Girl's Best Friend Foundation (GBF) closed November 2007. 
GBF’s records are archived with Special Collections of the University
of Illinois, Chicago.  In fall 2008, they will be made public: www.uic.edu/depts/lib/specialcoll.

Listening to grantees

Girl's Best Friend makes a habit of asking the people in the organizations and programs we fund to tell us how we're doing and what they'd like from us. Happily, we hear a lot!

• We hired an outside consultant to survey and meet with grantees to ask for feedback and suggestions about GBF's grantmaking processes. In 2001, grantees had an enormous impact on GBF that resulted in many major changes. These included:
  
  • simplification of all grant application materials and processes
  • addition of a second grants cycle in the year, helping us nearly double our giving
  • larger grants and multiyear grants

Respondents affirmed and challenged our forthright agenda for feminist social change:

"[Their mission] is tremendous and fairly unique. GBF takes its mission seriously, and the board is eager to be innovative. They push the paradigm in the ways that they run themselves and see themselves as a work in progress. They seem eager to invent new ways of doing things and keep themselves honest."

"GBF is one of the few foundations with an agenda, a vision of the world…. This was a tough issue. We needed to maintain our own focus on our own mission. They wanted us to make girls more central to our own mission."

• GBF communications were the focus of a 2004 audit, conducted by an independent consultant. Once again, findings dramatically reshaped some of GBF's practices -- this website, in particular, is responsive to what grantees and colleagues in philanthropy told us they want.

• GBF regularly invites grantees to meet in groups to talk, question, begin to articulate good practice, and help develop new resources and training. Recent topics of grantee exchanges: negotiating adult/youth relationships, what gender consciousness looks like, and the Safe Space Toolkit.

• High-engagement philanthropy means grantee staff and GBF staff talk often and regularly about what is happening in our respective organizations and about new challenges and unanticipated opportunities that are cropping up. We all ask questions to stay on top of what we are all doing with and for girls and young women.