The Bayview Hunters Point Community Fund was a small, private grantmaking fund focused on supporting youth development programs in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point area.

Spanning from 2001 to 2014, the Bayview Hunters Point Community Fund was a grantmaking and capacity building initiative that provided an unprecedented investment of private dollars to youth-serving organizations in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. The Bayview Fund forged new relationships, strengthened nonprofit organizations and leaders, and funded programming for thousands of youth.

This resource shares our reflections on capacity building for small community-based organizations. Throughout our 13 years, we found that many lessons and best practices around capacity building that are based on supporting larger agencies with a regional or national reach are not as effective when working with smaller, less established organizations. To be effective, our capacity building activities needed to be individualized, iterative, and responsive, focusing on healing and trust for individuals and organizations.

The Bayview Fund found that effective capacity building for small organizations working in under-resourced communities like Bayview Hunters Point requires a long-term commitment, flexible funding, and a willingness of both grantee and grantor to be vulnerable and open to change and input. We consider these factors to be a part of responsive capacity building, an intensive, individually tailored response to each organization’s needs, coupled with flexible funding, in the context of a trusting and honest relationship between funder and grantee.

In addition to strengthening our grantee organizations, our responsive capacity building approach helped to cultivate collaboration between organizations in the community. Through our responsive capacity building approach, we learned that effective leadership development for our grantees had to address the need for healing and increased well-being. Providing opportunities for grieving, reflection, and renewal helped to sustain our leaders and their organizations.

What follows are some highlights of our iterative grantmaking journey, including key elements of success for each of our responsive capacity building activities, and quotes from grantees gathered from 13 years of informal evaluations and feedback.

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