Reinventing Program Officers: What Makes Them Effective Today

What is a foundation program officer? The answer used to be simple: someone who ensures grant applications are processed and reports are filed on time. But huge changes in the nonprofit world driven by trust-based philanthropy, new technologies like AI, and a growing consensus that frontline nonprofits know best how to solve problems have caused many grant makers to reinvent the role. And it is starting to pay off. These foundations, their leaders say, can better understand grantees’ needs and react faster in a crisis.

At the Stryker Johnston Foundation, abolishing the program officer title was one of the first things William Buster, the foundation’s executive director, did when he started his job. Now the people who accept grant applications and send recommendations to Buster and his board are called network partners.

This is more than just a name change at the $40 million grant maker. Instead of enforcing the terms of a grant, network partners see themselves as part of the same community as the grantees they support, which includes nonprofits, governments, and businesses. The network partners take a crash course in strategic philanthropy designed by Buster, but their most essential trait isn’t learned in a class.

“The one thing I’m looking for when I’m hiring someone is how do they create relationships and how do they foster networks,” he said. “I can teach grant making, but I can’t teach how to be good at creating relationships.”

In years past, program officers put out RFPs, accepted applications and graded them, sent recommendations to foundation leaders, and zeroed in on grant reports to ensure that grantees had followed all of the contractual requirements of the grant.

But the rise of trust-based and participatory grant making and other efforts to address the power foundations have over grantees have now put a premium on “relational soft skills,” said Amber Bradley, vice president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Learning Institute, who has led several groups of program officers through training programs. Those skills include a talent for understanding a nonprofit in a context broader than just its financials, being able to clearly and completely communicate a funder’s goals, and being approachable and willing to listen to the challenges nonprofits face.   

Whether they call it a “trust-based” approach or not, Bradley said, many foundations have streamlined their paperwork and reporting processes. That has given program officers the potential to spend more time among grantees.

Add to that advances in artificial intelligence, which are beginning to play a larger role in assessing and processing applications and reports and program officers’ jobs may stress relationships even more.

“The hope is that the technological solutions will allow us to do what’s uniquely human,” she said. “Anything that can redirect program officers’ time and attention to that is, I think, likely a win.”

Deep Conversations

When Ebony English started at the Stryker Johnston Foundation earlier this year, she spent the first few months on a series of seemingly endless calls and visits with school district leaders, nonprofit staff, and community-based organizations -— both those funded by Stryker Johnston and those that aren’t.

The early conversations have revealed that child care “deserts” — areas of the region where parents don’t have access to affordable child care — are top of mind for nearly everyone she spoke with. While English and her partners haven’t come up with a solution, gathering a group of leaders across different sectors may be more helpful than the traditional program grant, which, English said operates in a vacuum. Her job, she said, is to listen deeply and do what she can to encourage more dialogue.

“The funding dollars are one tool,” she said, “But there are other tools you can use to create change. These folks could be talking to one another, and we can generate ideas.”

English and her colleagues make sure each existing grant is maximized by steering grantees to other grant possibilities, introducing them to potential partners, and identifying larger trends. “Making the next grant, that’s not the goal,” Buster said. “If you’ve funded something, you should be nurturing that investment. Don’t rush to go make another one.”

Buster is part of a group of foundation leaders influenced by Gladys Washington, former deputy director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, who died in 2024. Former mentees of Washington have taken her vision of a foundation officer’s role and put it in place at Stryker Johnson, the Colorado Health Foundation, the Dogwood Health Trust, and other grant makers. 

But Washington’s idea — that program officers should be deeply embedded in the communities they serve — has taken hold far beyond that circle of place-based grant makers.

More Site Visits, More Phone Calls

At the MacArthur Foundation, the program officers’ roles have changed over the past several years. In that time, the foundation began making more unrestricted grants and fewer program grants with tight restrictions, said Stephanie Platz, the foundation’s managing director of programs. And that has helped it quickly understand emerging challenges its grantees are facing.

Because there are fewer reporting requirements, the program officer is responsible for keeping up a strong relationship with grantees to learn about challenges — and successes — and communicate them throughout the foundation.

That work, said Platz, involves more site visits and more phone calls with nonprofits MacArthur supports. But she doesn’t consider that work strict oversight. Program officers who have strong relationships with grantees can help make sense of shifting circumstances, as happened last year when the Trump administration froze or cut wide swaths of federal spending, a lot of which went to nonprofit contractors. 

“Our program officers had to spend a lot of time person to person trying to understand at scale in different fields what the funding cuts have meant,” Platz said. “And there’s no way that AI would be able to replace a program officer doing something like that.”

The intelligence on the federal grants the program officers brought back helped MacArthur come to the conclusion the cuts were a crisis for many nonprofits. Less than a month after Trump was inaugurated, MacArthur committed to increasing its annual grant making budget by $150 million for two years.

Key to spreading that information through the foundation was what they call the cross foundation program officer.

They have regular portfolios of grantees, but they are spread across different program types. Mariam Pera, who has one of these roles, is not only responsible for managing those grants; she also communicates with program officers throughout the institution to share insights she’s learned

By informing fellow staffers about the state of grantees, Pera said, nonprofits have less of a burden trying to get funders to understand them. It helps, too, that Pera — like many recently installed program officers — is a nonprofit veteran who had to seek foundation grants earlier in her career.

“I try to really approach them with deep empathy and honesty because I spent more of my career on the other side of this conversation,” she said.

Grantees Can Be Honest

Program officers need to go out into the communities they serve and do their own “reconnaissance,” said Jehan Benton-Clark, vice president of grantmaking and strategy at the Dogwood Trust. The bureaucratic demands of the job are still necessary, and holding grantees in legal compliance and ensuring their financial statements make sense remain essential. But there is more to be learned than what is in those documents.

“They might be sitting in on a county commissioner meeting, they might be going to the opening of a new affordable housing complex, or they may be at a Chamber of Commerce community meeting,” she said. “They are really out there being present and engaging in communities in a more of an extended way.” she said.

Because Dogwood’s grants are for general operating support, it is more important for the foundation’s program officers to think holistically about a funded institution and its place in the broader community, said Kaitlynn Lovelace, a program and strategy officer at Dogwood. 

Over the past several years, Lovelace, who worked on housing issues before coming to Dogwood, has incorporated a more “generalist mindset,” she said.

On any given day, her colleague, Stephen Blount, a network associate at Dogwood, is likely to be meeting in the field in one of the 18 western North Carolina counties the $2 billion foundation serves. 

When Hurricane Helene hit in 2024, Blount and his teammates didn’t have to hunt down points of contact among responding nonprofits. They had already built relationships with those groups, Blount said. That helped the foundation quickly develop an $80 million response dedicated to direct relief, health care, mental health care, housing, and small businesses.

They found that the disaster had made a lot of organizations desperate — something they shared due to the trust Blount had built with them. “They felt they could be honest in saying where they really were, what they really needed, how things were looking, even if it was really dire and it wasn’t positive and it wasn’t shiny,” he said.  

Acting Fast With Emergency Funds

Thanks to a new concept of what a program officer is, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation has been able to act with swift efficiency during recent emergencies. 

At the foundation, they are called “network officers,” and they have to have one foot in the “nerdy, disciplined strategic assessment” camp and one foot in the “trust-based, relationship-based understanding’ of philanthropy, said Flozelle Daniels, CEO of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. 

Network officers are spread across the South, each located relatively near the foundation’s grantees. On the job, Daniels said, they are expected to be humble and “kind of disappear into the background.” 

Their job is to ascertain needs as they arise and act quickly. That’s what happened last year as federal immigration agents descended on cities, including Memphis. Babcock rushed $500,000 in emergency funding for nonprofits helping locate people who had been placed in detention. 

Similarly, Babcock’s network officers are playing a role in helping grantees in Louisiana and other states craft a response to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in April. In both cases, network officers and grantees were exchanging texts and calls as the news was happening.

Said Daniels: “Our partners didn’t have to wait for us, and we didn’t have to wait for them to call.”

Correction: A previous version of this article identified Mariam Pera as a cross functional program officer. She is a cross foundation program officer.