The philanthropy field seeks to advance long-term systemic change, yet much of its giving has been short-term, restricted, and episodic. These approaches are misaligned with the sustained, flexible funding that nonprofit organizations need to make real and lasting impact. At the same time, nonprofits operate in an increasingly volatile environment, with intensified competition for the same pool of philanthropic dollars. In this context, current funding practices can leave organizations financially fragile and unable to advance progress.

To address this gap between intent and practice, the Schott Foundation for Public Education engaged PTKO, a consulting group focused on strategy and organization effectiveness with experience in community indicators, to partner with them on creating the Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark. Its theory of change is straightforward: when funders adopt grantmaking practices that provide longer-term, more flexible financial support, nonprofit organizations are better positioned to pursue the necessary long-horizon strategies that lead to meaningful systemic change. A benchmark provides a standardized method to test whether funders are meeting these needs and an accountability mechanism for both internal and external monitoring. It also translates shared values into comparable, observable practices, thereby making progress visible, discussable, and improvable across a diverse philanthropic field.

The focus on long-term, flexible funding is reflected in the term “sustainable grantmaking.” Unlike frameworks that emphasize intent, values, or relationships, sustainable grantmaking centers on the most basic of a foundation’s activities: grantmaking. It measures how foundations use their wealth to enable their grantees not just to survive, but to lead systemic change, especially important to racial justice grantees. In this way, the benchmark is intended to complement other philanthropic frameworks, offering a clear, practice-based lens on how funders can align their grantmaking with the needs of this moment—and the future they seek to fund.

How We Set Out to Create the Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark

Development of the benchmark took place over roughly a year, beginning in early 2025 and culminating in its inaugural public release in January 2026. Sector leaders we spoke to about the idea of a benchmark emphasized the need for a tool grounded in tangible, measurable behaviors rather than aspirational language.

To identify what to measure, the team conducted an extensive landscape review, including interviews with philanthropy-serving organizations and foundation executives and research from leading organizations such as the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), Bridgespan, and others. The published research revealed a lack of concise, practice-based standards that foundations could adopt at scale.

Read the full article about the Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark by Patti DeBow, Mimi Yeh, and Melissa Daar Carvajal at Stanford Social Innovation Review.