Leveraging Funds: Tools, Insights and Suggestions from Advocates and Funders to Support Your Work and Long(er)-Term Sustainability

As part of our work, Community Catalyst aims to connect state and local partners to funding opportunities as well as to current trends in fundraising and best practices relating to resource development and organizational sustainability. At the end of 2020, we released a toolkit, Sustaining Your Fundraising in the Time of COVID-19. We are now pleased to share a new resource – one focused on the difficult task of not only raising funds to support your work, but leveraging them for long(er)-term sustainability. This collection of Leveraging Funds tools offers insights and suggestions from both advocates who successfully used Health Justice Fund (HJF) grants to secure matching funds for their work as well as an interview with a Georgia funder on how she works to leverage the capital of her foundation to the maximum benefit of her grantees.

Community Catalyst would like to thank Dr. Laura Guerra-Cardus, Scott Darius and Christine Reeves Strigaro for having these conversations with us and sharing their perspectives with our community.

• Interview with Scott Darius and Dr. Laura Guerra-Cardus

  Community Catalyst has a conversation with Dr. Laura Guerra-Cardus of the Children’s Defense Fund – TX (CDF) and Scott Darius of Florida Voices for Health (FVH), whose organizations’ fundraising efforts to support each state’s Medicaid expansion battle have resulted in deeper investments in the work.

• Interview with Christine Reeves Strigaro, The Sapelo Foundation

  Community Catalyst interviewed The Sapelo Foundation’s executive director, Christine Reeves Strigaro, to learn more about the Foundation’s approach to grant-making and thoughts on how advocates can leverage funding investments in their state’s advocacy infrastructure

• Sustaining Your Fundraising During the Time of COVID-19

  As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to create new challenges challenges for consumer health advocacy organizations and the communities they support, we hope this toolkit can serve as practical guide to support some financial challenges.