We are a nonprofit for nonprofits.
At its simplest, we build tools, training, and infrastructure that make it easier for community-focused nonprofits to grow their impact.
Communities know what they need.
The best ideas for solving society’s biggest challenges come from the communities who experience them most directly. The social sector exists to elevate these innovations, but the sector itself can be a maze of complexity and systemic barriers that make it hard for community-focused solutions to scale, let alone affect broader change.
We’re helping the social sector reach its full potential.
At HNC, we work closely with both nonprofits and funders to solve the most significant barriers they face, then we translate those solutions into more effective systems, tools, training, and infrastructure that can be shared widely across the sector.
For more than a decade we’ve been building these innovations into a comprehensive ecosystem of support designed to shift the ways we elevate community-focused impact to affect systems-level change.
Our Programs
For Nonprofits
HNC | Build
Operational Infrastructure + Shared Services
Our Build program (formerly ILS) takes the guesswork out of nonprofit setup and ongoing operational management with low cost access to fiscal sponsorship, core operational systems, shared services, and administrative support.
HNC | Grow
Sustainable Impact Growth
Our Grow program fundamentally shifts the way organizations grow their impact with perpetual access to training, coaching, and strategic support to solve the complex challenges that come up as an organization grows over time.
For Funders
HNC | Partner
Support Systems Around Grantees
Our Partner program centers around collaborative partnerships with foundations, family offices, and other funding partners to build customized ecosystems of support around the organizations, and impact they care about.
HNC’s Purpose
HNC is a pathway for community-driven leaders to build high quality, equitable, sustainable institutions.
We believe the most innovative solutions to society’s deepest challenges rise from within the communities who directly experience them, and the community leaders who drive these innovations are the most effective and profound force for creating a more just, equitable, and humane society.
The nonprofit ecosystem is riddled with complexities and systemic barriers that can hold community organizations back. Our purpose as an organization is to build a clear comprehensive pathway for community leaders to grow their work. Our programs are designed in close collaboration with the leaders we serve to provide the infrastructure, systems, and leadership support that the nonprofit system is lacking, empowering them to build effective, equitable organizations, and reach their fullest potential.
Everything we do, we do with communities—not for them.
HNC | Build
Operational Infrastructure + Shared Services
Our Build programs take the guesswork out of setting up and running a nonprofit with extremely low cost access to fiscal sponsorship, core operational systems, essential shared services, administrative training + support.
"Our partnership with HNC transcends the typical fiscal sponsor relationship. HNC helped to propel our work and their support yielded results immediately.”
— Cory Montalvo, Executive Director, YEBO
HNC | Grow
Our Grow programs fundamentally shift the way organizations grow their impact over time with ongoing access to training, coaching + support to continually solve the complex problem sets that come from growth itself.
"The tools and trackers we developed as part of Boot Camp are now part of our weekly team structures, creating momentum to drive both our impact and income.”
— Huma Babak Ebadi, Executive Director, MYPI
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Institute
HNC Institute provides bite-sized and bespoke access to our core training concepts, tools and strategies when our primary programs aren’t exactly the right fit for an organization. We help leaders set concrete goals and zero in on what forms of support will be the best fit for their organizations.
“The community of collaboration and support we experience as Collective Leaders is unlike any other. It is clear at the end of each Collective Gathering that every leader benefited in some way (and most often multiple ways).”
— Jenn White, Co-Executive Director, We Are FARMily
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Ecosystem Partners
Ecosystem Partners is an extremely low-lift funder to nonprofit relationship-building platform. It’s designed to help foundations, philanthropic organizations, and family offices find and support community nonprofits who are truly aligned with the values and impact they believe in.
Our Vision
Youth, families, and communities transform our systems & institutions to create a more equitable society.
Our Values
Humane
We focus our efforts on the human beings in front of us, and we’re careful to not lose sight of people’s humanity in favor of systems, process, or tradition.
Liberatory
We dismantle systems of oppression and replace them with systems that affirm our humanity.
Community-driven
We create solutions with (not for) communities based on what they really need.
Sustainable
We think in terms of decades, not years, and ensure that our people and our impact live long, meaningful lives.