Case Study
Evanston Community Foundation
Fundraising & Communications
Photo courtesy of the Evanston Community Foundation
How Women Unite! Got Connected
Sol Anderson, the current CEO of Evanston Community Foundation (ECF) was the Executive Director of IGrow Chicago (IGC), one of WU!’s very first clients. Sol became Executive Director of IGC in 2020 and joined ECF in 2021. In 2022, ECF staff reached out to Liz about capacity-building and training for nonprofits in their network and within the larger Evanston community.
Photo courtesy of the Evanston Community Foundation
About Evanston Community Foundation
Helping Evanston thrive now and forever as a vibrant, just, and equitable community, the ECF builds, connects, and distributes resources and knowledge through local organizations for the common good.
The ECF helps nurture and realize community-led, community-driven visions. This can mean helping to gather the right partners to transform ideas into reality, working with donors to develop support, or acting as the fiscal sponsor for a community effort. ECF lives out its mission by equipping nonprofits and their leaders for future challenges through free workshops, learnings, grants, and project collaborations that make Evanston a healthier community.
Over time, ECF has been part of a variety of creative projects: Evanston Climate Action Fund, Evanston Gun Buyback, Evanston Women’s History Project, Northwestern University Dance Marathon
Through their grantmaking, ECF strategically invests in arts, housing, senior services, at-risk youth, early childhood, economic empowerment, leadership, and many other areas focused on building a stronger, more sustainable Evanston. In addition to providing financial support, ECF routinely counsels nonprofits on issues ranging from board development to building endowments. ECF broadens and deepens philanthropic knowledge for individuals and nonprofit groups, setting the stage for effective civic engagement that moves citizens toward making a difference. ECF also multiplies its impact through robust partnerships with local organizations like Evanston Cradle to Career and Evanston Care Network.
The Need
In 2022, ECF received feedback from community groups and emerging organizations that they would like more support and resources around grant writing and the grant process. Most of these community members were from organizations that could not afford to hire a grant writer. In response, ECF partnered with WU! to meet this need.
“WU!’s partnership expanded our work in elevating underrepresented voices and providing emerging organizations equitable access to free grant writing resources. With WU! expertise on grants, we provided valuable community groups and organizations that cannot afford a grant writer with the tools they need to confidently navigate the entire grant process. Liz was responsive, kind, and clear.”
—Karli Butler, Director of Community Leadership, Evanston Community Foundation
Photo courtesy of the Evanston Community Foundation
The Impact
Former WU! Director of Communications, Tara Ebrahimi, provided a one-off grants training in June 2022 to a cohort of Evanston nonprofit community leaders. Most of these leaders represented small, grassroots organizations, a majority of whom had budgets of $50,000 or less, had never applied for a grant before, or had applied to less than three. Tara’s instruction provided the cohort with core information needed for organizations getting familiar with the grant process, including researching and identifying grant opportunities to submitting reports and managing relationships.
Tara’s training then expanded to a three-part series led by WU!’s Executive Director, Liz Jansen. In this series, participants were provided helpful templates, resources, and toolkits such as:
A grants pipeline and cash flow projection document
Boilerplate template that includes information on commonly used and requested attachments as well as commonly used organizational and programmatic narrative
Prospect research tools and resources focused on helping small organizations find funding and determine what funding opportunities they should pursue
Grants workflow management resources, including an overview of free and low-cost
Project management and workflow tools such as Asana and Trello
The first two training sessions were 90-minute Zoom meetings focused on expanding knowledge about the grants management process. Participants learned skills such as how to determine if a grants prospect is a fit through cost-benefit analysis and how to efficiently manage an actual grant from prospecting to reporting outcomes back to the funder. The third and final session was a two hour in-person workshop focused on applying the previous two sessions’ learnings and gave folks time to work on a grant together.
WU! helped equip a dozen Evanston nonprofits with the tools and expanded skills to feel more confident in their grant writing quests.
The Future
ECF and WU! are excited to expand our collaborative efforts and grow our partnership. We are excited to work with ECF on their Building the Future (BTF) 2023 cohort. Liz Jansen will be leading the project and providing coaching sessions to each of the five participating organizations. BTF is a two year cohort of six training sessions and six peer learning sessions. Each organization also receives 18 hours of individual coaching, and a matching major gift challenge of up to $25,000.
Mission Alignment
Like ECF, WU! understands that collaborative work is the path to a more just, equitable, and compassionate community. WU! is proud to collaborate on grant management workshops with ECF. We leverage each other’s strengths and expertise to meet the Evanston community’s diverse needs. Together, we combine the resources we have access to and use them to support and amplify those most impacted by unjust systems.