Our Funders

RoadMap greatly values its partnerships with foundations and philanthropic serving organizations. 

Over the past decade, we have forged several pathways to help foundations provide capacity-building support for and to their grantees. These pathways have also boosted foundations’ internal work along with that of its networks supporting funders committed to serving social justice movements, organizations and leaders.  

 If you are a funder and are interested in exploring how to work with RoadMap, here are a couple of options for how we might work together:

  • Cohorts: Your foundation could form a cohort of grantees that would receive capacity-building support. RoadMap can support cohorts of any size by matching your grantees with consultants from our network that have the skills, experience and particular expertise needed. 
  • Tailored Support Program officers often contact us because they have a small number of grantees that need tailored, long-term support (Example: leadership transition; board development; sustainability and resource development). The foundation has decided to make a significant investment in a few organizations experiencing a moment of growth or opportunity.  RoadMap works closely with the foundation to resource that work. We also work with the client to support a defined project that will help them through their most challenging or transformative capacity building project.
  • Coaching: This is often a big request that we receive from foundations. RoadMap has a robust network of coaches available to work with grantees as well as foundation staff. 
  • Internal Capacity building for Foundations:  While we are often asked to partner with foundations to support their grantees, RoadMap also has a long history of directly providing them with capacity-building support. We have a number of consultants in the RoadMap network who specialize in providing foundations with a range of capacity-building services. 

These are just some of the ways that RoadMap has and will continue to work directly with foundation partners. We also serve foundations as grantees.

Over the past few years, RoadMap has been hosting intentional dialogues with funders about the need to provide general operating support across the movement to intermediary capacity building shops—particularly those led by people of color.  

Because capacity building as a sector is often under-resourced in relation to the growing demand of organizations needing such services, RoadMap has become a convener of and bridge builder between capacity building shops and foundations. 

Our goal is to  help to strengthen the collective ability of capacity-building shops to meet this demand and bring our work to scale in these turbulent and transformative times. In that spirit, we want to express our gratitude to The California Endowment, Borealis, Anonymous and the Veatch for their general operating support to RoadMap. 

Have ideas on how to support our work? Reach out here!