This blog was originally published by The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Beyond-the-check support is a core practice within trust-based philanthropy. Yet the question of how to do it — creatively, strategically, and with care — often goes unanswered.
From 2019 to 2023, I was the founding director of a program called Partner Support at Luminate, an Omidyar Group foundation. Our team worked in collaboration with our funding and operational colleagues to focus explicitly on beyond-the-grant support for our grantee partners. Over the four years of the program, we reached 300 organizations across five continents, delivering 7,500 hours of support and 250 resilience stipends.
We learned a lot, saw meaningful shifts, and heard from grantee partners that these efforts were valuable. Specifically, research suggested that beyond-the-grant support mattered deeply to grantee partners: 84 percent of respondents said it was as or more valuable than the foundation’s financial support. However, this support remains unique in the philanthropic sector: 84 percent of our grantees received nonfinancial support, as compared with 58 percent of our peer funders’ grantees at the time of our Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) survey in 2023.
Why Go Beyond Grantmaking?
A thriving civil society necessitates cash as well as all the resources a funder is able to bring to bear. These resources may include networks, technical support, training, promotion and communications support, dedicated stipends, introductions, thought partnership, and especially careful listening and a partnership mentality.
Especially at this fraught moment in time when authoritarian leaders and funding cuts introduce existential threats to the nonprofit sector, partner support provides an additional and critical accompaniment to funding. According to the 2025 State of Nonprofits report by CEP, nearly 90 percent of civil society leaders report feelings of burnout at this moment, and a similar percentage report that burnout is affecting their staff.
Our aim, in our grantmaking and in designing the Partner Support program, was to shift from transactional relationships to transformational partnerships. The program focused on helping organizations and leaders achieve their goals of being more effective, building healthier and more inclusive teams, and strengthening their networks.
How to Approach Beyond-the-Grant Accompaniment?
We started with multi-year general operating support grants, recognizing that flexibility and longevity is important to sustain organizational health. We layered on beyond-the-grant support, because time, talent, networks, and skills can be as valuable as money. And we set forth principles such as: “We recognize and are alert to philanthropy’s inherent and unique dynamics around power.”
Our menu of partner support programming spanned four categories:
Foundation staff learning and capacity-building: Highlights included an Asset Framing session for staff led by Trabian Shorters and his colleagues, company-wide discussions on “the case for well-being,” training on financial management, workshops on shifting power, and peer-led learning sessions.
Universal offerings: We made several programs available to our grantee partners across all regions, including wellness stipends, coaching stipends, and access to Harvard’s Executive Education course on public narrative, taught by activist and professor Marshall Ganz.
Regional offerings: In partnership with our foundation’s Latin America team, we launched Potencia, a multi-layered capacity-building program shaped by partner feedback. In Brazil, we piloted a partnership to support racial equity inside organizations. In partnership with our Africa team, we offered our Kenyan and Nigerian partners pre-election training and stipends focused on holistic security: digital, physical, and psychosocial.
Learning and insight generation: We treated learning as part of the work, publishing our learning and conducting multiple internal and external reviews. For example, we twice commissioned a Grantee Perception Report (GPR) through CEP and commissioned The Social Investment Consultancy to assess our four years of partner support work.
What We Learned Through Successes and Failures
While implementing beyond-the-grant partner support programming, a number of lessons emerged, both in terms of ensuring that we are truly providing the support our grantees need, and equipping foundation staff to succeed in this work.
Ensuring ‘Partner Support’ Meets Grantees’ Needs
1. Proactive and Non-Directive: We were able to sense trends in the field and proactively offer what we believed partners might want or need. One partner said: “By proactively providing a wellness stipend, Luminate mitigated a great deal of emotional energy and time that would have gone into tailoring requests for greater flexibility and support.”
Furthermore, we didn’t suggest ways in which grantees could use well-being stipends, so they would feel free to use it however they wanted without funder pressure. In retrospect, we went overboard in the “let’s be non-directive” approach with our grantees. Although uses of this stipend were ultimately creative and highly varied, we heard from some recipients that they would have preferred to hear ideas from us. Similarly, when we offered the coaching stipend, we hesitated to recommend coaches, given how important and personal it is to find the right match. But some partners found it daunting and would have preferred a list of coaches to choose from.
2. Language Justice and Representation: We witnessed the importance of language justice. For global partner peer learning calls, we hired a team of translators so that our grantee partners could listen and speak in their preferred languages. We also learned to be more adamant about representation and equity. In one regional initiative, our local implementing partner provided consultants to advise partner organizations in Brazil. One grantee partner declined advising because none of the consultants were Black, while Afro-Brazilians make up more than half of the country. Our implementing partner added Black talent to the roster of consultants, but I regret not being more explicit about the need for representation from the start.
3. Organizational Development: In regional programming, we had hypothesized that the full spectrum of organizations in the portfolio — from grassroots to large institutions — could learn from one another and that networking together would strengthen the entire ecosystem. However, in practice, we heard from our partners that aligning programming by level of development would have created deeper value and that the mix of organizations diluted some of the programming.
4. Minimized Paperwork: We learned about trade-offs of minimizing application and reporting processes. In general, we created as little paperwork as possible so our partners could focus on their missions. For our well-being stipends, we did not have an application process, we didn’t create a separate grant agreement at first, and we didn’t require a report at the end. However, we learned that some grant agreement paperwork was legally necessary for compliance on both sides. Furthermore, we weren’t able to glean as many rich insights, since applications and reporting were voluntary. Structuring stipends as gifts rather than grants, followed by learning conversations with partners, may have been preferable.
Equipping Foundation Staff to Provide Support Beyond the Grant
1. Centralization and Decentralization: Because we worked across regions, we were able to connect themes and insights that no individual team had the bandwidth or mandate to track alone, such as grantee perceptions research. Our central team could provide global programming that enabled consistent offerings across the Foundation. We could also run pilots and experiments, such as well-being and coaching stipends, racial justice workshops, and security training.
However, centralized partner support worked only when staff had the bandwidth, confidence, desire, relationships, and senior-level support to take it up. Furthermore, some teams preferred a decentralized approach to fully lead and own this work; our partner support programming ultimately shifted more in this direction.
2. Capacity: While program officers were already doing important partnership work, sometimes they didn’t have the time or resources to offer as much as they wished to. Therefore, our unit helped complement their offerings. Our program offered a large menu to choose from. For some, this was ideal for matching support offers to partners’ specific needs. For others, it was too much. Centralized support created additional work for program officers and hundreds of stipends led to heavy workloads for our operations team. Later iterations of the program outsourced some of the partner support stipend allocations to intermediaries, which eased burdens on foundation staff.
Our beyond-the-grant support structures transformed over time, based on these learnings and other factors. Most importantly, we affirmed and validated the four benefits that trust-based philanthropy describes for beyond-the-check support.
Moving Beyond Trust Toward Care-Based Philanthropy
As the political and organizational context for civil society has only grown more intense, investments beyond-the-grant are not just possible, but a necessary consideration for most foundations. In this landscape, it’s not enough to fund the work. We must care for and invest in the people doing the work, leveraging every foundation resource — monetary and nonmonetary — and operating not just with trust-based philanthropy but with care-based philanthropy, as outlined by Shawnda Chapman.
Our support not only strengthened partners but also sent a field-wide signal, legitimizing long-desired conversations about team health and leadership. For many, it shifted what felt possible. One partner shared, “What really touched us is the fact that Luminate was thinking about us in such a difficult moment.” Another said, “This financial assistance dedicated to the well-being of a team was so exceptional, so benevolent, that our team was literally surprised by this gesture.” Some partners mentioned that our well-being support gave them leverage to ask for this type of support from other funders (1).
I encourage funders who do not yet have a non-financial support strategy to prioritize this by listening to grantee partners as to which resources would help most. I encourage funders already doing this work to ramp it up and publicly share insights, successes, and failures. And I thank many pioneering foundations (2) for their inspiration.
1. Many funders — such as members of the Funders + Wellbeing Group, a community of the Wellbeing Project of which I’m the strategy lead and facilitator — are leading the way on this front by prioritizing care and changemaker wellbeing.
2. Foundations that have led the way on beyond-the-grant support, and from which we drew inspiration for this program include: Ford Foundation’s BUILD program, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness program, David & Lucile Packard Foundation’s Civil Society and Leadership Initiative, General Services Foundation Healing Justice Grants, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the Omidyar Group’s Rights and Dignity working group, and many more.
Laura Bacon was the founding director of Luminate’s Partner Support program from 2019 to 2023. She is now an independent consultant and advisor to philanthropies and social impact organizations. Find her on LinkedIn.