Collaboratives & grantmaking initiatives
ViaNova works with funders and impact leaders designing and advancing collaboratives and grantmaking initiatives to address complex, systemic challenges. We help turn ambitious ideas into sustained progress, bringing together clarity of direction and discipline of execution.
Over the past two decades, our team has designed and implemented more than 100 collaboratives and grantmaking initiatives, gaining a deep understanding of what it takes for these efforts to succeed.
We bring that experience to every partnership—engaging the right voices and stakeholders, and drawing on a broad network across convening, impact investing, learning and evaluation, advocacy, and field-building. We help connect strategy to real-world practice, translating across funders, nonprofits, and communities, and drawing on what we’ve seen work to help ensure ideas lead to durable impact.
Collaboratives
Collaboratives are one of the fastest-growing models in philanthropy, granting over $4 billion annually, with enormous potential to drive meaningful change. When thoughtfully structured and supported, they can align diverse actors, unlock shared learning, and accelerate progress on complex challenges.
We work across a range of collaborative models— including donor collaboratives, learning communities, and field- or expert-led efforts— supporting efforts that bring stakeholders together around shared goals and sustain alignment over time.
Grantmaking initiatives
Signature grantmaking initiatives have the potential to deploy resources in innovative ways, push the field forward, and draw attention to critical issues. Realizing that potential requires more than funding—it also requires clear purpose; coordination across organizations, nonprofits, and communities; flexibility; and the capacity to implement with discipline.
We partner with corporations and funders to launch and advance these initiatives—from catalytic prize programs to large-scale RFPs to regranting programs and rapid-response funds.
We combine deep expertise, strong project management, and the flexible capacity to carry work forward, evolving our support in response to where you are and what you need.
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We bring expertise, research, structure, and insight to help funders define clear goals, priorities, and approaches that position their initiatives for impact. This includes:
Landscape research
Strategic planning
Partnership strategy
Impact investing policy statement and strategy design
Learning agenda design
Organizational and operational planning
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We enable effective, efficient decision-making by establishing processes that engage a range of voices and create space for dialogue and constructive disagreement while enabling stakeholders to stay aligned and move forward with clarity and momentum. This includes:
Governance structure design
Facilitating governing or leadership bodies
Outsourced secretariat support
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We design and run grantmaking and investment processes that minimize burden on grantees, equip funders to make effective, timely decisions, and take on the operational lift required to carry this work forward at any scale. This includes:
Grant process design
End-to-end RFP management
Grant or impact investment deal sourcing and diligence
Portfolio and grantee relationship management
Grants management system (GMS) selection and implementation
Technical assistance
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We convene funders, grantees, and field leaders and create structured opportunities to jointly refine priorities, reflect, and learn together so that initiatives remain connected, adaptive, and informed by practice. This includes:
Designing and managing learning communities and networks
Grant monitoring and reporting
Grantee capacity building
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We design and support organizational operating models so that clients are set up to function effectively and sustainably, including through major transitions such as new strategic directions, spin-outs, or sunsets. This includes:
Entity platform design (e.g., foundation, 501(c)3, fiscal sponsorship)
Organizational structure and staffing models
Systems, processes, and workflow design and implementation
Change management support
Case studies| Work with collaboratives & grantmaking initiatives
Arts Ed Accelerator Fund
The Hewlett Foundation came to us seeking to address systemic challenges in arts education, recognizing that no single funder could do it alone and with a vision to drive coordinated action. We partnered with Hewlett and three other founding donors to launch the Arts Ed Accelerator Fund (AEAF), a donor collaborative, turning that ambition into a statewide effort to support implementation of the Arts and Music in Schools Act. From initial concept through ongoing implementation, we have supported the donors to align around shared priorities while increasingly shifting decision-making and strategy into the hands of field leaders. Today, AEAF is strengthening collaboration across policy, workforce, and learning, expanding access to high-quality arts education for students across California.
Google.org
Environmental Justice Data Fund
Google.org needed a strategic and efficient way to run a grantmaking program aimed at supporting the data needs of environmental justice organizations. We partnered with them to design and implement the Environmental Justice Data Fund. We shaped a governance and grantmaking approach that centered environmental justice field leaders as decision-makers—establishing an advisory board and designing an open, accessible application process that reached a diverse set of organizations, including community-led groups. Over the course of the four-year initiative, the fund directed $15M to organizations closest to the work, helping communities across the country leverage better data to advocate for clean air and water.
Clean Slate Initiative
A bipartisan group of donors and criminal justice reform leaders came together with an ambitious idea—to pass laws that would automate record sealing for people who have completed their sentences, restoring opportunity for millions of Americans. In helping to launch the Clean Slate Initiative, we created a decision-making structure that balanced the voices of funders and field leaders, designed and managed an RFP to fund research on the policy's impact, and helped the initiative scale into an independent organization. Today, 13 states have passed the legislation, and 18 million Americans are eligible for relief as a result.