Ever since Lester Salamon rang the first alarm bell about organizational infrastructure challenges in 1999, noting that “U.S. nonprofits face a crisis of effectiveness” (p. 12), the sector has tried to come to terms with what capacity building is and how best to do it.

While the work of capacity building has grown over the past several decades, philanthropy has failed to agree on a single definition. It has been defined simply as any “actions that improve nonprofit effectiveness” (Blumenthal, 2003, p. 5), or, from the funder’s perspective, “as the funding and technical assistance to help nonprofits increase specific capabilities to deliver stronger programs, take risks, build connections, innovate and iterate” (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations [GEO], 2016, p. 3).

Often driven by institutional funders, capacity building could include training for members of the board of directors, developing a strategic plan, or even building a website. However, this traditional, foundation-funded capacity building is increasingly criticized for its origins in white dominant culture (EchoHawk, 2019; Community Wealth Partners, 2021; Le, 2020; Littles, 2022, Taylor, Coolidge, & Valerio, 2022) and its continued practice of serving white-led nonprofits. Power and equity are at the center of a growing movement to reimagine the language and practices of capacity building.

As the country and our sector continue to wrestle with dismantling white supremacy, capacity builders themselves are taking stock of their own work. In a 2022 article for Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), Melissa DeShields, CEO of Frontline Solutions, shared her own “crisis of conscience,” posing the question “who gets to decide what constitutes effectiveness?” (para. 8) as we seek to build capacity.

The 2022 annual conference of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, the only membership organization in the country specifically for nonprofit capacity builders, called on participants to continue disrupting the status quo “in a hopeful way and create new futures in nonprofit capacity building” (para. 2). Marcus Littles, founder of Frontline Solutions, went one step further in a 2022 NPQ article, asking if we should “cancel capacity building” altogether due to the idea that it comes with an “often unspoken assumption … that the funder knows best” (para. 6).

To combat this assumption, GEO (2021) proposes that funders and grantees intentionally co-create solutions in capacity building, balancing power as well as building trust-based relationships, peer learning, and encouraging longer-term support. Still, many of the practices that have reinforced the existing power dynamic persist. A 2021 study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, for instance, found that while many foundations note positive changes in funding practices as a result of the pandemic, “just 27 percent — are providing more multiyear unrestricted support” (Buteau et al., p. 13). Even fewer are doing so alongside capacity building/organizational effectiveness grants (Orensten & Gehling, 2021).

Read the full article about capacity building by Tamela Spicer and Trish Abalo at Johnson Center.