Capacity-Building Grants and Awards

Some foundations give grants that are either partly or entirely focused on building an individual nonprofit’s organizational capacity.

  • Often, these one-time or multi-year grants are made in the context of one or more issuebased portfolios at a foundation.
  • Often, these grants are given to existing grantees and responsive to their specific capacity-building requests.
  • Some foundations have dedicated organizational effectiveness portfolios through which they fund only capacity building.
  • Some grantmakers integrate capacity building across all grantmaking, often to help facilitate the meeting of programmatic goals.
  • Other funders are rewarding innovation in organizational effectiveness through specialized capacity-building funding, such as awards programs.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Supporting Grantee Capacity.