New Daymark Approach to Granting and Partnerships
Since our inception, Daymark has strived to take an outside-the-box, “more than the money” approach to our grants and partnerships. The antithesis of transactional, our approach is defined by our desire to see our grantees and partners succeed and to support them in doing so. However, we recently realized that our grants management model was not aligned with these values as we leaned on more traditional reporting and oversight.
With this in mind, we brainstormed new ways to meet all of our objectives related to grants management:
Accountability: Ensuring that funds are spent in a diligent way and that progress towards objectives is being made
Evaluation: Learning about the project’s outputs and outcomes
Support: Being intentional about providing non-monetary supports to our grantees, such as help with strategy and communications
Relationships: Going beyond the project parameters to support leaders in their role and personal well-being
Learning: Both Daymark and the grantee taking a reflective approach to our work that learns from successes and challenges and applies these to future work.
Lucky for us, there was an acronym that we could make out of these (and who doesn’t love acronyms?!): LASER. This new LASER approach is also meant to empower grantees to define evaluation metrics that are relevant to them, decrease written reporting, and increase connection.
We are still testing out this new approach, but in the spirit of shared learning, we are happy to share our work-in-progress with you: