Last year, when COVID-19 pushed us all to go indoors, we started a monthly gathering of our Believers -- called it Little Big Convening. A Convening is a 1-hour event where we invite a subject matter expert, usually from the field of nonprofit and social entrepreneurship, to share their story, insights, and resources for our community.

Pavel Reppo, the Founder and Executive Director at FineMind, shares advice on finding and building a relationship with a funder as an early stage organization.

Proximate leaders is a term that has been made famous over the past years, especially with the discourse around race, and equity in fundraising has deepened at various levels. As an organization that has directly funded 40 proximate leaders from 26 countries with $58000+ in microfunds, we have learned a great deal about the process of finding and supporting proximate leaders at a global scale. This piece will dive into that process with the goal of supporting other institutions looking to grow their strategy of supporting proximate leaders.

A quick update from Neejan Shrestha (2020 Believer) on his clean water project in Bhangeta, Nepal.

Launching our new collaboration with the Resolution Project, here is a short reflection of our first session with four brilliant non-profit leaders from Venezuela, India, Ghana, and the US!

In 2020, we continued to witness the important role micro-grants played to catalyze early stage development of non-profit and hybrid programs around the world. As we all ponder strategies to re-invigorate small business, we should not forget how indispensable emerging social changemakers are and support their immediate needs with micro-grants.

For many in the educational sector, the coronavirus pandemic presented challenges transitioning from in-person learning to virtual learning. How did we uphold the key elements of our curriculum in a virtual world and what did we need to ask more of ourselves as facilitators.

Inequality in funding opportunities for POC-led organizations and ideas is interwoven with the necessity to create long-term systems that are fair and just. Most philanthropic organizations have well-intentioned missions and visions of, broadly, making the world a better place so they are not always examined or held accountable for racial bias.

The coronavirus pandemic has affected every sector of society from small businesses, large corporations, and non-profit organizations. Times of hardship often lead to innovation and adaptation. In the midst of this crisis, entrepreneurs, who are used to sudden change, stress, and uncertainty, have had to find creative solutions to continue doing their necessary work and overcome the limitations created by the global pandemic.

Ashraf Mizo is an electrical and electronic engineer from Sudan. Around his third year in university, he started working on human-machine interface with a particular focus in prosthetics. Shortly after, he met Ali, a 40 year old man from West Sudan, a father, and unfortunately, a recent amputee. Ali had lost his hand in a horrific accident in the pipe factory he worked in…

In 1996, Omaima’s father pronounced the Hippocratic Oath. At an early age of 7, the power of helping people was engraved in her subconscious. Six years later, as she was traveling from the city of Fes in Morocco at 1 am in the morning, her father pulled over the car with a medical aid box to perform emergency field relief for a roadside accident. Her father was the only doctor on site, and with the use of a simple first aid box and moral courage, he worked tirelessly to save as many lives as possible.

Branding for nonprofits is a luxury, a driving force many grassroots, community-and-cause-based non-profits want but just can’t get started. Branding allows these organizations to acquire more resources and have more freedom over how to use them. Branding helps organizations acquire financial, human, and social resources, and build key partnerships. Yet, like Next Step, many non-profits don’t have the time or resources to create, polish and then amplify their branding.

We met Jumoke in the spring of 2017 and were struck by her passion to eradicate deaths from cervical cancer in Nigeria. She had built the technology necessary to provide cancer screenings and knew that if she could offer it to her community, it would increase the number of women who would be treated.