Capacity Building

The Dream Fund supplemented our grantmaking by offering its grantees funding and/or training to expand communications capacity and to learn from other organizations. All of our grantees were eligible to receive training and technical assistance from the Communications Consortium Media Center, which helped grassroots groups develop their capacity to communicate effectively on equal opportunity issues.

In 2008, the Dream Fund provided nine organizations with Learning Exchange grants of $5,000 each to create opportunities for sharing ideas and strategies among groups that work with similar issues or constituents. These mini-grants allowed grantees to meet face-to-face to share lessons learned from their experiences and plan coordinated projects.

The Dream Fund's Communications & Visibility grant initiative in 2009 provided $10,000 each to fifteen grantees to expand their communications capacity to reach new audiences or to increase their engagement of existing constituents and members. Groups used the funds to increase public awareness of their programmatic work by enhancing their websites, creating web platforms for online organizing, and training their staff/constituents to conduct media activities.