• Nonprofits benefit from long-term support. It allows them to divert resources away from short-term fundraising and toward more strategic uses. They can plan into the future more wisely and accurately, and they can leverage longer grants and the vote of confidence that they carry to access additional funds.
  
  
• General operating support is necessary and vital to the success of nonprofits. It gives them the ability to respond rapidly to urgent organizational or community needs as they develop, and it allows them to invest in organizational capacity that can increase sustainability and program effectiveness.
  
  
• We become more effective and responsive grantmakers only when we learn alongside our grantees.
  
  
• There is great value in the new ideas and practices that come from young organizations with visionary leaders, but these organizations are the ones that often have the hardest time moving past the startup phase. At the same time, older, established organizations are important incubators of values, promising practices, and field wisdom.
  

Our strategic grantmaking program includes the following three initiatives:

Capacity Building Initiative: The Foundation's Capacity Building Initiative has supported a small number of organizations in their efforts to develop the ability to understand, evaluate, and articulate their work, and to apply this ability toward ongoing program improvement.

Grantmaking to Emerging Organizations: The Foundation invested three years of support in five startup organizations that show a strong potential to make a meaningful impact on their youth participants, their communities, and the broader field.

Grantmaking to Established Organizations: The Foundation has moved toward providing multiyear grants of larger amounts to organizations that have demonstrated impact and that employ programmatic practices that can be valuable to other organizations and to the broader field.