The Eleanor Crook Foundation (ECF) is a growing US-based philanthropy focused exclusively on global nutrition. ECF supports innovative solutions to malnutrition through three key means: (1) funding and support for nutrition implementation research in East Africa; (2) technical capacity building and funding for local East African organizations to implement high-quality nutrition programs in their own communities; and (3) coalition-building and external stakeholder engagement initiatives to leverage additional support and funding for global nutrition.

To encourage research and scale-up of effective nutrition interventions, ECF partners with NGOs and universities to conduct implementation research through its RISE for Nutrition grant program. Through RISE, ECF supports innovative approaches to improving nutrition outcomes at scale. RISE research projects seek to build the nutrition evidence-base, and test project hypotheses in real-world implementation settings. All ECF-funded research includes considerations of scalability during design, builds on country-level priorities and systems, and involves key local actors in order to ensure community buy-in and support at all stages of implementation research. ECF’s pathway to scale consists of three stages: (1) to establish the effectiveness of an intervention in a single geographic location; (2) to test promising hypotheses from stage one research in additional geographic settings. Through this additional testing, they seek to determine whether existing results can be maintained in multiple contexts; and (3) once hypotheses have proven effective in multiple contexts, ECF supports broad dissemination of results.

Through strategic coalitions and practitioner capacity strengthening, ECF catalyzes the scale-up of evidence-based nutrition innovations. With this goal in mind, ECF supports a broad range of organizations that advocate for global nutrition, food security, and more effective foreign aid. For many years ECF has focused on amplifying U.S. faith community voices on global nutrition issues. ECF also supports efforts to mobilize civil society on nutrition issues in Europe and the Global South.

Additionally, ECF promotes a hands-on approach to local capacity building through tailored technical training and direct funding for local East African organizations to implement high-quality nutrition programs in their own communities. ECF provides funding and capacity building to local organizations primarily through its Uganda Grassroots Nutrition (UGN) program. This grant program supports a new network of local, Northern Ugandan NGOs that are working to address the immediate causes of undernutrition in their communities.