The Local Public Sector Alliance (LPSA) is a nonprofit organization seeking to promote inclusive, equitable societies by enriching the understanding of decentralization and localization as complex, cross-cutting, and multi-stakeholder reforms. To advance this work, LPSA engaged a Capstone team to perform a regional analysis on the empowerment of subnational governance institutions in South and East Asia. The team utilized the Local Governance Institutions Comparative Assessment (LoGICA) framework—an assessment tool that analyzes a country’s multilevel governance structure, subnational institutions, and intergovernmental systems contributing to inclusive governance, effective public service delivery, and sustainable localized development. The team conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh to compare the country's de facto versus de jure multi-level governance system, and worked with local counterparts to prepare an in-depth assessment of the country’s subnational governance institutions. The team’s final report includes a regional analysis that draws upon desk research and interviews with country experts, to be distributed among LPSA’s professional network.

Hewnoaks Artist Residency is a small nonprofit located in Lovell, Maine that provides artists the gift of space and unstructured time to advance their work. Relying heavily on support from grants, Hewnoaks engaged the Capstone team to provide evidence-based guidance and recommendations on ways to diversify its funding resources and build a better fundraising apparatus. The team completed surveys and interviews of key stakeholders and researched fundraising strategies and peer organizations that completed similar expansions. Based on its findings, the Capstone team devised an overall fundraising strategy for Hewnoaks and developed key recommendations and tools, including a three-year implementation plan, strategies for augmenting volunteer and board member engagement, fundraising event best practices, and a detailed guide to enhance the donor engagement cycle of the organization.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) innovates financial solutions to empower local governments in the least-developed countries to increase dedicated budgetary space and resources for programs that improve lives. UNCDF’s West Africa team engaged a Capstone team to identify ways to better finance service delivery within Morocco's public finance architecture. The team focused on public lighting infrastructure—an expensive budget item for municipalities—and identified an initiative to cut expenses in half. The Capstone team traveled to Morocco to interview stakeholders at the regional and national levels to refine its analysis. The team proposed the introduction of a revolving loan fund to finance upfront investment in energy-efficient public light systems, with repayment being made through cost savings realized from energy savings. The team recommended application of this approach in Morocco's Oriental Region as a scalable model to implement a revolving fund for infrastructure development, furthering the client’s mission to find local solutions to local service delivery gaps.

Jersey Cares is a nonprofit organization that leads volunteerism in New Jersey by engaging volunteers in projects that address community-identified needs. Through its successful Corporate Service Program, the organization customizes projects for corporate partners to engage their employees in volunteer initiatives. Given rapid revenue growth from this program, Jersey Cares enlisted a Capstone team to address concerns about financial management systems that can be time-consuming and prone to human error. The team designed and executed a four-phase project that entailed: 1) mapping existing revenue and expense management systems using evidence from staff interviews and organizational documents, 2) researching best practices in nonprofit financial management related to staffing, processes, and technology, 3) identifying and evaluating recommendations to improve operational efficiency and reduce risk, and 4) developing an implementation timeline informed by the client’s unique context and best practices in nonprofit change management.