Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on August 12, 2025.
At a time when philanthropy commentators are once again calling on funders to ramp up unrestricted, multi-year funding, the Ford Foundation’s Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) program is a real-time case study documenting how this kind of support has transformed its grantees and the foundation itself.
Since 2015, Ford’s board has allocated a total of $2 billion over 12 years to fund BUILD, an initiative that provides multi-year, flexible grants with dedicated support for institutional strengthening. Since 2016, it has provided $1.85 billion in BUILD grants to over 560 organizations in 47 countries, supplementing grants with peer learning opportunities in areas like financial resilience, leadership support, cyber and physical security.
“BUILD has catalyzed a transformation of Ford’s overall grantmaking,” said Victoria Dunning, Director, BUILD. “Our flexible funding, which includes both general operating and core grants, has gone from 37% to 85% since BUILD started.”
Although Ford’s BUILD grantmaking has been prodigious in of itself, this was never just about Ford. Over the bellwether funder’s decade of diving into unrestricted funding with BUILD, getting other philanthropies to sign onto these practices has always been part of the remit. Looked at from that perspective, Ford’s results have been mixed. There are numerous exceptions, but research suggests that Ford’s extensive deployment of unrestricted, multi-year support still makes it an anomaly in the broader funding ecosystem.
Nevertheless, Ford soldiers on with its trust-based grantmaking advocacy, having recently published a longitudinal evaluation focused on organizations that received BUILD grants between 2016 and 2019. Conducted with the Denmark-based NIRAS, the report found that grantees used BUILD’s unrestricted, multi-year support to boost resiliency and strengthen mission impact, although some grantees expressed “a lack of clarity around future funding,” which complicated nonprofit leaders’ organizational planning efforts.
Now, with trust-based grantmaking advocates calling on funders to provide flexible support to nonprofits grappling with Trump 2.0, our inner idealist hopes that Ford’s report will resonate with the field’s myriad skeptics.
“The first and most important finding is that BUILD works!” Dunning said. “Multi-year, flexible funding coupled with a focus on institutional strengthening helps organizations be more resilient and on track for mission impact. We expect to see more evidence of this over time, and as more organizations move through their five-year BUILD grant.”
How Ford uses unrestricted funding to advance its goals
For the Ford Foundation, multi-year, unrestricted funding gels with its commitment to what it calls “complex social change.” This work is “characterized by longer time horizons, progress forward followed by steps backward, and highly dependent on context,” said Ford Deputy Director, Strategy and Learning Subarna Mathes. Project-based support may work for programs focused on, for example, service delivery, but “when it comes to funding complex social change, we need to be flexible, adaptive and think long term.”
Skeptics of unrestricted support worry that grantees will use the money for frivolous expenses. But this concern overlooks the fact that trust-based funders still have plenty of options to conduct thorough due diligence and align the grantee relationship with their strategic goals.
Here’s how Ford approaches this process. It starts with a strategy that details the five to 10 changes it seeks and its assumptions about how it expects changes will happen. Stakeholders identify what Mathes calls “strategy-aligned organizations that have a track record of success in the fields in which they work,” and use a combination of project and unrestricted support, including BUILD, to support the cohort of partners to pursue their missions, and in so doing, advance Ford’s strategy.
All the while, Ford takes a patient view of what constitutes impact. “We are focused on learning about what works and when, acknowledging we may not see impact right away,” Mathes said, “and that there will be periods of progress, periods of setback, and times to just hold the line — we have goals in sight, and we are headed towards them, even with detours and delays.”
Ford program teams decide whether to offer a second five-year BUILD grant to an organization or transition the grantee back to regular funding, which typically entails maintaining a post-BUILD commitment to multi-year, flexible support.
In some cases, program teams made a second investment because the organization was experiencing what Dunning called “a continuing critical inflection point.” As for organizations that do not receive a second grant, “in most cases, with limited BUILD budgets, program officers saw the transformative effect of a BUILD grant on organizations, and they choose to offer this opportunity to other grantees.” Approximately one-quarter of BUILD grantees receive a second BUILD grant.
Key takeaways from Ford’s BUILD evaluation
Ford’s latest report explores BUILD’s longitudinal impact on grantees from BUILD grants that started from 2016 through 2019. The foundation previously engaged NIRAS to produce a report published in 2022.
According to the new evaluation, 83% of grantee partners said that BUILD contributed to their ability to achieve mission impact “to a large extent.” Organizations that received a second BUILD grant expanded and reinforced resilience-building efforts. Conversely, some organizations that did not receive a second BUILD grant experienced what Ford called “some loss of resilience.”
Two of the report’s most important takeaways echo trust-based proponents’ contention that unrestricted support allows organizations to focus on its mission, rather than chase misaligned project-based funding and scramble to plug holes with annual grants.
When asked if their organization was more “financially resilient” today than before the start of BUILD, 85% of grantees said yes in 2024, an increase from the 76% that responded affirmatively in 2021. While one might expect most grantees to respond positively here, the increase is notable. In 2024, 94% of respondents stated that BUILD “enhanced their ability to strengthen their financial situation to some or a large extent.” The evaluation defined “financial resilience” as “freedom, over time, to make financial decisions and power to conduct programs in line with strategic objectives rather than having to implement external priorities such as those held by funders, public pressure and governments.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Fine-tuning the program officer/grantee relationship
Beyond attesting to the value of unrestricted multi-year support, Ford’s study provides an instructive look at how its program managers navigated a grantee relationship predicated on an enormous amount of trust.
At the beginning of a BUILD grant, both parties agree to what Dunning calls “a clear timeline and pathway — five years of general support coupled with a focus on institutional strengthening.” However, even the most well-defined pathway can have a few bumps along the way. Ford’s report found that three or more years into the grant, some grantee partners experienced uncertainty about the level and length of future Ford support. This uncertainty compelled grantee leaders to pull back on commitments or medium and long-term planning.
“While it might seem like common sense, it was insightful to us, and something we want to pay attention to,” Dunning said. “How can we be more clear about future funding? And where uncertainty is in play, how can we be in dialogue with transparency and accountability?”
Program officers also had to acclimate to a relationship in which the grantee was in “the driver’s seat.” Now, program officers enter the funding relationship with what Dunning called a “different set of ‘higher order’ questions — ‘Where is the grantee heading?’ ‘What are the obstacles and opportunities to getting there?’ ‘What assumptions do they have, and how are those assumptions shifting?’” Those conversations, Dunning said, “are richer, more candid, and more real.”
Lastly, some grantee partners felt like they lost some ground when their program officer was replaced with a different one. While this wasn’t a huge surprise to Dunning, “it feels disappointing that this was their experience — and also fixable,” she said. “We can be more intentional to ensure a smoother, more continuous relationship transition so that organizations can feel on solid footing amidst change.”
Calling on funders to adopt “BUILD-like principles”
Ford expects to have over 90% of its current $1 billion board allocation to BUILD committed by the end of this year, and has until the end of 2027 to commit the remaining funds. “These commitments are already in draft for our teams,” Dunning said.
Moving forward, Dunning said Ford’s “No. 1 priority” in improving BUILD is “how we can do a better job at transitions — off-boarding from BUILD grants and ensuring clear, continuous communication with the program officer contacts, even amidst change.” Ford is offering “beyond the grant” peer learning and technical assistance to its BUILD grantees, and, Dunning assured me, “we will keep beating the drum on these principles and practices in the wider philanthropy field.”
Ford’s new report suggests that funders accustomed to a top-down management style and cut-and-dry metrics collected over a compressed timeframe may not appreciate the ambiguity that’s often baked into multi-year, unrestricted grantmaking. Others may balk at the idea of funding “overhead,” even if doing so advances a grantee’s mission. But there are ways for funders to approach trust-based giving by degrees and tailor it to the level of risk they want to take. Nor, for that matter, is Ford arguing that a multi-year, unrestricted grant is, in and of itself, a panacea.
“The need for this type of support does not go away after a five-year BUILD grant,” Dunning said. “While the BUILD grant can be transformative, it will not sustain the changes forever after. The [report’s] findings represent and demonstrate the need for a critical structural change in philanthropy with more BUILD-like principles and practices.” A good first step, from my vantage point, would be for funders to commit to consistent, unrestricted multi-year support in a way that aligns with their risk profile, rather than only wielding it as a short-term lifeline to grantees navigating an existential crisis.
“Put simply, more BUILD is better,” Dunning said. “In the best of all worlds, free of all constraints, nearly all funding would be a BUILD grant.”
