Aggregated growth capital investments offer many advantages to co-investors and grantees that help them serve more youth more effectively.
For co-investors, the benefits include:
- Leveraging the impact on disadvantaged youth of one’s own investment by adding other funders’ resources.
- Relying with confidence on EMCF’s rigorous selection and due diligence process, emphasis on evidence, grants management, and performance reporting.
- Reducing transaction costs.
- Collaborating with other funders and nonprofits.
- Creating regional funding partnerships, such as EMCF and Blue Meridian Partners have formed with the George Kaiser Family Foundation in Oklahoma and the Duke Endowment in North and South Carolina, and PropelNext with four foundations in California.
- Contributing to a learning community that adds to the body of knowledge about effective philanthropy.
For grantees, the benefits of growth capital aggregation include:
- All the capital upfront that is necessary to fund a growth plan, reducing the burden of day-to-day fundraising and freeing a grantee to focus more sharply on executing that plan.
- Uniform terms of investment and reporting requirements, reducing the burden of reporting to multiple investors.
- The strategic counsel of an experienced portfolio manager, and the access to additional support s/he provides.
- The expertise and networks of engaged co-investors, providing guidance and creating opportunities to which grantees might not otherwise have access.