The Schott Foundation for Public Education is kicking off 2026 with an initiative it describes as a “calling-in to philanthropy” with its Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark, announced today.
Its name may be clunky, but the Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark is actually a simple tool that helps funders evaluate their grantmaking. It aims to help funders determine how flexible, long-term and innovative their grantmaking is, and to evaluate whether their support allows “organizations not just to survive, but to lead systemic change, especially important for racial justice grantees,” as Schott president and CEO, John H. Jackson, wrote in the report’s preface.
For the initial rollout, Schott joined six funders as part of the inaugural cohort that participated in the benchmarking project. It was a diverse group, including national, local, conversion, family and collaborative funders: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, The Grove Foundation, Woods Fund Chicago, Communities for Just Schools Fund and the Schott Foundation itself.
Working with the consulting group PTKO, which helped design the Benchmark framework and scoring rubric, the Schott team conducted in-depth interviews with foundation leaders and examined foundation documents and public information. These findings were synthesized and evaluated to determine funder practices across three categories: the duration of funding support, flexibility of funding, and the use of innovative funding tools. Participating funders were awarded points according to their grantmaking practices and received one of four designations: Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum.
Spoiler alert: None of the participating funders received the highest Platinum designation, and Schott itself walked away with just a Bronze. But as Jackson said in a recent interview, the Benchmark is intended as a learning tool — not a scorecard.
“The goal here is not to identify leaders and laggers but to produce a profile for a philanthropic entity that provides some insight into where they’re positioned and some shifts in practices they can make,” he said. “This is not an effort to call out philanthropy, but a calling in.”
A LEED rating system for philanthropy
The Benchmark was Jackson’s idea; he compares it to the widely used LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system.
“We wanted to develop a process that would allow us to measure the philanthropy inputs that make organizations more sustainable; it’s a process essentially very similar to the LEED building standards,” he said.
“Philanthropy, especially what I would call ‘progressive philanthropy,’ hasn’t adjusted to the new reality that we’re going to need these organizations for the long haul, so we should resource them for the long haul. Too often, we see one-year grant terms. Too often, we still see foundations that don’t support endowments. Longer-term commitments and endowments are two ways organizations are sustained.”
To develop the Benchmark, the Schott team approached a number of funders, and selected six that were willing to participate and to have the results made public. Schott also consulted with an advisory group of philanthropy-serving organizations, which acted as strategic thought partners. Members of the advisory group included The Bridgespan Group, ABFE, Grantmakers for Education, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, the National Center for Family Philanthropy and others.
Based on their grantmaking practices, two of the seven participants in the inaugural cohort received a Bronze rating, one received a Silver, and the rest received Gold designations. Each funder also received a confidential report that provided additional details regarding strengths, areas of potential improvement, and recommendations.
Michelle Morales is the president of the Woods Fund Chicago, which was part of the inaugural cohort. “I found it to be a really thoughtful and engaging process overall,” she said. “It wasn’t difficult or cumbersome. They were very intentional about talking us through the final product, making sure that we understood where we landed and why.”
The Woods Fund is a small, regional funder, but it’s one to watch; it began increasing its payout rate during COVID and hasn’t stopped, as my colleague Dawn Wolfe has reported. Its payout reached 14% last year, and will go to 15% this year, putting it far ahead of most funders. Still, Woods received a Silver Benchmark designation rather than a Gold or Platinum. Morales said that is in part because the fund is just starting the process of aligning its investments. “We just hired a new investment manager and a new managing firm, and we’re going to be rewriting our investment policy statement. And we want to start looking into what regional impact investing can look like. But that’s all work that’s going to start this year.”
The Woods Fund also doesn’t do participatory grantmaking, Morales said, “Partly because our grantees have asked us not to, because they’re too busy. So there were questions about steps we haven’t taken based on feedback from grantees, or we’ve just started those aspects of the journey.”
Morales believes that other foundations would benefit from the process. “It’s always helpful to see where you land in respect to your colleagues,” she said. “We’re a foundation that considers itself pretty progressive, and yet we hadn’t met all the benchmarks, right? I think that was good for us to see — yeah, a little humbling to see — that we still have a way to go in certain aspects of our work. It was useful for us and I think could help me as an ED articulate — even to my board — how much further we still have to go.”
In a quote included in the report, Richard Tate, president and CEO of The California Wellness Foundation, another Benchmark participant, said, “The Benchmark provokes us to ask: Who gets to operate in perpetuity? Who gets to last? It’s about expanding the freedom that comes with financial independence — the ability for organizations to set their own agendas, act independently and chart their own paths.”
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Next steps for Schott’s Sustainable Grantmaking Benchmark
Going forward, Schott hopes to work with more funders and to release new versions of the Benchmark biennially. It has other plans, including a digital tool called “Pathways to Platinum,” and would like to incorporate other elements, like racial justice impact, for example, into the Benchmark.
The Schott team is also considering developing different versions of the Benchmark for different types of philanthropic entities. Its own experience is illustrative: As a funding intermediary, its capacity to give grants is limited, which accounts, at least in part, for its Bronze designation. (The Communities for Just Schools Fund, another Benchmark participant, is also a pass-through organization and also received a Bronze.)
Jackson admitted that he was shocked, initially, when Schott received a Bronze, but pointed to the foundation’s structure. “As an intermediary, we raise funds to distribute them for impact, and so the commitments that we can make are often based on the commitments that other institutional foundations make to us,” he said. “Going forward with the Benchmark, we want there to be a pathway for every type of institutional foundation or donor to achieve Gold or Platinum status. Bronze is just the starting point.”
A time to “double down” on long-term, sustainable support
The Trump administration’s threats against American institutions, including philanthropy, may be having a chilling effect for some in the sector, but they haven’t changed the direction of Schott’s work. The foundation hasn’t backed away from terms like equity or racial justice, for example, or from work to advance those goals.
For Jackson, the Benchmark initiative, with its goal of strengthening nonprofits, is a key part of that work. “What this moment has made clear is the fight for racial justice and education justice is not a fight that is going to be determined by a moment of winning or a moment of losing, but it’s a process of progress and setbacks,” he said. “If you look at the arc of progress, when there are moments of setback, organizations need to be resourced to continue to advance that progress. We’re in a moment when there have been some setbacks. That does not mean we should retreat in our support for organizations working for racial justice and equity. It means that we have to double down.”
In fact, many conservative funders have engaged in the sustainable funding practices the Benchmark effort advocates for a long time, as Patti DeBow, PTKO’s president and COO, pointed out in the report. “We’ve known for years that right-leaning foundations use 10-, 20- and even 30-year grants to fuel their causes with sustained resources,” she said. “We’re seeing the success of those commitments play out on a national stage today.”
Jackson echoed this point. “Philanthropic donors on the extreme right have already institutionalized these practices; they’ve made long-term commitments and large gifts to fund endowments,” he said. “It’s the more progressive funders that have yet to institutionalize this approach. We would like to see these sustainable grantmaking practices a part of a playlist across the board among institutional foundations and individual donors.”
