Over the past year, we’ve spent significant time partnering with funders as they navigate a rapidly shifting education landscape, one that is placing new and evolving demands on our school systems and nonprofit partners alike. While philanthropic dollars can never replace public funding, they can play a critical role: flexible, responsive capital that can move to meet emerging needs. And yet, that flexibility comes with hard choices. With varying levels of risk tolerance, many funders are grappling with how (or even whether) to adapt their strategies in this moment.
But not all funders operate from the same vantage point. A funder’s relationship to place–where and how their work shows up–matters deeply. National funders often bring significant capital, expansive views of the landscape and bold (and often deeply invested in) theories of change. Regional and local funders, by contrast, bring something equally essential: deep trust, lived context and enduring relationships within communities. Too often, however, these strengths of funders operate in parallel rather than in partnership, resulting in fragmented efforts and incoherence experiences for the very communities they aim to serve.
Coherence Starts with Context: Stay in Tune with Place move beyond parallel play and toward true alignment, funders must be intentional about how they show up, both individually and collectively, in place-based work. Coherence doesn’t happen by accident; it requires deliberate choices about relationships, roles and ways of working across national, regional, and local contexts.
Based on what we’ve seen through the Place-Based Funders Network, three shifts can help funders move from fragmented efforts to more coordinated, community-centered impact:
Too often, parallel play shows up when national strategies are developed “back at the foundation” instead of closer to communities they aim to serve. National funders may design theories of action and then look for local partners to implement them, assuming alignment will follow. In practice, we can say with confidence this doesn’t always bear fruit, for national funders or local partners. Place-based funders and local leaders are left to translate, adapt or even retrofit initiatives to fit local realities of things like school board politics, leadership turnover and community priorities.
Coherence requires something different: ongoing attunement to local context. That doesn’t always mean full co-design (which isn’t feasible for all funders), but it does mean staying close enough to the work to understand when conditions shift and being willing to adjust accordingly. National funders can do this by investing in deep listening, partnering with regional and local intermediaries and creating space in their strategies to respond to what communities actually need in real time. Without that connection, even the strongest strategies risk operating in parallel rather than in partnership.
Hewlett Foundation
Pre-pandemic, the Hewlett Foundation had engaged in direct partnership with a select number of districts. As Hewlett entered into these partnerships, careful attention was given to the local context and the local philanthropic efforts in each community. Leadership transition in urban school systems is inevitable—during this partnership there were transitions in a couple of school systems. While the foundation’s efforts were solely designed around system transformation on teaching and learning issues, it was evident that attention would need to be paid to the leadership transitions as well. The foundation invested resources to smooth over the transitions in two systems by working with them to support planning and onboarding of new system leaders.
The foundation’s efforts demonstrated to the school systems, the local community and local funders that a national funder can be attuned to local needs and can play an effort in supporting big scale efforts and small but yet critical infrastructure efforts. Rather than staying rigidly aligned to its initial plan, Hewlett adapted. By staying attuned to local conditions even when they fall outside a defined strategy national funders can help sustain momentum and strengthen trust. In doing so, they move from operating in parallel to acting as true partners in the work.
Parallel play can stem from misaligned strategies, but it is also a function of underinvesting in the infrastructure that makes coordination possible. National funders often prioritize programmatic or student outcomes within fixed timelines, while place-based change depends on long-term ecosystem building. When funding is limited to discrete programs, communities are left without the “connective tissue”—trusted intermediaries, convening capacity, and shared data systems—needed to align efforts across actors.
Coherence requires investing beyond programs or a narrow focus on student outcomes in short timelines into the structures that help systems function as systems. Intermediaries, in particular, can play a critical role as translators, conveners and coordinators, ensuring that national priorities and local realities are not operating in parallel, but are actively aligned over time.
ECMC Foundation
ECMC Foundation’s Catalyzing Community Foundations for Postsecondary Student Success strategy shows what it looks like to invest in the connective tissue that enables coordination. Through a $2 million investment in the Southern Education Foundation as an intermediary, the Foundation is supporting community foundations across four states to build durable postsecondary student success efforts rooted in local context. This strategy strengthens the ability of community foundations to convene partners and build shared approaches. Rather than funding isolated programs, this model builds the capacity of local funders to act as ecosystem leaders, coordinating efforts, managing data and sustaining partnerships over time, all toward shared goals. The intermediary plays a critical role in connecting national strategy to local implementation, ensuring that efforts are not fragmented across communities.
This work reflects a clear shift toward building coherent systems: community foundations grow their capacity and confidence to invest in postsecondary student success, local organizations receive more aligned and flexible funds allow them to focus on the students and communities they know best and ECMC gains deeper insight into how place-based investments function at the local level. Building on early progress, ECMC Foundation has invested an additional $2 million through National College Attainment Network (NCAN) and the Nebraska Children & Families Foundation (NCFF) to extend the model to four more states, reinforcing the role of intermediaries and local funders as essential infrastructure for lasting systems change. By investing in connective tissue, ECMC is strengthening the conditions that make coordinated, sustained impact possible.
Parallel play is especially costly when resources are constrained. Even funders with deep local roots and strong community relationships face a common challenge: the needs far exceed what any single foundation can support. Without coordination, this can lead to duplication in some areas, gaps in others and difficult tradeoffs that happen in isolation.
Coherence, in this context, requires collective prioritization. Rather than each funder responding independently to community demand, national, regional and local funders can work together to align on where to invest, which organizations to stabilize and how to sequence support over time. This may mean making explicit decisions about who funds what, sharing insight on grantee needs and collectively identifying where limited dollars can have the greatest impact. In doing so, funders can avoid spreading resources too thin and instead contribute to a more coordinated and resilient ecosystem.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF)
As a national foundation with deep roots in local communities, WKKF embeds team members in the places it serves–team members are proximate, building strong relationships and a nuanced understanding of community needs. Yet even with this proximity, at the start of 2025, local program officers quickly experienced an increase in the volume of requests from partners that quickly outpaced what the foundation could sustainably support.
As funders grappled with how to make meaningful investments in a sector facing urgent questions of sustainability and fiscal solvency, they began coordinating more closely with local and regional peers to develop a shared response to evolving community needs and organizational capacity. Together, this growing group of funders crafted a more aligned approach—providing immediate stabilization for some nonprofits, making targeted investments where additional resources could unlock broader impact, and offering support beyond funding, such as governance guidance, to help organizations navigate difficult decisions, including compassionate closures.
These practices laid the groundwork for a more ecosystem-oriented approach, with funders working in complementary ways rather than in isolation. Anchored in trust, both among funders and with nonprofit partners, this shift has enabled more responsive, real-time decision-making, strengthened in part by WKKF’s deeply embedded approach.
Sustaining this progress requires philanthropy to thoughtfully navigate power dynamics while engaging in honest, courageous conversations with nonprofit partners, grounded in transparency and mutual trust.
Moving beyond parallel play requires more than shared intent, it takes coherence in action. That means staying grounded in local context, investing in the connective tissue that enables coordination and aligning with other funders to focus limited resources where they matter most.
We need the scope and resources of national philanthropy combined with the nuance and staying power of embedded regional and local funders. Embracing place-based funding principles can help philanthropy bridge the divide to provide responsive support to communities in this critical time for education.
Our 2022 literature review dives deeper into the key principles of place-based grantmaking introduced in this blog post. To learn more about place-based funding and funder collaboratives convened by Education First, reach out to Kelly James kjames@education-first.com.
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