Four years ago, the Sewall Foundation decided to tackle an incongruence in our practice of trust-based philanthropy: how to make multiyear grants within a structure of single-year grants budgets. The deep belief that structures manifest and reinforce our culture and values led our internal spending plan team to tackle this structural issue and work on an approach that aligns our values with our processes.

As a result, in December 2021, our board adopted our first multiyear grants budget, providing a set dollar amount (equivalent to approximately 8.5 percent of our assets at the time it was set) per year for 2022 to 2024.

As we launched our second multiyear grants budget at the start of 2025, we understood that we were heading into a socio-economic political context of high uncertainty and vulnerability for our nonprofit partners and the communities they serve. We considered that overall giving has decreased, in part due to changes in tax-deductible giving, and in part because some foundations and donors are preemptively retrenching their support for racial and social justice, environmental justice, and other essential community efforts.

Nonprofits are experiencing unprecedented challenges (as documented in the CEP Research Snapshot, “Challenging Times: How U.S. Nonprofit Leaders Are Experiencing the Political Context”) on top of the fact that most have not recovered from the pandemic, inflation, and the burnout that so many of our nonprofit leaders have been and are experiencing.

We are sanguine about the enormity and uncertainty of what is coming and know that the best way to be prepared is to lean into our values to create internal flexibility, be in close communication with our partners, deepen collaboration and coordination with peer funders, and support policy and advocacy efforts, particularly those that are grassroots and community-led.

Benefits and Impact of Multiyear Grants for Foundations

Since 2021 we’ve learned a lot about the positive impact that structuring flexibility and abundance into our grantmaking through a multiyear grants budget has on our partners and on us. It infuses mutual accountability and mutual flexibility, giving us all more time for strategic thinking and work. Some of the key lessons learned through partner feedback and internal experience and reflections include:

  1. Transparency in available funding builds trust with partners and influences other funders.
  2. Foundation staff have more time to support partners beyond the grant and to coordinate with peer funders.
  3. At times, Sewall’s multiyear grant is the only multiyear funding for some of our partners

We’ve also seen reinforced the many documented benefits of multiyear funding, including that it provides stability for grantee partners, signals trust they can use to leverage funding from others, supports their ability to do strategic planning, enables them to use more of their time for mission-focused work and less on logistics and grant-seeking, and opens the door for greater trust between us and our grantee partners through conversations that are not funding-related. What’s more, it contributes to buffering against irreparable harm: what we invest now acts as prevention.

Multiyear Grants Spending Plan 2.0

The Sewall Foundation’s second multiyear spending plan, adopted in December 2024, calls for us to distribute grants each year over the five-year period from 2025 through 2029 of approximately $14.5 million annually, and overall spending estimated at approximately 11 percent of the organization’s current asset value. This level of spending and multiyear commitment is the result of close collaboration across the organization. Looking back, it was achieved thanks to a few key approaches and decisions.

Read the full article about multiyear grants for foundations by Gabriela Alcalde and Thomas Mitchell at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.