The Cricket island Foundation’s new report, Supporting Nonprofit Leadership Transitions: A Foundation's Journey, examines how funders can best support nonprofits before, during, and after leadership transitions—offering suggestions for how philanthropy can support the people, planning, and processes involved in all aspects of transitions.

Over the years, staff at Community Wealth Partners, they've spoken and worked with hundreds of Black, Indigenous, and other BIPOC nonprofit leaders. They’ve consistently heard that current capacity-building approaches often miss the mark—or worse, contribute to inequities in the sector.

While capacity building is a critical part of our work, traditional models of capacity building tend not to account for culture, systems and power in their design, too often “rendering them inadequate for communities of color.” The limitations of models that do not consider dynamics of power and issues of equity have never been more apparent than they are now.

What does nonprofit capacity strengthening mean and why is it important? How has it evolved and what are emerging trends in the field?

As part of its Organizational Effectiveness (OE) strategy refresh, the Hewlett Foundation’s Effective Philanthropy Group set out to answer these questions and better understand the current field of nonprofit capacity strengthening.

A key part of Ford's BUILD grants is the Organizational Mapping Tool (OMT), an open-source assessment tool to help nonprofits identify and prioritize where they need strengthening as organizations. The tool is designed to provide clear qualitative markers of development, creating an assessment of an organization’s current state as well as a roadmap for its improvement.