Insights from Working with our Grantee Partners

Throughout the year, Gary’s Philanthropy team engages in regular one-on-one check-ins with our grantees, attends their events, engages in site visits, receives progress reports, and reviews final reports upon conclusion of their grant term. Our close connection with our grantees has yielded several key insights about transforming the systems that serve Colorado kids and families that will guide our work in 2026 and beyond.

The Power of Proximity

Across grantees, the strongest systems insights came from organizations closest to the work and to community members. Our partnership with Community Design Insight Group, a Gary venture, was instrumental in yielding quick community insights has greatly accelerated and deepened these rich insights.

Systems Change Depends on Strong, Trust-Based Relationships

Relationship capital is a core asset. The deep trust Gary staff has built with partners enables us to get close to system actors, understand their needs, co-create with them, and problem solve together. These relationships take time and yield strong results.

Adaptation, Flexibility, and Iterative Learning Are Essential

Our work with partners across all outcome areas showed that:

• strategies required adjustment due to external shocks
• experimentation surfaced better models
• data and evaluations informed real-time refinement

Policy Wins Are Maximized with Strategic Investments

Across our outcome areas, we see that:

• Investment in implementation is often lacking, but essential to lasting success.
• State agencies rarely receive outside capacity investments to operationalize reforms.
• Grantees closest to community members reveal gaps that policymakers often cannot see.

Systems change requires policy + implementation support + community insight.

Small, Strategic Investments Can Unlock Outsized Impact

Small, strategic investments can generate outsized impact when they are directed toward high-leverage moments in a system. Even modest grants can help test ideas, reveal barriers, build momentum, and create pathways for broader adoption or systems-level change. 

Systems Change Requires Working at Multiple Layers Simultaneously

Systems change is complex and requires working at multiple layers. For example, in our child care work, we’ve worked with families, family friend and neighbor providers, child care center leaders, early childhood councils, local coordinating organizations, advocacy organizations, media and storytellers, city and county administrators, state department leaders, legislators, and the Governor’s office. Engaging with multiple layers of the system increases understanding of where the system is performing well and where there are gaps, and it surfaces solutions that can be tested and iterated upon at different layers to yield system impact.

We are looking forward to building on these learnings as we advance our work in 2026 with our current and new grantee partners.