got from GrantCraft to Candid Learning for Funders

Understanding that funders generally arrive at their position through routes other than formal education programs, the Ford Foundation launched GrantCraft in 2001 as a project to help its program officers learn on the job and from each other. In the decade that followed, GrantCraft grew into a collection of practical wisdom aimed at helping grantmakers get beyond the basics and work more effectively. In 2011, GrantCraft became a service of Foundation Center (now Candid) in New York and the European Foundation Centre in Brussels, a collaboration that continued for three years. During this time new content, partnerships, formats, and translations were developed, and as a result of this and continued global partnerships, today we offer resources in more than 11 languages. In 2014, GrantCraft became led solely by Candid and continued focusing on developing online resources to complement its popular field guide publications. 

When Foundation Center and GuideStar joined forces to create Candid in 2019, we further prioritized learning as an essential service with the launch of Candid Learning as a destination for both grantmakers and grantseekers, and today’s announcement is a step towards better organizing these offerings within the Candid Learning universe to serve you better.

In the last two years, Candid has responded to a rapidly changing environment by creating new resources and intensifying efforts to:

• address urgent information needs through real-time data reporting on philanthropy’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
• increase calls for racial equity
• track how grantmaking practices are evolving, and
• develop more on-demand courses as an alternative to in-person programming, including the launch of new self-paced courses for funders such as Funding Smarter and Risk and Reward

The launch of Candid Learning for Funders is part of Candid’s larger evolution and will help us deliver on our 2030 vision.

New tools launching in 2022

When you visit Candid Learning for Funders, you’ll still find the robust collections of resources and learning experiences you found on GrantCraft. You can still, for example, download field guides designed to improve grantmaking practices, find videos sharing lessons learned from peers, and discover new and emerging philanthropic practice trends from our blog. 

Candid Learning for Funders is committed to strengthening this collection of resources and to cultivating an engaged community of global funders. This new chapter will be characterized by closer ties to Candid, increased opportunities for diverse funders to share with and learn from each other’s unique perspectives, and opportunities for shared dialogue and learning across nonprofits and foundations.

We also have some new learning tools for funders launching in 2022. In the first quarter, I am excited to report that thanks to support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a GrantCraft classic will return with the re-launch of the Roles@Work cards. For the uninitiated, the Roles@Work cards are a physical deck of cards that make facilitating reflective practice fun. The cards were designed to help program officers consider the many roles they must play and think about how to strike a balance. The new and expanded Roles@Work deck has been enhanced to also include roles for program staff at nonprofit organizations, so they will now also make an excellent resource for both grantee and grantmaker gatherings. 

And, coming later this spring, Candid Learning will publish a new climate justice field guide for funders focused on the why and how of supporting climate in an integrated way, exploring how to use a justice lens with both climate mitigation and adaptation funding strategies, and how to embed it within existing funding priorities. The field guide will identify common barriers to the development of more holistic support strategies by foundations, ways to overcome them, and share case studies from experienced funders who have helped their institutions use a climate justice lens for greater impact within their existing grantmaking priorities.

Through Candid Learning for Funders, we’ll continue to get you the information you need to do good by connecting you with peers, experts, and learning experiences. We invite you to explore the site, share it with your network, and follow us on Twitter at Candid Learning for Funders.