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Our effort, known as Building Institutions and Networks, or Build, provides long-term, flexible funding and a deep sense of partnership with grantees, which leads to impressive outcomes for social-change organizations around the world. More than 80 percent of Build grantees report that because of Build support, their work is more effective, their networks and fields are stronger, and they have been better able to take advantage of strategic opportunities and counter external threats.

Flexible funding requires foundations to be flexible in their own grant-making strategies — and to listen deeply to their nonprofit partners in developing strategy in the first place.

For grant makers willing to take the leap, many funding colleagues can show you the way. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, the Full Cost Project, and many others offer tools and resources for funders on how to make larger, longer, more flexible grants.

To meaningfully support the nonprofit sector at this time, she argues that funders must transform their practices to be more flexible and less bureaucratic. She also says that they should offer unrestricted and easy access to grant money and provide long-term support.

Successful organizations require financial systems, information technology, volunteer management and sustainable revenue streams. Part of the myth of the nonprofit world is that somehow righteousness will ultimately triumph over limited planning, crappy systems and a general scarcity of resources. But that is not the way the world works.