Four years ago, the region in which we were located was one of 21 grantees to win an EDA Build Back Better Regional Challenge award. Amy was in it deep; writing two of the component projects, then spending the first couple of years implementing those awards on the ground. This week in the Building Better Regions Community of Practice, she got to share about that experience and seeing it now through the other end of that story, the wind-down, and talk about what happens when the money ends.
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As part of that story, we want to tell you about Ivan. He was a dynamic workforce director in that regional coalition. His entire job was connective: matching what regional employers needed with the talent and programs coming out of local institutions and skills-first training. He kept that work moving. As the funding winds down, his position is winding down with it — not because the work stopped being critical to the region, but because over the four years of the award, no one took ownership to institutionalize what that key role would require when the award ended.
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Sadly, that's the pattern we see repeated across multiple regions and multiple awards. The money comes in … the money goes out … and the connective work, knowledge, learning and relationships quietly leave with it.
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Here's the reframe we offered the room, and it's the one thing we ask you to sit with, reflect on, and ask yourself the tough questions.
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Coalitions were built to stack. They are much better off learning to braid.
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A stack is how these awards train you to think. Federal dollars on the bottom, philanthropic and private capital layered on top. It's a rational response to how the incentives are designed, and so you built exactly what you were instructed to build. But a stack rests on one foundation. Pull the bottom block and the whole tower gets wobbly, Jenga-style.
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A braid is different. Weave your funding sources together (philanthropy, public dollars, corporate, memberships, earned revenue) and no single strand carries the weight of the whole. Pull one strand out and the braid still holds.
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This isn't about collecting five grants and writing five times the reports. It's one question with two parts: “what work in your region is essential enough that it has to continue no matter which funder walks away?” and “how do you fund it from more than one place?”

A mature braid around a million-dollar backbone might look like this: $300K philanthropy, $250K public, $200K corporate, $150K memberships, $100K earned revenue. The exact numbers matter less than the shape. What you're avoiding is a $750K/$250K split dressed up as diversification; that's still a stack with a bow on it.

And here's the part almost no one funds: the backbone itself.

Most money pays for programs; the visible things you can count. Underneath is the coordination: the shared strategy, the data, the trust, the reciprocal relationships, the buy-in. The invisible infrastructure that makes everything else work. Everybody values what it produces, almost no one understands how it works and nobody owns it or takes responsibility for it from the beginning of the award, not when the cliff is here. That's the trap.

The coalitions on the call this week felt this in their bones. One is designated an EDA Tech Hub but can't simply continue prior work; the mandate shifted, so the braid has to flex. Another has a state that's supportive in principle but expects programs to "just continue" without new money. A third has built a clean succession plan around a trade association, whose own funding is now uncertain, because the whole thing runs hub-and-spoke style through one organization at the center.

That's the fragility. One center point holding everything together can’t sustain the work, but a network of networks designed intentionally from the outset, can.

So critically in the first year of any major funding award and long before any funding cliff, here are five strategic questions worth taking back to your team:

1. Who owns what comes after this, by name?
2. Who funds the connective work after the award ends?
3. Who in your ecosystem can actually move new funding in 30-90 days?
4. What does everyone value the outcomes of, but nobody owns?
5. Are you in ecosystem-building mode, fundraising mode, or both at once?

Most of your coalitions have already built more leverage than you realize. The necessary threads are in your region right now (a university office doing part of it, a community foundation doing another, a corporate partner you built a stronger relationship with through a grant award). The required work isn't starting over; it's weaving together the capacity and capabilities you already have.

Because funders don't fund potential. They fund demonstrated coherence. And a braid is what coherence looks like when the money gets tight. Conversely, a stack topples over.

Keep building. The work matters. 🧵

Amy Beaird, PhD and Dawn Haynes, MBA

Co-Founders, Ecosystem Edge LLC

P.S. RTI's Build Back Better coalitions received free access to our Ecosystem Edge Scorecard ($149 value) after the session. If you’re interested to see where your own partnership braid is strong and where it frays, it's a good place to start.

📘 Field Guide: Build an Ecosystem That Can Leverage Funding Without Depending On It

We turned the five strategic questions we asked that room into an Ecosystem Edge Field Guide: Build an Ecosystem That Can Leverage Funding Without Depending On It. Five moves to make before you take on a major award, so the work survives a funding cliff instead of ending with it.

Interesting Reads

This week's conversation got us thinking about a question bigger than grant sustainability: What remains when the funding ends?

Not the programs, rather the relationships, institutional memory, governance, shared intelligence, and capacity to act.

A few recent pieces have us thinking about that from different angles:

• The institutional capacity question. The OECD's latest work on place-based policy makes the case that durable regional development depends on well-coordinated, multi-dimensional interventions — governance, coordination, and institutional capacity — not simply getting resources into a place. It's a useful reframe: the question isn't "how do we diversify our grants?" but "what conditions let a region actually turn capital into something lasting?" → Place-Based Policies for the Future — OECD​
• The funding-cliff question. Evidence from Universities Wales to the UK Parliament offers a sobering look at what disappears when regional innovation funding ends — not just projects, but the people and long-developed relationships that innovation ecosystems actually run on. When the funding ends, you don't just lose the activity. You can lose the network that made the activity possible. → Universities Wales written evidence — UK Parliament​
• The coordination question. The European Commission's work on place-based innovation puts coordination at the center — across institutions, levels of government, and funding streams. It gets at the braid as an operating system rather than a fundraising strategy. The question isn't how many funding sources you have; it's whether the institutions and pools of capital can actually act as one system. → Knowledge Exchange Platform — European Commission​
• The learning question. Investing in Place points to the least visible infrastructure an ecosystem needs: collective learning, shared sense-making, and the capacity to adapt together. A four-year coalition accumulates knowledge about what works, shared data, trust, institutional memory, and a faster ability to assemble around the next opportunity. If those things walk out the door when the grant-funded staff do, the region has lost part of its return on investment. → Investing in Place — From Service System to Ecosystem​

The thread we're pulling. The return on a major regional investment isn't just what gets built during the award. It's what the region is still capable of doing after the award is gone. The braid is the financial mechanism, but the deeper work is building regional capacity that survives capital cycles.
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