Effective Philanthropy

Our Work

Philanthropy plays a critical role in our education ecosystem. Through our work, Bellwether partners with funders to support the role of philanthropy in catalyzing, scaling, and supporting educational opportunity, outcomes, and success for young people.

This work includes:

Landscape Assessment and Ecosystem Mapping: Funders must deeply understand the systems, organizations, policies, and ecosystem conditions that create the context in which they operate. Landscape assessments are a powerful tool for developing insight and setting strategic direction. Bellwether partners with funders to design and execute custom landscape assessments, which often include mapping of key actors within the ecosystem, analysis of current-state outcomes and policy conditions, and investment readiness assessments. Our approach combines research and stakeholder engagement, resulting in insights that can guide strategic decision-making and investment strategy.

Strategy Development: Bellwether helps funders develop, refine, and/or strengthen their understanding of which levers can drive their intended impact, ensuring that day-to-day decisions and investments remain focused on the highest-leverage activities. We also help funders articulate how their efforts interact with others in the ecosystem to create lasting, systemic change.

Capacity-Building and Implementation: Executing strategy well requires more than a plan — it takes clarity of roles, coherence across teams, and intentional approaches for capacity-building and change management. We work alongside funders to turn strategic vision into coordinated, sustainable action and help teams stay aligned, resilient, and focused on impact in the face of ambiguity.

Coordination and Collaboration: Philanthropy’s greatest impact often comes through collective effort. We help funders identify shared goals, align investments, and build coalitions that amplify their reach and learning. From co-funded initiatives to communities of practice, we design and facilitate collaborations that harness funders’ complementary strengths and accelerate progress across the education ecosystem.

Measurement and Continuous Improvement: We help funders define what success looks like and how to learn as they go. Our team designs practical, rigorous measurement frameworks that clarify intended outcomes, surface insights, and support ongoing improvement. We balance qualitative and quantitative approaches to build shared understanding of impact — strengthening funders’ ability to assess progress, adjust course, and sustain meaningful results.

Grantee Advising: We help funders extend their impact by investing in grantee capacity. Through individualized advising and cohort-based learning, we support grantee organizations to strengthen their strategies, define success and indicators of progress, and implement with fidelity. Our approach helps grantees clarify priorities, build sustainable systems, and translate philanthropic investments into lasting results for students and communities.

Our Impact

A-Street Ventures (A-Street): Bellwether partnered with A-Street — an investment fund focused on evidence-based, equitable solutions in instructional content and measurement, teaching sustainability, and student well-being — to strengthen its theory of change, develop a logic model, and create an approach to track the impact of its portfolio companies over time. Through this partnership, we fostered strategic clarity for A-Street and provided practical ways to measure and improve its support of its portfolio companies.

Crown Family Philanthropies (Crown) and Circle of Service Foundation: Bellwether partnered with Crown and the Circle of Service Foundation to develop an early childhood grantmaking strategy that aligns with their organizational goals and the current needs of Chicago’s early learning ecosystem. Through a multifaceted approach, we assessed the city’s early childhood landscape, examined the philanthropic funding environment, and identified promising practices from other areas. Our work provided a clear perspective on where Crown’s assets and ambitions could have the greatest impact, particularly in a context where Crown was newly expanding its education investments to include early childhood. The resulting strategy offered actionable guidance to inform Crown’s future investments.

JPMorganChase Foundation: Bellwether partnered with the JPMorganChase Foundation to analyze the policy, advocacy, and technical landscape of state higher education finance, with a focus on public two-year institutions. Through this work, we surfaced critical insights about the complexity of state funding systems, the lack of policy infrastructure in many states, and the rapidly evolving field-level momentum for reform. We assessed state readiness for policy change across multiple dimensions — including funding structures, stakeholder ecosystems, political appetite, and potential beneficiaries — and identified states well-positioned for future investment. This work has informed the foundation’s strategic outlook on where and how to engage in advancing equitable, outcomes-driven postsecondary finance policy.

Charter School Growth Fund: Bellwether designed and facilitated the Charter School Growth Fund’s Strategic Growth Institute to support early-stage charter schools planning to scale into multi-school networks. Through a blend of tailored advising and collaborative cohort learning, each participating school developed a strategic growth plan, multiyear financial and staffing model, and clarified their equity-centered theory of action, instructional model, and network design. Leaders emerged from the experience with stronger leadership capacity, stakeholder engagement strategies, and practical tools to guide sustainable, high-quality growth.

Ballmer Group: Bellwether partnered with the Ballmer Group to craft a talent investment strategy to support place-based partnerships. We interviewed a broad array of stakeholders and surveyed a range of talent providers to inform a landscape assessment outlining key areas of need and opportunity. Through conversations with a working group composed of Ballmer Group partners, we helped inform a five to 10 year intended impact and set of strategies to pursue. We also developed an outcomes model and set of metrics and measures to track the impact of this work over time.

Greater Texas Foundation (GTF): Bellwether partnered with GTF to develop its 2025-2029 strategic plan. The engagement began with a comprehensive landscape scan and internal assessment to ground the planning process in both external trends and GTF’s organizational strengths. We then supported the development of GTF’s refreshed impact goals, refined grantmaking areas, and benchmarking of peer foundations to inform strategy design. Our team also offered recommendations to align the foundation’s evaluation framework and grantmaking operations to better support its new strategic direction.

Our Team

Liz Russel McNamee
Senior Associate Partner

Mark Baxter
Partner

Katrina Boone
Senior Associate Partner

Alex Cortez
Partner

Rebecca Gifford Goldberg
Managing Partner

Nick Lee
Senior Partner

Titilayo Tinubu Ali
Partner