A decade after Social Venture Partners Seattle first put its capacity building approach into practice, 25 SVPs in the US, Canada and Japan are investing in hundreds of nonprofit organizations and supporting their ability to achieve results. The French American Charitable Trust (FACT) is in its seventh year of offering a comprehensive capacity-building program. This session will explore the similarities and differences between these two approaches and highlight lessons learned and the keys to their success. In small group discussions, participants will have an opportunity to dig deeper into the capacity-building process and better understand approaches to strengthening grantee capacity.

Bold leadership comes from skilled visionaries who are grounded in deep self-knowledge about their values, gifts, shortcomings and vocational calling. These leaders guide their colleagues and organizations to new levels of mission-driven impact. But the exploration of "leading from within" is a fundamental and often ignored element in leadership. This session will explore connections between leaders' deep self-knowledge and organizational effectiveness.

Big challenges call for bold responses. The decisions foundation leaders make today about how to respond to the economic downturn have critical implications for the effectiveness and stability of the nonprofits we support. By showing strong leadership at a time of such global uncertainty, philanthropy could tap latent interest and entice others to help find innovative solutions to the problems we face. Join a moderated conversation with foundation leaders about the difficult decisions they've had to make in the face of this recession and how they've reached out to grantees and other stakeholders along the way.

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, joined by 22 co-investors, launched the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot (GCAP) to explore a new way of raising upfront growth capital three high-performing grantees to help them significantly expand and achieve long-term financial sustainability.
This collaboration, in which the 22 co-investors collectively committed $120 million in growth capital, is unique not only by the scale of the funds committed, but because the highly aligned nature of the collaboration - which evaluation results, so far, have fostered a more effective partnership among all parties and greater impact for grantees. Soon after the $120 million was committed, the tumultuous effects of the economic downturn became increasingly apparent. This session will explore and share, using the experience of Citizen Schools as a case study, the lessons EMCF and co-investors gleaned from GCAP so far, particularly how all parties have worked together to adapt to the historic challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the past two years.

While philanthropy's core business is to use our financial assets to make grants to nonprofit organizations, we also generate new knowledge and networks from the work we fund. These "byproducts" are potentially as valuable as our money. Our knowledge and networks often go untapped because we rely heavily on written reports as the main means to transmit knowledge and information, which are not the most effective. This session will address the central question, "What makes a knowledge product effective so that the benefit of new knowledge contributes to positive social change?" We will explore examples of where knowledge transfer has been successful as well as new tools to increase the influence of our knowledge and networks.