Putting Partnership and Community First: One Intermediary’s Approach

I came to GreenLight Fund after leading Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a direct service and advocacy nonprofit that works with a variety of philanthropic partners. I’ve been struck by how much GreenLight as an intermediary works to align with grantees to support community voice and community-led approaches to solving problems. Having experienced funders shift their priorities and thereby shift financial support away from our work, I understand the importance of a community-driven process built on trust that allows grantees the space to adapt to community needs; two important parts of the GreenLight Method.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) recent study highlights varied characteristics that help differentiate types of funders and shed light on grantees’ perspectives. The report revealed that grantees’ experiences with “intermediaries” aren’t all that different, in the aggregate, from their experiences with “originating” funders. But it also highlighted that it can be.

GreenLight’s program model centers on a local focus in each community. We engage deeply with grantees and have established trust with partners — both on the philanthropic and the service side — investing for local impact. Since our strategic approach is to be issue agnostic, we’re able to align with community-defined priorities and identify and bring in evidence-based programs to address what communities tell us they need. While we provide multi-year funding, it is our on-the-ground strategic support and partnership that ensures impact and sustainability.

While some findings of the CEP report resonate with our experience, there are three key areas where we see GreenLight Fund’s approach as unique among intermediaries, and we wanted to add these to the picture for other funders to consider.

Prioritizing Community Expertise

GreenLight doesn’t claim to be an expert in the focus areas we address. Instead, we elevate the expertise that exists in the communities where we work to identify pressing unmet needs and potential solutions. In each of the 13 metropolitan areas where we’re located, we hire a local team with deep roots in the community. They engage directly with residents, leaders, and issue experts to facilitate a process that elevates communities’ priorities where there’s an opportunity for change.

We are then able to leverage our national reach to identify proven solutions from across the country that can be replicated to a local context. Each year in each site, we select an organization demonstrating measurable results elsewhere in the country and support its expansion to meet the needs we’re hearing from the community.

This deep relationship with communities paves the way for our grantees to reach impact faster and ensure sustainability, building the trust that is essential for successfully addressing local challenges.

“By teaming up with the folks who really know the community’s needs, we quickly figured out where we could help the most,” noted Aurica Donovan, national director of development and impact of Food Connect, a GreenLight Fund grantee.

This community-driven approach allows us to be adaptive, focusing on the unmet needs most urgent at the time, rather than on a predefined set of focus areas. We find that this collaboration — us and our grantees and grantees and the community — ensures grantees are able to embed their model to effectively address the community’s needs for the long run.

Commitment to Equity in Process and Outcome

Equity is a core focus for GreenLight, both in practice and outcome. Our investment selection process is guided by an advisory council that represents a diverse cross-section of leaders, residents, and experts who represent the community. By doing so, we commit to a process of adding valuable perspectives, sharing power, and building partnerships that will help embed grantees into the local nonprofit ecosystem.

We value community members’ time and expertise, so each site has a budget for community engagement as part of its selection process, ensuring residents closest to the challenges we work to address are compensated for their time. As an example, learn more about our approach in Kansas City.

“Without Community Consultants, the work would get done, but this process is made better because we come from a different viewpoint or perspective. It helps the funders make smarter investments,” observed Tonya, a GreenLight Kansas City community consultant.

To GreenLight, it is incredibly important that our process centers different voices not often included in philanthropic decisions, especially those most affected by the challenges we hope to address. We believe we make better decisions together by sharing power and incorporating multiple perspectives, ultimately reaching the change we seek.

Building Trust Through Ongoing Support

We place a high value on a partnership approach with our grantees that is centered on learning, support, and trust-building. 

When evaluating potential grantees, GreenLight conducts comprehensive due diligence to understand how organizations can effectively meet identified needs while complementing and fitting into the local ecosystem. We begin developing trusted partnerships early, even before a final decision is made. Our full diligence grant is one example of how we honor the time and effort of prospective grantees during the selection process.

Once an organization is selected through our collaborative process, we provide grantees with six-figure unrestricted funding over a four-year period to allow for learning, partnership building, and developing roots in the community during the incubation period of expansion. We recognize that grantees, having proven their model in other cities, know what they need to reach impact, and that it will take a few years to become fully integrated.

Our investment is just the beginning. We remain an active partner, supplementing the general operating seed investment with beyond-the-check, ongoing support. We leverage our deep roots in the community to help hire local staff, offer coaching and mentorship, connect grantees to funders and partners, and open opportunities to deepen ties with the local community. In addition, our site executive directors convene grantees’ local leaders, fostering collaboration and shared learning to overcome common challenges. As a national network, we also apply learnings from our experiences in other sites to further strengthen local impact.

Seeking — and Acting on — Feedback

Feedback from grantees also plays an important role in ensuring continued improvement in our grantmaking. After one year, we conduct a formal launch review, capturing feedback on how the launch went based on the grantee’s expectations, a review of key milestones and their experience relative to how they’ve replicated to other communities. This reflection helps GreenLight understand where additional support is needed and ways to shift practices. We’ve also undertaken external evaluations ourselves, in line with a commitment to learn how we can better support our communities and our grantees and to deepen our impact.

As the saying goes, when you have met one intermediary, you have met one intermediary. We are grateful to CEP for this study as it provides valuable insights into the philanthropic landscape. It also highlights that one size does not fit all in the intermediary space — or, indeed, in the broader funder landscape.

We believe our role as funders is most successful when we collaborate with communities and grantees and leverage their expertise to reach meaningful impact. As with all funders, whether “originating” or “intermediary,” we must also continue learning, seeking out and listening to feedback, and looking to one another to continually improve practices and, thereby, better effect change. We look forward to continuing to learn from studies like this one to improve our work on the many dimensions critical for driving lasting change.

Ali Knight is the CEO of the GreenLight Fund. Find him on LinkedIn.