Encore Fellowships are an attractive grant-making strategy for a wide range of philanthropic organizations, from small individual charitable trusts to private, family, community and corporate foundations. Foundation sponsors are visible community and national leaders, spearheading Encore Fellowships as a social innovation that aligns with their core missions and reinforces their focus areas.

Foundation Sponsor Roles:

• Community and thought leadership: Provide leadership to catalyze and create Encore Fellowship programs for their grantees and communities. Convene prospective program operators, work hosts, fellows and sponsors to learn about the idea and to translate it to high-priority program areas.
• Program development and operations support: Provide funding to plan and launch new programs, operate existing ones and evaluate results.
• Encore Fellow compensation: Fund Encore Fellow stipends, as part of grants to nonprofit work hosts and program operators, or directly through foundation programs.

Foundation Sponsor Benefits:

Sponsoring foundations can benefit in many ways from their support of Encore Fellowships programs.

• Improved grantee effectiveness: Encore Fellowships provide a unique way for foundations to increase the effectiveness of organizations they support. Encore Fellows can be assigned as individuals or teams to work with grantees on specific capacity-building needs or issue areas. Fellows might not only work one on one with individual grantees, but also link with other organizations and fellows to share experience, reinforce institutional change and strengthen working relationships across the field or community.
• Nonprofit leadership development: Encore Fellowships are an effective pathway to transition former corporate employees to encore careers in the nonprofit sector. This pathway is particularly critical at this time, since the sector needs experienced leaders more than ever. Research from The Bridgespan Group reveals a shortage of nonprofit leaders and underscores aging boomers as one of the most promising talent pools to help close gaps in the growing need for management and leadership capacity. According to Carol Larson, president of The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the foundation “is funding Encore Fellows because it’s opening up a whole new set of leaders to contribute to nonprofit organizations and thereby contribute to conservation, the environment and children.”
• Greater impact through grantmaking: Encore Fellowships provide a cost-effective method for foundations to bring encore talent to priority issues, such as education, health, environment, arts and culture. Targeting fellowships to high-need areas and specific roles that require the fellow’s depth of experience and specific skills provides human capital that extends the impact of the grantee’s work. Foundations can launch or support multi-function or multi-fellow initiatives which can generate significant momentum or change management across time, grantee populations or key issue areas.