Foundations often focus their time and attention on making large operating grants to nonprofits — and rightly so given their importance to grantees. Yet sometimes, untraditional support that falls outside of typical funding — so-called “beyond the grant” opportunities — can have an even greater impact.
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At Emerson Collective, where I serve as managing director of philanthropy, we’ve deployed these “beyond the grant” funds in a variety of ways: Sometimes we use them to bring together grantees and other partners to share experiences and develop connections. Sometimes they provide technical support or professional development, including executive coaching, legal help, communications training, and data and tech tools. And sometimes, “beyond the grant” opportunities take a more experiential form, not fitting neatly into conventional grant making categories of any kind.
That was the case in 2018, when we began funding trips for our grantees to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. The organization and its founder, Bryan Stevenson, have created a powerful and immersive place where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial injustice. We wanted the nonprofits we support to experience it firsthand. In 2018, 2019 and 2023, nearly 400 groups traveled to Montgomery, each using a grant of up to $25,000.
These trips were transformational. We requested little in terms of reporting: Just a simple paragraph and photo following the trip. But we received a huge variety of rich personal accounts, including handwritten thank-you cards and letters, art, poems, and videos.
During our annual calls with the nonprofits we support, we heard countless accounts of the trips, including stories about individual learning, personal reflection, and growth. For example, people talked about how their own education ignored America’s history of slavery and its enormous and inhumane carceral system.
We also heard stories of individuals challenging their own and others’ biases, and groups having hard conversations about race, inequity, and their organization’s role in dismantling structural racism. Notably, nonprofit staff told us that these conversations helped strengthen their work during the tumult of the past few years, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
As one visitor wrote afterwards, “[This] was, without a doubt, the most meaningful experience our team has ever had together.” Another said, “I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to have this experience with my colleagues. I heard people I work with each day share things that helped me better understand the lens through which they view the world.”
Important Lessons
This trip also yielded several valuable lessons for other grant makers considering offering similar “beyond the grant” programs.
Don’t shy away from out-of-the-box experiences. Technical training or skill-building workshops should not be the sole focus of “beyond the grant” support. As our Montgomery trip proved, meaningful experiential opportunities can have a profound effect on a nonprofit’s culture.
The experience was so important for one organization that they’ve sent leadership and entire staff to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice regularly since their first visit. “We have to go to (there) every year,” shares one of its directors. “It is what grounds our work and sets us up for success.”
Grant makers should fund experiences that help nonprofits learn about the causes of the inequities they’re trying to address. This could involve focusing on specific issues, or it could include helping organizations experience and better understand different parts of the country or approaches to achieving their missions. Some organizations that visited the Montgomery sites gained all three: They better understood racial injustice, they could spend time in areas of the South that they had never visited, and they learned how one nonprofit pursued its mission in a particularly unique and powerful way.
Critically, foundation leaders should fund trips to places they’ve visited themselves or activities they’ve participated in. This allows them to better guide grantees on how to get the most out of the experience and ensure a meaningful trip, while treating the areas they visit with respect. In our case, not only did we closely partner with the Equal Justice Initiative to plan the trip, but Emerson Collective staff members previously spent time at the sites in Montgomery, which allowed us to prepare grantees for how moving and challenging the experience can be.
Be flexible. When we offered this trip, we gave organizations a grant and allowed them to design the experience as they wished. They decided what travel expenses to cover, who could attend, when to go, and how to organize the itinerary.
Some brought team members; others brought family and community members. Some used the trip for a board meeting and others for a staff retreat, integrating additional stops along the way, such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Montgomery.
Flexibility makes it easier for organizations to take the trip, and encourages them to think deeply about what they really want from the experience.
Make it easy. We helped make planning these trips simple and less time consuming. We created a guide, for example, that included travel logistics, such as hotel, restaurant, and transit recommendations; pre-trip educational resources, such as relevant articles; suggestions for how to structure time at the museum and memorial; and ideas for additional educational places to visit in the Montgomery area. The guide also recommended facilitators who could lead groups in their conversations and reflections during the trip.
We suggested spending ample time at each site to take in everything it had to offer and allow for individual contemplation. The trip can be deeply emotional, so we suggested traveling during less busy and stressful times of year.
Encourage organizations to think long-term. We shared ideas for continuing to learn about and discuss racial equity even after the trip ended, offering recommendations for books, films, and podcasts that expanded on the history of lynching, slavery, segregation, and reconstruction.
Organizations who’ve taken the trip have also described starting or joining efforts to take part in the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project and erect signs and monuments memorializing victims of racial violence in their community. Others have worked with elected officials and school board members to ensure schools teach local Black history with fidelity and care.
The nonprofit newsrooms we support continue to write stories about, and remain influenced by, these experiences, which helps people elsewhere in the United States learn about the Legacy Museum and Memorial. Some people have brought their families to the sites or encouraged their children’s schools to travel to Montgomery as part of American history curriculums.
The Montgomery trips represent only a small slice of our philanthropy, but they’ve changed the organizations we support for the better, building strength, empathy, and awareness. As one of our grantees put it after the trip: “All of us went in one way and came out another.” For grant makers interested in impact, it’s hard to ask for more.