Developing Program Strategy for Foundations

Whether your foundation has one or several programmatic areas of interest, you need a clear strategy for achieving the impact you desire in each area. We can help you refresh existing and develop new issue-specific strategies aligned to your foundation’s vision and values.

How We Help Your Foundation Develop Program Strategy

Developing a Shared Understanding of the Issue: We perform a wide-ranging analysis to help you, your team, partners, and stakeholders (as appropriate) develop an understanding of your issue—including as appropriate how the issue impacts communities of color differentially.
Identifying Pathways to Change: With a shared understanding of the issue and your organization’s possible role, we will help you develop possible pathways to pursue to make an impact.
Sourcing and Vetting: Once you have decided on a strategic pathway, we will help you (as needed) identify specific nonprofits, partners, and community leaders to work beside as you advance your shared goals, explicitly casting a broad net to identify leaders most proximate to the issues they seek to solve. We also screen grantmaking opportunities with mutually-agreed upon criteria, incorporating lessons from our work on racial disparities in philanthropy.
Evaluating Impact: We can help you identify clear milestones and design accountability measures to ensure you are progressing and learning as you go.

Tricia and Jeff Raikes “Bridgespan has been an invaluable partner in the Raikes Foundation’s work to foster environments that cultivate learning mindsets and skills for students—particularly those of color and from low-income families. With Bridgespan’s collaboration and expertise, we translated our aspirations into an actionable strategy that will work as well for us as for our grantees and partners.”