Building on 15 Years Supporting Heads of Nonprofits, The LeadersTrust Is Expanding Its Work

Sidney Hargro, executive director, the LeadersTrust

Foundations waking up to the need to invest in professional development for nonprofit leaders—and the nonprofits that could use that kind of investment—should consider putting The LeadersTrust on their radar.

Yes, the group just launched as an independent entity earlier in 2021, offering cash awards for leaders and help in areas including fundraising and board development. But the organization’s work is far from new. The Flexible Leadership Awards that are the bulk of the trust’s work were actually first created as a program of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund more than 15 years ago. Since that time, the awards have provided roughly $30 million to more than 100 nonprofit leaders—funds that were invested in addition to general operating support from Haas. 

“I have run a startup before, and this is not it,” said Sidney Hargro, The LeadersTrust’s first executive director. 

That track record, perhaps coupled with the larger philanthrosphere’s growing recognition that the sector hasn’t done enough to support leadership in the areas in which foundations want to make an impact, seems to have led to impressive growth for this new organization in a relatively short time. 

In 2015, according to The LeadersTrust, the Haas Jr. Fund was the organization’s sole supporter, and it had a budget of about $1.6 million. Today, it has five additional partners: the Heising-Simons, Packard, Grove, and Irvine foundations and the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity—and a budget of $5.7 million, including money that is re-granted on behalf of some of those foundations. 

The trust may be a new entity, Hargro said, “but we’re a new entity that’s building on a strong foundation.”

Now, The LeadersTrust is connecting with new funders to expand its support of nonprofit leadership across the United States.

General operating support is a must

Currently, here’s how The LeadersTrust works: participating foundations nominate grantee partners for Flexible Leadership Awards. These awards, multi-year grants that range from $45,000 to $100,000, are then used for purposes that can include coaching and leadership development, building a deeper leadership team, developing communications, and even transitioning to new executive leadership. 

Awardees work with capacity coaches to determine the suite of programs that will best serve their needs, with the only restriction being that FLA money must be used for leadership and capacity-building work.

There are two important caveats, both of which are in favor of the grantees. The first is that nonprofits aren’t required to accept an FLA if the timing doesn’t fit the organizations’ needs. 

“Sometimes, there might be organizations who are not ready in the moment, (but) the door’s always open,” Hargro said. “They can get started at a later point,” when the leadership has the capacity to get real benefit from the award.

The other caveat: Flexible Leadership Awards are given in addition to general operating support that The LeadersTrust foundation partner is already providing to a nonprofit. 

Hargo explained, “At the end of the day, we would not want funds that would have gone toward general operating support to be diverted” in order to cover the costs of the leadership grant. The kind of lasting change The LeadersTrust’s member foundations are interested in creating requires that level of both/and support. 

Change (and growth) are in the air

While Hargro cautioned that he had only been in his new role for six weeks at the time of our recent interview, it’s clear that both growth and change are in the air at The LeadersTrust.

In addition to current plans to work with nonprofits throughout the U.S., other possibilities include finding ways to proactively support nonprofit leadership (rather than waiting for funding partners to offer lists of grantees), assisting in the creation of funder collaboratives to allow foundations with larger endowments to partner with smaller funders to provide FLA support to grantees, and proactively seeking out funders to participate in The LeadersTrust. 

Hargro, who prior to taking the helm at The LeadersTrust served as the president of Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia, is also serious about helping the funding partners at his new organization do more to walk their talk around issues of racial equity. 

During his tenure at Philanthropy Network, centering racial equity in all aspects of a philanthropy’s operations was a central part of his work. 

“Most of my time there (was spent) developing both a leadership agenda as well as operationally creating opportunities for funders to self-reflect (and) look at their practices,” Hargro told me. “And instead of simply saying, how do we create equitable impact externally, and how do we create statements that talk about how we care about Black lives and racial equity, how might we need to change because we might have been complicit in some (of those inequities) in the way that we practice?” 

Those practices range from how funders evaluate nonprofits to foundations’ investment portfolios. 

That experience, Hargro said, will inform his work with The LeadersTrust. One thing that became very clear during his work with Philanthropy Network, he said, was “how underfunded Black, Indigenous and people-of-color leaders in the sector were, and the need to not only deeply invest in general operating support, but also to invest in their capacity and their leadership.”

And while Hargro said that philanthropy is currently in a more “introspective space” overall as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning that began last year, it’s vitally important, and will prove to be a challenge, to keep that introspection going and shepherd reflection into lasting action across the sector. 

“At the end of the day,” Hargro said, philanthropy’s “muscle memory” of the way it has always operated toward minority communities “will likely come right back a couple years removed from this time. And the only way to make sure that you don’t go back is that you do the work internally, which is hard. It’s messy. It requires us to really talk about how those values you wrote down show up in practice and relationship with communities that you might have been funding but had zero relationship with.”