If you log onto the website of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, you can read about its five current grant-making areas, the amount of money available through grants in each, and the application window. This clarity was not always present — even as recently as, say, last year — when a nonprofit staffer working in the area around Kansas City, Missouri, where the foundation is based and focuses its funding, likely knew colleagues who’d landed grants from Kauffman, but probably had far less understanding about who, exactly, the foundation funded, or when, or how.
With an endowment of $3 billion, the Kauffman Foundation is one of the larger private foundations in the U.S., and it has a long, storied history of funding work on economic mobility, equity and entrepreneurship. It also runs programs (including a comprehensive crash course for aspiring entrepreneurs called FastTrac that I took in Harlem, New York, in the early 2000s — with only the vaguest idea that a foundation called Kauffman was behind it).
What it didn’t always have was consistency in its approach to grantmaking or a lot of clarity for grantseekers. The foundation’s efforts to increase transparency offer a good model for others in philanthropy, a sector not generally lauded for openness and ease of access across the board.
The problem: No one really knows how we operate
“Before, we were by invitation for the most part, with occasional RFPs on the research side,” said DeAngela Burns-Wallace, who came on as president and CEO in August 2023. “There wasn’t a clear understanding in the grantee community about what we would fund and what was eligible. People would hear, ‘Oh, so and so got a grant. That’s similar to what we do.’ Then they would apply, and they would hear, ‘We don’t fund that.’”
One of her first orders of business: Initiate a formal strategic planning process, which the foundation hadn’t done in years. This included speaking to community members and others on the local, state and national level. These conversations revealed frustration about the foundation’s process. “What we heard was that there was inconsistency and a lack of flow of information about when we were funding, what we were funding, and how to apply,” said Burns-Wallace.
Burns-Wallace, who came to Kauffman after holding two state cabinet posts in Kansas, leadership roles at universities, and serving as a diplomat in the U.S. State Department, said those experiences gave her a keen awareness of the importance of transparency. “In those sectors, particularly government, you have to publish everything. So, for me, some of the ideas around clarity come from my public sector background. But I also have an amazing team here,” she added, noting that many Kauffman staff members have worked in the community for years and brought to the refresh a good sense of what the community needs.
Lauren Aleshire, Kauffman’s senior communications manager, said that part of the confusion came from the organization’s structure itself. “We had different grantmaking units within the foundation and each one had a different set of policies they operated by. You might get one set of information from one unit and one from another.”
All of this led to a sense, for some, that the foundation wasn’t aligned with the community and that, perhaps, you had to know someone to get a grant. “That may not have been true, but once that idea gets out, it erodes trust. We had to really address that in our refresh,” said Burns-Wallace.
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The solution: a strategic refresh focused on clarity and communications
Keeping these interviews in mind and working with the foundation’s team and additional input from the community, Burns-Wallace spearheaded an effort to coordinate internal processes and improve how the foundation communicated them. The Kauffman Foundation’s new, improved, grantmaking “refresh” just rolled out in August. It retains the spirit of founder Ewing Marion Kauffman’s giving with its focus on college access and completion, career and workforce development, and entrepreneurship, but now addresses these issues through five grant categories, each of which has a clear cycle.
The newly revamped website communicates the foundation’s process. It has no fancy videos or animation. Instead, you’ll find extremely clear, page-by-page details about how grantseekers can get funding. Take the foundation’s capacity building grants, $100,000 to $250,000 awards to “organizations with a need to build their capacity in order to strengthen or scale impact in our focus areas.” Grantseekers can click through to learn more about eligibility, the deadline for the first cycle (October 8, 2024), when the funds will be disbursed, and how often the foundation makes this type of grant (twice yearly).
In addition to capacity building grants, two other categories opened for applications on August 29: collective impact grants, designed for coalitions driving systems-level impact and change in the Kansas City region, and sunset grants for previous grantees whose work falls outside the new strategic priorities. Two additional grant types will open October 15: project grants for organizations looking to design, implement or scale a multiyear project, and research grants. These grant types can feed into each other. “Maybe they get a capacity grant this year and can move up [to] the next level and get a project grant in the future. And we can move applicants to other pathways and be more responsive and agile,” said Burns-Wallace.
Finally, the Kauffman Uncommon Leadership Award will launch in January, designed to recognize local organizational leaders who, as the press release puts it, “like Ewing Marion Kauffman, reflect innovative, generous, and meaningful work in the community.”
Through October, grantseekers can register for webinars about the first of Kauffman’s new grant cycles, hosted by the foundation’s chief research, learning and evaluation officer, Yvonne Owens Ferguson, and chief impact and strategy officer, Allison Greenwood Bajracharya. Grantseekers also can drop by virtual “office hours” to pose questions about specific situations. “We had close to 600 people register for our first webinar,” said Burns-Wallace, noting that attendance is not required for grant applicants. “We spent a lot of time answering questions. We received a lot of comments from people saying, ‘Thank you for being available.’”
Kauffman also has added new webinars in response to questions. “You want to learn about capacity grants? We stood up a webinar for that,” said Burns-Wallace.
The actual grantmaking structure has been updated, too, with all grant officers working on one Impact Team. “So, there’s an alignment internally to support this effort,” said Aleshire.
Mastering the art of feedback
One important takeaway from the Kauffman Foundation’s efforts to introduce greater clarity: The work isn’t done after one refresh.
When an organization submits a grant, the foundation now sends an automatic feedback survey about the process. This is part of its “iterative upgrade,” said Burns-Wallace. “This isn’t a one-time thing. Take the capacity grants. Once we close this round, we’ll learn a few things. Maybe a question isn’t clear, or feedback says this piece worked well and this didn’t. Before we launch the next round in April, we’ll address those areas that didn’t work well and communicate that out. We’re trying to give ourselves room to tweak things going forward in response to grantees and other stakeholders in our system.
“Our mission hasn’t changed,” she added. “Mr. Kauffman always saw the foundation as taking down systemic barriers and being a partner in creating solutions so individual communities would have power to control their economic future. In this moment, it’s thinking about that larger donor intent and how you do that today.”
Editor’s Note (10/3/24): A previous version of this story included an incorrect spelling of DeAngela Burns-Wallace’s name.
