Build Grant Evaluation Summary

The Jim Joseph Foundation is committed to fostering compelling, effective Jewish learning experiences for young Jews, their families, and their friends. To enhance this work, the Foundation developed Build Grants to invest in the capacity of Jewish education organizations to dramatically scale their programming to reach larger and more diverse audiences.

The Foundation’s Build Grants include two targeted capacity building strategies. The first, Capacity Build Grants, provides short-term resources to stand-out Jewish organizations for specific interventions that enhance their ability to grow over time. Organizations use these resources for business and strategic planning, infrastructure and operational support, or measurement and program evaluation. The Capacity Build Grants that the Foundation offers are a steppingstone to the second area of support, the Scaling Build Grants. Scaling Build Grants are focused explicitly on organizational growth, providing larger one-time, multiyear investments meant to expand the organization’s reach, increase their effectiveness, and strengthen their ability to generate revenue and sustain an expanded budget. The Foundation is interested in deepening its understanding of its Build grantees’ successes and challenges to further iterate on the Build Grants structure and strategies. To glean insights, the subsequent questions guided the evaluation:

● What was the grantee experience?
● What were some of the key impacts of the Foundation’s Build Grants?
● What were some of the core challenges of the Foundation’s Build Grants?
● What lesson can we learn to improve the grantee experience and grant impact?

The evaluation outlines major themes on the structure, impacts, and challenges of Build Grants to date.

Build Grant Evaluation Summary, Third Plateau, June 30, 2023