Identify & Address Needs
We help grantees assess their needs, build capacity plans, and access expert support to meet their goals.
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Support Grantee Needs
Effectively support grantees with different needs and contexts in becoming more effective, innovative, equitable, and resilient.
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Center Grantee Perspectives
Honor grantees' perspectives and preferences, while ensuring they have the support needed to reach their full potential.
Learn and Apply Insights
Learn from grantees' experiences and leverage insights to inform your work and the broader sector.
Power High-Impact Projects
We power grantee efforts by funding individualized, high-impact capacity-building projects and creating opportunities to learn from peer experiences.
Generate Insights for Smarter Giving
We track grantee progress, identify what’s working, and connect the dots across projects to surface patterns and build collective knowledge.
Diagnostic and Action Planning
Our Capacity Advisors facilitate a capacity assessment with each grantee to understand where they are, identify their biggest capacity building priorities and develop an action plan that takes grantee contexts and available resources into account.
Provider Matching
Our Capacity Advisors develop thoughtful scopes of work for each capacity building priority. We then guide grantees through our signature matching process, where we identify a curated list of qualified providers from our diverse network and support them in identifying the right partner.
Contracting and Payment
Our team handles all consultant invoices and payment processing via “consulting wallets”, so your grantees don’t need to sweat the details.
Data and Insights
We capture feedback and data from grantees and selected consultants at specific points before, during, and after capacity-building efforts. Important trends and insights are shared with the foundation via a dashboard and reports for progress-tracking and decision-making.
Oak Foundation Partnership
Catalyst partnered with Oak Foundation to support several of its grantee partners in strengthening their organizational capacity so they can better support students with learning differences. Grantee organizations received comprehensive, equity-centered support, including diagnostics for self-reflection, advisory services from Catalyst, and tailored capacity building.
NewSchools Partnership
Catalyst has partnered with NewSchools Venture Fund since 2017 to provide capacity building to successive cohorts of grantees. Grantees have appreciated the depth of expertise and diversity of providers in the Catalyst Network and the thoughtful and timely support they received from their Capacity Advisors in order to build strong organizations.
Networks for School Improvement (NSI) Partnership
Catalyst connected the Networks of School Improvement grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation K12 team with their peers, vetted providers, and knowledge resources. Catalyst takes each grantee through a capacity assessment framework, based on which grantees are connected to customized supports and resources. The NSI Exchange has since spurred us to launch the Learning Lab for School Improvement Teams, a public-facing resource for teams interested in incorporating networked improvement practices into their work.
