“In early 2015, staff from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) and the Collective Impact Forum (CI Forum) came together to respond to their respective members’ interest in considering how grantmakers can support bringing an equity lens to collaborative efforts. Because neither GEO nor the CI Forum has deep expertise in this space, the first step was to conduct an environmental scan to 1) learn more about key considerations when applying an equity lens to community collaboration work such as collective impact; 2) consider whether we might want to offer a potential community of practice to members; and 3) identify organizations with whom we might partner if we moved forward with supporting our member bases in a particular way.

We did desk research and conducted brief interviews with funders, practitioners, and equity advisors who bring deep understanding of the ways in which funders can support collaborative, place-based work with equity at the fore. … The following memo documents our learnings from this early scan.”