Napa Valley Vintners Community Investment
Client: Napa Valley Vintners
Project: Community Investment
Service Area: Grantmaking Development
Content Area: Economic Mobility, Education, Health, Safety Net
Napa Valley Vintners is a winemaker membership organization that had become the largest philanthropic funder in Napa Valley through its annual wine auction, which generated more than $7 million each year for distribution to local nonprofits.
Members wanted to increase the impact of their giving and be able to demonstrate it better, so they brought in csb philanthropic solutions together with Learning for Action (LFA). With LFA, we helped the board and grant committee define the organization’s grantmaking values and identify what they wanted to accomplish.
The result was a grantmaking structure with an ongoing Community Fund to provide core support for education and health nonprofits, plus Strategic Initiative grantmaking targeted to specific larger projects. csb philanthropic solutions then worked with Napa Valley Vintners to implement the Community Fund.
We helped the grant committee refine its review and selection process and provided objective, third-party review of the first round of letters of inquiry. Once the initial grants had been awarded, we identified shared outcome measures and developed grantee reporting forms that would facilitate evaluation of the grant portfolio. Finally, we helped staff synthesize results from the first round of grantee reports to produce the first-year summary report for the board and community, documenting the outcomes and impact of the restructured grantmaking.