The Story Behind Our Capacity Building Grant Program

A Program Built & Rebuilt – on Feedback

Where it started

Back in 2021, as FCH widened its focus new strategic framework from healthcare access to the broader conditions that shape health, we kept running into the same idea: nonprofits in our region can’t do their work well if they’re not healthy themselves. That thought became the Capacity Building Grant Program — unrestricted funding for nonprofit organizations to strengthen their operations however they need to.

We didn’t have a clear blueprint for this. Flexible, unrestricted dollars for organization health are rare in our region, and we weren’t entirely sure what we’d learn by offering them. Our CEO, Nancy Heaton, sums up the bet we made: “Nonprofits know what they’re doing. We just need to support them so they can do it better.”

Although investing in organizational strength and building capacity was not a new direction for FCH, having historically supported this internal work on a case-by-case basis, this grant program represented an intentional expansion of our long-held belief that strong organizations are better positioned to create lasting impact.

How we decide

When an application comes in, FCH staff seek to answer three key questions:

1. Does it fit?

We check whether the organization’s location and mission align with our funding interests and region.

2. Does it match the program’s purpose?

We look at whether the request is genuinely about organizational health — not a program or service expansion, which is a different kind of funding.

3. Is the organization ready, and will it stick?

This is the deepest part of the review. We look at the organization’s history, anything that’s changed recently, and the specifics of the request, and ask: is this organization position to do this work now, and will the benefit last after the funded period ends?

Our Board of Directors set the total dollars available to the program each year and its parameters, decisions on individual grants sit with staff.

What we keep discovering

One of the more interesting parts of this program is how often it surprises us. Almost anyone can apply — any organization that believes its work supports community health and well-being — and that openness keeps teaching us new things about what “organizational health” actually means in practice. As Natashea Winters, our Director of Programs & Learning, put it: “There’s been such a wide range of things that have happened, and a lot of that is just due to the ingenuity of the organizations we work with.”

We’ve also had to keep relearning how to talk about this program. “Capacity building” isn’t a familiar term to a lot of grantee partners, and early on, some assumed it meant hiring outside consultants. It rarely does — it looks different for every organization, depending on where they are. We’re still adjusting our language as we hear where it lands and where it doesn’t.

After the program’s debut, the grantee pool became larger, as a result, we’ve worked with new grantee partners nearly every year. Nancy shared that the program is all-about “Inviting everybody to the table who says ‘I know I’m contributing to the health and well-being of our community, and this is how…’”

What trust-based funding has asked of us

2021 was also when FCH formally committed to trust-based philanthropy — a practice grounded in the idea that our success depends on our grantee partners success.

In practice, that’s meant treating grantee feedback as something to act on, not just collect. Before this program launched, grantee partners and community stakeholders told us a rolling application window didn’t give them anything concrete to plan around — they wanted a real deadline — so we moved to two annual deadlines instead, with a goal of turning decisions around within 30 days. Later, feedback led us to raise how much applicants could request in a single cycle. Neither change was something we’d have landed on alone.

The reporting we ask for reflects this same instinct: just a post-survey and a check-in, where we ask grantee partners to share what happened in their organization, whatever that turned out to be, related to the grant or not.

The results so far — and what’s still ahead

Every year of this program has taught us something we didn’t expect. As we’ve made changes we’ve found ourselves approving more of the requests that come through, and grantee partners tell us more often in their post-award surveys that flexible dollars led to real, lasting improvements in how their organization runs.

In 2024 alone, 9 out of 10 grantee partners reported at least one improvement in their program quality, workplace, experimentation, or financial alignment, and 90% reported improvement in at least two of three organizational health indicators we track — function, adaptation, and growth.

By the numbers, since 2021:

$719k granted, 52 grants made, 29 unique nonprofit partners funded, and 44% of recipients were small organizations*.

*Small organizations defined as organizations with operating budgets at or under $500,000 annually.

What we have is a habit of asking grantee partners what’s working, believing them when they tell us, and changing the program in response. That’s less a finished success story than an ongoing one — and we’re curious to see what we learn next.

See how the program has changed over the years: