Building Capacity Through Trust: Our Approach to Strengthening Grantee Partnerships
By Sifat Yusuf, Program Manager, WES Mariam Assefa Fund
The immigrant-serving sector in Canada has faced growing challenges amid the country’s ever-shifting policies concerning immigrants and refugees. These challenges range from the impact of global events causing displacement, to the uncertainty of funding and resources, to policies that negatively impact people who hold temporary or precarious status. Indeed, the sector finds itself facing choppy waters ahead.
Not long ago, I navigated the complexities of Canadian immigration myself. Before immigrating, I enjoyed a career in health systems research, and social development. My professional life in Canada began at a non-profit as a Project Manager leading on work that helped internationally educated health care professionals find meaningful employment. Now I am privileged to find myself on the other side of the table as a funder. I work at the WES Mariam Assefa Fund, where I support our philanthropic efforts directed toward immigrant economic inclusion efforts. I have the unique opportunity to champion the issues our grantee partners manage, particularly as immigrants and newcomers are being blamed for Canada’s housing crisis and hard economic conditions. This year the Fund celebrates five years of doing this critical work, which I’m so proud to be part of.
As a trust-based philanthropy, beyond our grantmaking, the Fund strives to support grantee partners “beyond the check”—to engage and actively contribute as a true partner in the sector. The Fund currently supports grantee partners’ capacity strengthening needs through a variety of approaches, including convenings that bring together grantee partners virtually or in person, networking opportunities to connect partners with other like-minded stakeholders, sharing resources such as our monthly partner newsletter in both English and French, and amplifying partners’ voices through conferences, blog posts, and other means of communication.
With a focus on funding organizations that support underserved immigrants and refugees, the Fund seeks to respond to the external environment our partners operate in. In 2021 and 2022, the Fund provided additional small-scale grants to bolster partners’ vaccine equity efforts and meet other needs related to COVID-19. Over the years the Fund has also focused on various training opportunities for partners, such as resource mobilization, anti-racism, and communication support. Having implemented a variety of these stand-alone capacity strengthening initiatives to complement the core grant work of our partners, in early 2023 the Fund decided to try a more systematic approach to identifying and responding to our partners’ unique needs.
Through research and building on our existing capacity strengthening framework, the Fund conducted an in-depth analysis of grantee partner capacity needs. We began by zooming in on what supports our partner organizations thought they needed, leveraging existing meetings to ask questions, and facilitating group discussions about capacity strengthening needs. This ensured that we could validate information and create a trusting, open space that would allow grantee partners to transparently share their needs and concerns. We sought to reduce the burden on our grantee partners and ensure that our capacity strengthening strategy was rooted in trust, equity, and co-ideation of opportunities, with recommendations coming directly from our partners.
With the information our partners provided, we designed a survey to further flesh out key areas of capacity strengthening needs. Our goal was to understand their pain points and identify the best ways to address them, such as through trainings, support from consultants, or additional flexible grants. To no surprise, our grantee partners were keenly aware of their own gaps. They were trying to do their best with the resources they had at hand, exemplifying their resilience and determination to serve the communities they cared about. The survey results helped us refine our capacity strengthening priorities and develop a two-year strategy that focuses on specific initiatives to address identified needs.
We learned from this needs analysis process that all partners have different needs and priorities, and that it is not easy to design capacity strengthening solution that would be helpful to all. In the summer of 2023, the Fund decided to disburse $400,000 each in Canada and the United States in flexible one-off grants to existing partners, with minimal reporting requirements. These grants could be applied over the course of a year to address a variety of partner needs. Some of these needs included supporting grantee partners’ staff attendance at conferences, hiring additional staff to address HR concerns, convening as a team to strategize about their organizational mission and vision in coming years, and hiring consultants to help streamline internal governance processes.
These additional grants allowed our grantee partners to do organizational work that is often not funded by others, and for which they would need to tap into their unrestricted reserves, if available. Talent Beyond Boundaries, an organization committed to helping displaced people secure their future and skills in Canada, was awarded $20,000 as part of this initiative.
Talent Beyond Boundaries, a recipient of one of the Fund’s capacity strengthening grants, utilized the grant to advance discussions and convenings with their boards around strategic development and direction.
“It can be hard to find ways to fund activities like change leadership, innovation, and strategy within a non-profit,” says Talent Beyond Boundaries Canada Director Lara Dyer. “The WES capacity strengthening grant in 2023 allowed us to sharpen our skills in these areas at both the Board and staff levels, boosting our performance and helping us achieve even greater results in our mission. We are all better as a result!”
As someone who has worked in social development for nearly a decade, typically as a grantee, I know from experience how difficult it is to have an impact while navigating resource and capacity limitations as a smaller organization. As the Mariam Assefa Fund celebrates its fifth anniversary, I’m proud to be on this journey of shifting power in philanthropy and creating a supportive funding ecosystem network for partners. I encourage other funders to consider ways to build trust with grantee partners and help them expand organizational capacity. The opportunities are limitless!
