A coalition organized by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations has emerged as a key player in leveraging the Social Innovation Fund experience. Twenty-one grantmakers will come together to form Scaling What Works, a $4 million initiative that will support collaborative learning among the intermediaries selected by the SIF.

The coalition goals are to not only support collaborative learning, but also to transfer lessons learned from the SIF experience to a much larger audience, enabling community solutions to scale more quickly.

In addition to providing programmatic benefits, Sean Stannard Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy hopes to see financial benefits: “Scaling What Works is exciting because it is the first independent project that I’m aware of that will attempt to leverage the attention being paid to the Fund to encourage more support for providing growth capital to effective nonprofits”. Scaling What Works also hopes to enable this outcome, as evidenced by their project summary objective “to expand the number of donors nationally who are prepared to support the evidence base, capacity and growth of promising nonprofit organizations”.

With the work of this new coalition, we expect a new portfolio of best practices to emerge around evidence-based grantmaking. This will be invaluable for social innovators, and we hope it will provide both opportunities and inspiration for increased high-impact social investment. While the SIF will serve as the catalyst, Scaling What Works has the opportunity to provide broad and lasting systemic impact.

Download the Scaling What Works project summary for more details.