Many funders have also recognized the importance of learning from the on-the-ground knowledge and experience of their grant recipients.
The Nokomis Foundation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, hosted the Prostitution Round Table, a “community learning venture" that brought together more than 35 individuals and organizations in monthly meetings and other activities to share information and expertise. They examined the scope of prostitution issues in Grand Rapids, documented learning, and proposed ideas for coordinated solutions and future directions of activity.
And at the Woods Fund of Chicago, all grant recipients are expected to engage in a learning partnership to share best practices, successes, and challenges with the fund and fellow grantees. The partnerships are focused not just on convening grantees for their own sake, but on actively learning with them, to inform grantmaking and to educate others in the nonprofit community about successful strategies.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the funders of the Future of Philanthropy project, have also been especially active in learning with their grantees. For example, as part of its new Philanthropy and Volunteerism strategy, the Kellogg Foundation recently convened philanthropic leaders in communities of color to share information, learn from peers, and build relationships in order to start a collective dialogue about leadership development in communities of color. Similarly, in 2002, the Packard Foundation brought together a learning community of grantees involved in its Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy program for the first large-scale conference of management service organizations—intermediaries that provide management and other capacity-building support to nonprofits.
Foundations are also inviting grantees to help them learn about the effectiveness of their own performance as grantmakers. A handful of foundations have longstanding traditions of conducting “customer service" surveys with their grantees and applicants, and more than 50 funders have commissioned the Center for Effective Philanthropy to undertake “Grantee Perception Reports" that provide the grantmakers with confidential data about how their grantees view them across a range of performance measures.
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