PhilanTopic

To Innovate…Collaborate

(Paul Grogan is president and CEO of the Boston Foundation. His blog, City of Ideas, appears regularly on the Boston Foundation Web site.)

"If we put our heads together, we might be able to figure this out."

It's a bit of folk wisdom that often rings true -- and for a number of years, the Boston Foundation has highlighted the opportunity for collaborations and mergers to tackle otherwise intractable problems.

In 2010, we co-founded the Catalyst Fund for Nonprofits, a five-year, $1.925 million fund in partnership with local funders Boston LISC, the Hyams Foundation, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, and the national Kresge Foundation. The idea behind nonprofit mergers isn't cost savings -- in a high-touch world like ours, there is only so much excess you might be able to trim in a merger. Rather, it's all about service. Organizations that merge and/or collaborate build capacity to do more of what they do best, and do it even better.

In Boston, the much-publicized merger of the Pine Street Inn for the homeless and hopeFound, a job training nonprofit serving the same client base, has proven a success, as demonstrated in a recent assessment of the Catalyst Fund's work and in a profile in the Boston Globe. The merger has allowed the two organizations to connect their respective job training programs and opportunities in a way they likely never would have as separate entities, and the results have been remarkable.

But to succeed, we also need to see the power of a more grassroots-level of collaboration. In that vein, we launched our first-ever Collaborate Boston competition this winter. The premise was simple: We'd pose a problem and then open the floodgates to proposed solutions, with one important restriction -- all the proposals had to bring together organizations in collaborative efforts to address the issue.

What we hoped to achieve was slightly more than that. We wanted to inspire organizations that didn't normally talk, or talk as much as they should, to work together toward a specific outcome.

For the initial competition, we put up $100,000 in prizes for collaborations that focused on "improving the lives and futures of black & brown boys and young men, ages 9-15, living in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan." Seventy different collaborations applied and had their applications reviewed by a remarkable advisory committee comprised of business, government, nonprofit, and philanthropic leaders. Twelve made the finals and made an in-person pitch for their projects, and in the end two were selected.

Black and Latino Boys at the STEM of Success partners a Boston Public Schools office, a university STEM center, a Latino STEM group, and one of the state's largest construction firms in a collaboration to create neighborhood-based robotics teams and provide academic and social support. The other, the Codman Square Brotherhood Project, brings together neighborhood arts, business, ministerial, and men's groups with neighborhood police to create a supportive infrastructure, a brotherhood, for boys age 10-14 in Dorchester's Codman Square section.

Last week, the two winners presented their plans to about one hundred and fifty funders, donors, and civic and community leaders. (You can watch their presentations on the Boston Foundation YouTube channel.) All twelve finalists were invited to attend the celebration and take the opportunity to network, share ideas, and maybe even find funding for their efforts. The conversation was lively, the mood was celebratory, and ideas and connections were abundant.

It's a conversation we in philanthropy need to encourage, because the power of effective collaboration and mergers can only serve to amplify the best of our creativity, innovation, and ideas.

We’ll be working to ensure that the conversation continues, and that organizations looking for broader partnerships and collaborations to enhance their work continue to have the support they need.

Because if we put our heads together, we might be able to figure some things out.

-- Paul Grogan

Weekend Link Roundup (June 1-2, 2013)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

Guest blogging on the Inside Philanthropy blog, Katherine McLane, vice president for communications and external affairs at the Livestrong Foundation, explains how the organization plans to move on from the doping scandal involving its founder, international cycling star and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. "None of us anticipated the rapid and radical changes that are now the new normal," writes McLane. "But we're dusting ourselves off and keeping the focus where it should be: helping people with cancer...."

Community Improvement/Development

The folks at the Philanthropy Potluck blog give a shoutout to MCF member the Bush Foundation, which has launched two new grant programs designed to "enable, inspire, and reward community innovation" in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the twenty-three Native nations that share the same geography.

Fundraising

On the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog, Carol Weisman, an international consultant who specializes in fundraising, governance, and volunteerism, shares some advice about "what to do when donors say 'no' or 'I'm not sure'."

Grantmaking

On the GrantCraft blog, Rosien Herweijer shares links to a handful of "visual summaries" for grantmakers in Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish.

Leadership Development

"What if, instead of barreling ahead, relentlessly focused on keeping their organizations afloat (until they burn out trying), effective nonprofit leaders started delegating more and more responsibility to staff -- at once paving the way for a next generation of leaders, and freeing themselves to think about their own leadership in more expansive ways?" asks Stefan Lanfer, knowledge officer at the Boston-based Barr Foundation. "And what would emerge if, at the same time, a critical mass of these great leaders become a great network?" These are the questions the foundation set out to explore in creating the Barr Fellowship, a network of nonprofit leaders whose stories of personal, organizational, and city transformation are now featured in three short films: Reflection and Rejuvenation, The Power of Disruption, and Social Capital & Emergence.

Regulation/Oversight

As the Internal Revenue Service continues to deal with political the mess created by its exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, Lucy Bernholz suggests on her Philanthropy 2173 blog that the real issue has more to do with the money flowing into political campaigns and less to do with "incompetence and mismanagement" at the IRS. "For this there are two...solutions," adds Bernholz.

[F]irst, fund candidates and parties directly and require full disclosure of all such gifts. This is was what campaign finance looked like before Watergate revealed the cracks in the system and we responded by taking the first steps to today's broken system. The second...is to provide public money for campaigns and not allow private gifts above a certain percentage. This is what Larry Lessig has been promoting with Rootstrikers. It's appealing, but even Lessig recognizes it's very slim chances of happening under current conditions (which is why he's also calling for a Constitutional convention).

There is a third way that has nothing to do with stopping the flow of money in, but instead focuses on the flow of money out. Most of the dollars raised go to broadcasting candidates’ messages. If we made air time (television and radio) free to candidates and campaigns, limited the length of campaigns to a certain period of time and gave everyone the same amount of airtime (on those publicly owned, privately leased airwaves of ours) we’d kill the beast of demand and supply would wither in response....

Social Media

According to analyst Mary Meeker's annual review of Internet trends, mobile usage globally will continue to grow rapidly over the next twelve months, writes Katya Andresen on her Non-Profit Marketing blog. According to Andresen, Meeker also predicts that multimedia content will continue to dominate on the Net, that social media usage will continue to grow, and that organizations will discover "it’s nearly impossible not to have full transparency -- whether that’s coming from your organization or those talking about you."

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a good week!

--The Editors

Partnering With State Governments to Strengthen Families: Early Lessons From the Work Support Strategies Initiative

(Luis A. Ubiñas is president of the Ford Foundation. This commentary is adapted from a forthcoming Urban Institute report, available online starting June 4, that includes an array of perspectives from leaders about practical lessons emerging from the Work Supports Strategies initiative.)

Over the past half-decade, as the country has suffered through a deep, persistent economic downturn, America's work support programs have served as an essential backstop for millions of working families struggling to keep a toehold in the labor market. For many families, supports such as child care subsidies, health insurance and unemployment assistance, and food stamps have been the difference between staying together and dissolution.

Yet in dozens of states, lean budgets and antiquated, underresourced work support systems are failing to meet the needs of America's working poor. Problems that were evident in better times have become more intractable, even as caseloads have expanded. How can states improve the health and well-being of low-income families, stabilize their work lives, and make it possible for family breadwinners to get and keep a job if they are unable to get basic work supports to those who are eligible?

Solving such a challenge goes to the heart of what all of us in the philanthropic community do on a daily basis: tackling major problems at a scale that results in real and enduring change -- in this case, creating opportunity for low-income populations and keeping low-income workers in the workforce.

That's why the Ford Foundation, along with the Annie E. Casey, Kresge, and Open Society foundations, is proud to support the Work Supports Strategies (WSS) initiative, a multiyear demonstration project directed by the Urban Institute, with technical assistance from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. WSS is partnering with nine states -- led by governors from across the political spectrum -- to design, test, and implement easy-to-navigate quick-to-deliver operating changes to public work support systems that keep employees in the work force and families together. Many of these changes have the further benefit of reducing the cost of running the programs.

More than a year after we launched the initiative, the progress in fixing what was described in one state as a "completely dysfunctional, broken system" has been greater than any of us could have imagined. In some cases, the changes spurred by WSS had an impact on pilot offices or counties; in others, statewide changes affected tens of thousands of families. For example, in Colorado, state and county staff trimmed their work support application from twenty-six pages to eight; in Rhode Island, the Providence office implemented same-day service to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants, enabling clients to obtain work support after just one visit; and in South Carolina, the Express Lane Redetermination program preserved health coverage for tens of thousands of children -- and is projected to save the state $1 million a year in operating costs -- by using data in families' SNAP records to certify eligibility.

Taking advantage of new technologies, streamlined bureaucracies, and operating processes borrowed from the private sector, many states are strengthening the customer experience and reducing the burdens on state workers. Beyond our nine partners, these efforts are already serving as models for other states.

For those of us in the philanthropic community, the work of WSS offers three important lessons for future partnerships between foundations and state governments.

First, as any philanthropic funder will tell you, the idea of working directly with the public sector often meets with resistance. Foundations fear being placed in the middle of ideological disputes or paying for services that are the government's responsibility to deliver. But such trepidation, though hardly unjustified, shouldn't be an excuse for inaction; the opportunities are too great. After all, where else can funders meet their goals of supporting initiatives that scale, create impact, and are sustainable? Federal and state governments remain the largest source of resources targeted at the issues that drive our work. As the progress of the initiative so far demonstrates, when a project has clear goals and strategies, funders can successfully partner with public agencies.

Second, one of the by-products of the budget crisis has been the elimination of state resources for and attention to "research and development." Despite the fact that many agencies running work support programs have budgets of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at their disposal, the flexible funding to promote ongoing innovation, modernize operating processes, and use data to improve operational effectiveness has all but vanished. While it shouldn't be a surprise that state leaders increasingly are compelled to devote dwindling resources to direct benefits rather than innovation, the result often is greater inefficiency and poorer distribution of services. By providing the kind of technical assistance and peer learning that leaders and staff of public systems need as they embark on the task of modernizing large bureaucracies, that's exactly where foundations can be most helpful. Quite simply, without foundation engagement these work support systems would continue to underserve their recipients and burden taxpayers with unnecessary operating costs.

Finally, tough budget times are a reason to engage, not disengage. With work support offices stretched thin and the current squeeze on state budgets, one might imagine that helping those in need -- rather than making investments in improving the efficiency of state government -- would take priority. But if you look at the early response from twenty-seven states to the initial request for proposals and the dedicated work of the nine states chosen to participate in the first year of the WSS project, the desire for ideas and resources to modernize the safety net -- in both red states and blue -- is overwhelming. With states aspiring to do better, this is a great opportunity for foundations to step in and ensure that this current crisis becomes an opportunity to make lasting changes in how we deliver work support benefits across the country.

Philanthropy has a proud history of convening disparate groups and seeking common ground based on practical solutions. The result has been an impressive mix of programs that make a real difference in the lives of individual Americans -- and often bring people together. The WSS initiative aspires to that tradition, and we hope the lessons it is yielding inspires even more partnerships for the betterment of the most vulnerable in our society.

-- Luis Ubiñas

Introducing the 'Open Places' Initiative

(Kenneth H. Zimmerman is director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Foundations. The post originally appeared on the OSF's Voices blog.)

Across the United States, local communities face an ever more challenging environment: dramatic shifts in federal and state funding, advances in technology, and large-scale demographic change. Each of these affects how low-income communities and communities of color are able to access political, economic, and civic opportunities. In response to these shifts, the Open Society Foundations is launching a new effort, the Open Places Initiative, to advance the ability of local communities to achieve equal opportunity and promote vibrant democratic practices.

As part of the initiative, planning grants of roughly $100,000 each have been awarded to eight sites. The awards will enable an assortment of nonprofits in each of these places to plan how to create sustainable change in areas such as effective and accountable government, civic engagement, criminal justice reform, and equal educational opportunity.

In late 2013, OSF will award up to five of these sites long-term implementation grants of up to $1 million a year, for a minimum of three years -- and, potentially, a full decade.

The eight sites selected to receive grants are Albuquerque, New Mexico; Buffalo, New York; Denver, Colorado; Jackson, Mississippi; Louisville, Kentucky; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; San Diego, California; and Puerto Rico. We are pleased with the geographic diversity of these sites as well as the diversity of communities represented.

The Open Places Initiative begins with the premise that local knowledge and assets are fundamental to the creation of inclusive and open places. Yet, local conditions are changing significantly. Local governments face unprecedented demands due to budget constraints, and the nonprofit sector is facing significant funding challenges. At the same time, increased access to information is transforming community engagement on pressing issues. Nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and civic groups need to adapt to the new circumstances. One of the primary goals of the initiative is to increase the ability of each place to extend beyond current agendas, strategies, and capabilities.

The initiative draws on our experience with our urban social justice laboratory, OSI-Baltimore, which tests the effectiveness of various place-based strategies to address some of the biggest challenges facing Baltimore and other urban centers in the U.S. We are also drawing on the experience of other foundations and public-sector efforts, and look forward to collaborating with them going forward.

During the next few months, each site will select its specific areas of focus in response to pressing local priorities -- and, in each case, will incorporate multiple issues and tools into its planning.

While the sites are just now beginning the planning process, they have already noted some areas of focus. In addition to increasing local civic capacity to bring about long-term change, the preliminary goals of the different projects include advancing fair and inclusive economic development and fiscal policy, integrating immigrants into the larger community, reducing rates of incarceration, helping high school students graduate in greater numbers, addressing the enduring impact of residential segregation, and creating pathways to the middle class for low-wage workers.

We anticipate the initiative will enable the collaborations to identify and address needed skills and capacities, effectively access national and local resources, and further develop the approaches needed to address complex issues. In doing so, the Open Places sites will successfully develop more innovative and coordinated approaches to these and other challenges over the long term. While local equity and justice issues are likely to vary over time, what will remain constant is the need to bring together different groups -- residents, business leaders, state and local officials, nonprofits -- to mobilize and advance needed reform.

We are committed to supporting the Open Places sites as they develop and refine their approaches to making lasting and positive change. In addition to financial resources, we will be providing technical assistance as well as facilitating connections among sites and introductions with leading national organizations and institutions.

We heartily congratulate the groups that won planning grants. We look forward to gleaning lessons from the work that comes out of the initiative for replication in other cities, regions, and states, and believe that work has tremendous potential to help all of us chart a new course for our cities and regions.

-- Kenneth Zimmerman

'Funding for the Arts' Month: Arts and Community Engagement

(Kyoko Uchida is features editor at Philanthropy News Digest. In her last post, she provided some background on the deteriorating situation in Syria through the lens of half a dozen foundation-sponsored publications.)

In a commentary piece on Philanthropy News Digest earlier this month, Sharon DeMark, a program officer for the arts at Minnesota Philanthropy Partners, argued for expanding the definition of arts engagement in grantmaking. While citing examples of arts institutions that are experimenting with new ways to attract younger and more diverse audiences, DeMark also noted that the lion's share of grant dollars goes to a handful of large, established organizations, and that there is ample opportunity for funders to identify and support smaller, lesser-known groups and individual artists.

One example mentioned by DeMark that elicited comment was the Walker Arts Center's recent Internet Cat Video Festival, which showcased short videos curated by an online community from among more than ten thousand submissions. "Think expansively, yes," one comment on DeMark's piece read. "Pander to the lowest common denominators and call it the arts, no." Fair enough, but if the subject hadn't been cat videos, would this kind of crowdsourcing be considered "pandering"? Whatever your view of cat videos, there are any number of contests in which the public are invited to vote for their favorite arts organization to receive funding; for example, five South Florida nonprofit arts groups currently are competing for votes via text message to win $20,000 in the first Knight Arts Challenge People's Choice Awards. While it goes without saying that online popularity contests are in many ways a flawed mechanism for awarding philanthropic support, they have been shown to engage more diverse audiences in the arts by giving them a say in directing support to less established groups and artists.

I believe in art for art's sake, but isn't support for broad participation in the arts important because it sustains us, not only as individuals but as a community? In other words, active engagement in the arts by more diverse audiences not only is a way to ensure the long-term sustainability of arts organizations, it also serves to strengthen community and social cohesion by enabling different segments of society to experience together how various cultures define, make, and enjoy art. To wit, the James Irvine Foundation's new arts funding strategy aims "to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians -- the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts, and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment." Specifically, the foundation seeks to grow and deepen arts engagement among low-income and/or ethnically diverse populations that have been traditionally underserved by arts nonprofits; support new ways of creating or curating art, including via digital technology; and encourage the use of non-traditional spaces in art making.

As DeMark noted in her commentary, more grantmakers also are coming to recognize the role the arts play in economic development and community revitalization. As documented by Americans for the Arts in its Arts & Economic Prosperity series, the nonprofit arts sector generates significant revenues, both direct and indirect, for communities in which those activities take place. But it also contributes to a stronger sense of social cohesion. Indeed, according to Civic Health and Unemployment II: The Case Builds, a report from the National Conference on Citizenship, communities with a robust ecosystem of nonprofit organizations that engage directly with residents tend to have lower unemployment rates.

In exploring how a broader definition of arts engagement can help strengthen communities, we should also consider how arts participation affects educational outcomes. According to The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four Longitudinal Studies, a report from the National Endowment for the Arts, socially and economically disadvantaged youth who are exposed to and involved in the arts earn better grades, graduate from college at higher rates, and are more likely to volunteer, vote, and participate in politics as adults than their peers with little exposure to the arts. Given that budgets for arts education in public schools are under pressure, support for broad participation at the community level in non-traditional venues and formats -- including inviting the public to submit art, curate the work of others, and vote for funding online -- is an essential element of philanthropic efforts to bolster community vitality and economic development.

What do you think about expanding participation in the arts as a way to strengthen broader engagement in the community? Does engagement in the arts foster economic resilience in local communities? And if it does, are private funders doing enough to make it happen? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

(Image: Irrigate, a partnership between the City of Saint Paul, Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and Springboard for the Arts)

 

[Commentary] If Nonprofits Fail

Jennifer Talansky is vice president of knowledge and communications at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national nonprofit that provides a continuum of financing, consulting, and advocacy services to nonprofits and funders nationwide. Talansky held previous marketing positions at Credit Suisse Asset Management, Partnerships for Parks, Hearst Magazines Brand Development, and JP Morgan's Private Client Group.

Recently, the Nonprofit Finance Fund released the results of its 2012 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey. The response to those results has varied widely based on who is interpreting the data. While many who are well-acquainted with the long history of the sector's financial woes saw the results as confirmation of their own experiences, some saw the results and told us, "That doesn't look so bad!" This divergence of perspective about what constitutes a healthy nonprofit sector begs the question: What is an acceptable level of instability -- or even failure -- within the sector?

Nonprofit financial health can be an abstract and technical subject. Let me start with a look at something more familiar. I live in New York City, where there's a pizza joint on almost every corner. Unless she has a favorite or is a friend of the owner, most New Yorkers don't blink if one of these pizza places goes out of business. Heartless as it may seem, it's the kind of economic Darwinism that one grows used to in a city with high commercial rents and an overabundance of almost everything.

Yet, there are repercussions to this kind of churn beyond a more limited pizza choice. The revenue once generated by the shuttered pizza joint supported the owner or group of owners, their families, other dependents, and employees. Its taxes contributed to the maintenance and expansion of the city's infrastructure, including teachers, police, and trash pickup. Perhaps the owners also donated to a local charity, or gave their time to a local business association. And because their basic needs were covered, the pizza shop owners and employees probably did not need to access some of the social safety-net services that a growing number of people in the city have come to rely on. With the failure of that one pizza place, the community lost all the economic and social good that was bound up in it.

Now let's take my example a step further and shift our thinking to the nonprofit sector. Like the pizza place, nonprofits contribute to their local economies in a variety of ways, including rent, the regular purchase of supplies, job creation, and more.

But imagine that the "business" at risk of failing is a domestic violence shelter. And that we're no longer in New York City but instead in a rural community in the Midwest. And that this particular shelter is the only safe haven for women and children within fifty miles. Is it acceptable from a community perspective if the shelter only has enough money to cover the next thirty days of its expenses, as is the case for one in four of the more than forty-six hundred organizations we surveyed? Or that it's like the 50 percent of survey respondents that don't expect to have the resources to keep up with demand for their services in 2012?

One of the more powerful aspects of the survey is its reflection of the collective voice of the organizations working to provide some of the most critical social services in our communities. But we mustn't succumb to statistical numbness: the survey numbers aggregate many individual stories, and each of those stories has local -- or wider -- meaning. For instance, it sounds great that "only" 20 percent of the organizations responding to the survey had to reduce or eliminate programs in the past year. Yet among these nine hundred organizations, 63 percent were unable to keep up with demand for their services. From Georgia to Texas to Montana, this simple fact has serious repercussions for the populations and communities that depend on those organizations and services.

Indeed, consider what a leader of one of those organizations told us: "We have seen a dramatic increase in the need for our services. As available resources decrease across the country, the demand for basic needs continues to grow....Domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness among women and children in the nation. It takes more than a roof over [one's] head to break the cycle of homelessness, particularly when domestic violence is involved....Our greatest challenge is securing a steady stream of revenue and funding for services and programs."

So when we look at the numbers, it may seem like a small victory that "only" 31 percent of survey respondents finished 2011 with a deficit -- which means the other 69 percent either broke even or ended the year with a surplus. And yet, among the more than twelve hundred organizations that said they ran a deficit in 2011, 39 percent were human services organizations -- precisely the kind of organizations that provide the basic safety-net services that the most vulnerable in our communities rely on -- while another 15 percent work to educate our children.

And as if that's not sobering enough, when respondents filled out the survey in late January, 34 percent of those with a deficit in 2011 were already anticipating operating in the red in 2012. Are the rest of us willing to accept the possibility that, with two (or more) consecutive years of deficits on the books, many of these organizations may have to shut their doors? Do we, as a society, have a plan to replace the critical services they provide? The answers to those questions are unclear, the stakes are high, and, unfortunately, failure is a possibility.

NFF launched its annual sector survey in January 2009, during the darkest days of the recession. The nonprofit financial picture painted in the response to that first year's survey was pretty grim. Our hope, as the economy improved (albeit slowly) in the three-plus years since then, is that we would see a similar positive shift in the nonprofit sector's finances. That has not been the case and any improvements along the way have been modest.

Let's be honest: Business as usual is not working. The business models, revenue sources, and practices that have long been mainstays of the nonprofit sector are no longer adequate to see us through the challenging times that lie ahead. We must consider other approaches that tap new sources of money, generate new cross-sectoral partnerships and ideas, and help identify new solutions to persistent social problems. Because without fundamental change -- change that involves both innovation and more risk taking -- we will see the same disappointing results year after year. And that's a prospect that none of us should be willing to tolerate.

To see the results from the most recent NFF survey and from past annual surveys, please visit http://nonprofitfinancefund.org/survey. For individual stories behind the numbers, the "In their Words" section is likely to be of special interest. And for a more localized look at a particular sub-sector or state, we encourage you to check out our new NFF Survey Analyzer, which lets you easily filter the data in multiple ways.

-- Jennifer Talansky

Weekend Link Roundup (June 9-10, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

What to do when people say bad things about your organization online? Before you respond in kind, take a deep breath -- "then suck it up and deal," writes Network for Good's Katya Andresen on her Non-Profit Marketing blog. "As long as the person isn't a troll, he or she deserves to feel heard, acknowledged and understood. I've found some of my biggest fans were initially critics. By taking the high road with them, I won them over and learned something from them in the process...."

Community Improvement/Development

After looking at how Kepler's, an independent bookstore in Menlo Park, California, is using crowdsourcing and other digitally enabled techniques to reinvent its business model, Philanthropy 2173's Lucy Bernholz asks: "If you run an institution that thinks it has a community purpose...what would your community do for you?"

Corporate Grantmaking

Here at PhilanTopic, the Foundation Center's Andrew Grabois shares the news that the center has begun to add CSR data to Foundation Directory Online. "Appearing as a separate tab on individual company profiles," writes Grabois, "more than fourteen hundred companies will have at least one CSR measure that users of FDO can incorporate into their prospect research."

Leadership

"If we're going to be the leaders of 'learning organizations', we need to be learners ourselves," writes GuideStar president and CEO Bob Ottenhoff on the GuideStar blog. "That means sharing problems and opportunities with not only your closest allies, but also building a network of interesting people we can learn from...."

Nonprofit Management

At the Philanthropy Potluck blog, Susan Stehling of the Minnesota Council on Foundations discusses the benefits of collaboration, with a focus on what collaboration expert Karen Ray calls the "four phases of alliance" –- cooperation, coordination, collaboration, and consolidation.

Philanthropy

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Christine Reeves recaps a recent event at the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement dedicated to Inderjeet Parmar's new book Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. Reeves writes that she was disappointed the panelists -- which included Parmar, Thomas Asher of the Social Science Research Council, Kathleen McCarthy of the Graduate Center of CUNY, and Patricia Rosenfield of the Rockefeller Archives Center –- did not get around to discussing "truly urgent and important questions such as:

How can philanthropy be more responsive to disparities, diseases, hunger, discrimination, poverty and other urgent issues of our time? How can philanthropy, nonprofits and marginalized communities partner together to leverage philanthropy’s limited dollars? How can we shift the philanthropic power conversation away from the power of philanthropic institutions and towards empowering historically underrepresented populations or fostering equality of opportunity? [And how] can we all better understand, attack and solve the important and urgent problems that disproportionately affect marginalized communities?...

Instead, the panelists discussed what Andrew Carnegie might have done today, a hundred years after founding the Carnegie Corporation. But, writes Reeves, the questions that went unanswered "need to be at the forefront of philanthropy, and [they] require all the time, talented people, and resources we can give them...."

Social Media

On her blog, Beth Kanter shares a very good "remix" of a Link Building by Imitation presentation that highlights the differences between good and bad content curation.

Last but not least, in a guest post at the Philanthropy 411 blog, Brad Aronson offers twenty-two tips for nonprofits interested in extending their reach and impact through social media.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

--The Editors

Why LISC? It Starts With a Cold Call

(Michele Sullivan is vice president of the Caterpillar Foundation. A version of this post appears on the LISC Web site.)

Not unlike most cities in the U.S., Peoria, Illinois, and its surrounding communities have areas where existing businesses have left and economic development has ceased, housing is crumbling, crime and unemployment are high, and public transportation is inadequate or nonexistent. Yet, the residents of these areas have the same desires as everyone else. They want a safe place to live and raise their children, a job they like, local neighborhood businesses to shop in, and a neighborhood they can be proud of.

Peoria is blessed to have a strong base of nonprofit organizations to help families in blighted neighborhoods that are struggling with the problems mentioned above. While the Caterpillar Foundation supports many of these organizations, we recently found ourselves asking, Why aren't these neighborhoods thriving?

As we thought about that question, it became evident that nonprofits and stakeholders in the community were treating symptoms, not causes, and that the greater Peoria area needed an organization to help redevelop blighted neighborhoods and address challenges such as affordable housing and high crime rates. What's more, those efforts were needed not just within Peoria proper; poverty and high unemployment extend beyond the city limits. Which got us wondering: Does such an organization exist?

Be honest. Everyone rolls their eyes when a cold call comes in. Steve Sagner, head of development for LISC, came calling in February 2011. LISC was fundraising and wanted an investment from the Caterpillar Foundation. Doubt turned to curiosity. As the conversation turned to what LISC had to offer, my team and I began to think this was just what Peoria needed. With a thirty-year track record of revitalizing communities in need, LISC would take the lead in mobilizing all available resources for job training, business development, affordable housing, child care, and more. By the end of the call, LISC agreed to do an assessment of Peoria for a possible future office.

The assessment was soon completed and the news got better. LISC agreed that Peoria fit its organizational model. And while it admitted it had not worked in a metro area which required a rural and urban strategy, it was confident it could deliver results. To be honest, we weren't sure. But the day LISC program VP Anika Goss-Foster took us to visit the Auburn Gresham neighborhood in Chicago was the day all the dots got connected. When we saw that thriving neighborhood, the 'Net center full of people on computers working on resumes and reading USA Today, the new Walgreen's, the financial office for residents, and, most importantly, the pride of local residents, we knew that making an investment in bringing LISC to Peoria was the right idea at the right time.

Caterpillar, Inc. -- and by extension the Caterpillar Foundation -- promotes the health, welfare, and economic stability of communities around the world where its employees work and live. One such community is Peoria, Illinois, our hometown and global headquarters. LISC's expertise and experience, coupled with Peoria's strong nonprofit base and support from the city and county, has convinced us that the residents of the greater Peoria area have a much brighter future to look forward to.

Has your view about cold calls changed? Ours sure has.

-- Michele Sullivan

[Infographic] Playgrounds That Build Communities

Nice infographic from the folks at KaBoom!, a national nonprofit dedicated to creating great playspaces with the participation of community members, and the Knight Foundation, which today announced that it is providing $1.5 million to the organization for the construction of nine additional playspaces in Akron, Ohio, Miami, and Detroit.

 

The grant announcement coincides with the release of a report, KaBOOM!: Playgrounds That Build Communities (exec summary, 10 pages, PDF), that provides lessons for groups seeking to engage volunteers in community change efforts. Based on a Public/Private Ventures evaluation of Knight-funded KaBoom! projects in five states and the District of Columbia, the report found that:

• The majority of KaBoom! project planning committee members believed they had developed or improved in a variety of skills related to organizing, leading, and executing large-scale change efforts.
• Most of the respondents to the survey reported positive changes across a variety of skills, abilities, and attitudes related to their community.
• All the community partners showed increases in their organizing and leadership skills, and many went on to apply these skills to other efforts post-playground build.
• Much of the effort involved in building a KaBoom! playspace is mutually reinforcing: Planning committee members and community partners become more skilled and confident through the effort, which enables the participating organization to employ participants' skills in other and more ambitious tasks.
• After participating in a KaBOOM! project, planning committee members expressed a greater sense of hopefulness that they can improve their communities by working with others.

To download the full report (58 pages, PDF), click here.

 

The L.A. Riots, Twenty Years Later: A PubHub Reading List

Last Sunday, April 29, was the twentieth anniversary of the start of what became known as the Los Angeles Riots -- four days of civil unrest and violence sparked by the acquittal of white LAPD officers who had been captured on video in March 1991 brutally beating Rodney King after a high-speed car chase through the San Fernando Valley. In the days that followed the verdict, Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, and a Guatemalan immigrant were brutally beaten by a mob in the South Central neighborhood, home to many of the city's low-income African Americans; buildings were torched; stores were looted; and more than fifty people lost their lives. The prevailing view at the time, as captured by New York Times reporter Don Terry, was that "the acquittal...was only a spark put to a tinderbox of anger constructed from years of deep poverty, governmental neglect, racism, charges of police abuse and high unemployment."

Twenty years later, how much has -- and has not -- changed?

According to Reparable Harm: Assessing and Addressing Disparities Faced by Boys and Men of Color in California (126 pages, PDF), a report from the RAND Corporation, African-American and Latino men and boys continue to be negatively affected by structural racism and a variety of socioeconomic, health, and education disparities. Young African-American and Latino boys are more than three times as likely, for example, to live in poverty as their white counterparts; almost seven and more than three times as likely to have HIV/AIDS; more than five and almost three times as likely to end up in prison; more than sixteen and five times as likely to be a victim of homicide; and nearly twice and almost seven times as likely to drop out of high school. Funded by the California Endowment, the report calls for a range of targeted interventions, including more effective foster care and prisoner-reentry policies; community-based zoning laws that address the social determinants of health; and mentoring and school-based programs for children traumatized by violence. The California Endowment itself has funded the National League of Cities Institute's Gang Prevention Network and the Healthy Returns Initiative.

One nonprofit that has worked with disadvantaged and at-risk youth in Los Angeles since before the riots is the PUENTE (People United to Enrich the Neighborhood Through Education) Learning Center, which offers preschool, kindergarten, tutorial, and college preparation programs as well as job and computer skills training, English as a second language, and literacy programs for adults. Of, By, and For the Community: The Story of PUENTE Learning Center (21 pages, PDF), a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, describes how the family-focused organization -- which had a thriving center in the Boyle Heights neighborhood -- was offered the site of a burned-out ARCO station by the ARCO Foundation in the wake of the riots. "The embers were still warm, and the total damage had not been tallied," recalled former ARCO Foundation president Russell Sakaguchi. "We wanted somebody to provide hope and relief to that very visible corner. We wanted an organization that wasn't going to flounder, that was sensitive to the shock in that community [and] had faith in its ability to deliver."

Starting with two trailers, PUENTE eventually built a state-of-the-art facility with ten classrooms serving a thousand students of all ages, one-third of whom are African-American and two-thirds Latino. (As of 2005, the population of South Central was 45 percent African-American, 47 percent Latino.) One of the organization's keys to success, the report notes, is its sharp focus on its educational mission, which enables it to address issues even more fundamental than racial disparities or cultural differences. "Our mission," says PUENTE vice president Luis Marquez, "is not about any particular ethnic group; it's about people. It goes way beyond ethnicity and race. It's about humanity."

Among other things, the riots highlighted the serious racial/ethnic tensions that existed between long-established African-American communities in Los Angeles and the more recently arrived Korean and Latino communities. The influx of immigrants into historically African-American neighborhoods has continued in the two decades since, and racial/ethnic tensions have become more pronounced as unemployment rates have climbed. All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants, and California's Future (66 pages; 7.15MB; PDF), a report from the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California, examines the potential of inter-ethnic alliances to address tensions created by demographic and economic changes. But bringing the various communities together first requires a forward-looking agenda. To that end, the report notes,

• A number of community-based organizations have developed new mechanisms to both manage tensions and build toward a common ground. Leadership development is key, but the first step is creating the space for new and honest dialogue about what is shared and what is different.
• Seemingly specific issues can be effectively connected to both populations. The criminalization of black (and Latino) youth has its parallel in the excessive enforcement of a broken immigration system; the racial profiling embodied in Arizona's 2010 immigration law echoes an experience all too familiar to African Americans. If [minority groups] pursue economic opportunity and fair treatment for all residents, the [focus on] difference[s] can give way to a concert of common interest.
• A common and unifying agenda should be based on a vision of everyday social justice. "Everyday" means three things: address[ing] daily needs around education, the economy, and the social and physical environment; ensur[ing] that dialogues go beyond a more comfortable middle-class and multi-ethnic elite and reach grassroots participants; and realiz[ing] that this will require effort every day and over the long haul.

Funded by the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, James Irvine Foundation, and John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the report calls for an approach which recognizes that "African Americans have laid the groundwork for America's commitment to equality and fairness" and "that immigrant rights will be insecure as long as African Americans remain vulnerable to racial profiling and economic despair."

All three reports suggest that twenty years after the L.A. riots and almost fifty years after the Watts riots, the City of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the nation still have a long way to go in addressing the racial and socioeconomic disparities that made South Central such a tinderbox on the eve of the Rodney King verdict. At the same time, all three reports suggest that we have only begun to tap the potential of civic engagement, advocacy, and community organizing efforts to bring communities together and advance the cause of social justice. And, of course, funders have a role to play here. Funded by the California Endowment and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the NCRP report Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles notes that for every dollar invested in the advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement efforts of fifteen Los Angeles County nonprofits between 2004 and 2008, $91 in benefits were generated for marginalized communities.

To learn more about the factors contributing to enduring socioeconomic, health, and education disparities in Los Angeles (and across the country), the demographic shifts that sometimes exacerbate racial/ethnic tensions, and efforts to address these and other problems, see also:

Why Place & Race Matter
PolicyLink; California Endowment

State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation Brookings Institution

Critical Condition: Examining the Scope of Medical Services in South Los Angeles
California Endowment

Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities
Brookings Institution

Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions: An Agenda for Rebuilding America's Older Core Cities
PolicyLink

What do you think? Have we made as much progress, as a country, as we should have in the twenty years since the L.A. riots? And if not, what is holding us back? Use the comments section to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

This Week in PubHub: Race, Place, and the Wealth Gap

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that addressed the topic of protecting the rights of people with disabilities.)

Research shows that racial/ethnic disparities in a variety of areas, including wealth, health, and educational attainment, have worsened over the past two decades. This week in PubHub, we highlight four reports that examine the extent of these disparities, as well as how they are linked and reinforce one another.

According to the Pew Research Center report Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics (39 pages, PDF), the median net worth of white households in 2009 was twenty times that of African-American households and eighteen times that of Latino households -- a wealth gap, in both cases, nearly double what it was in 1984, thanks in part to the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble and the recession that followed. Indeed, since 2005 Latinos and African Americans -- many of whom live in states characterized by housing market volatility and/or who derive more than half of their net worth from home equity -- saw their median household wealth fall by 66 percent and 53 percent, respectively, compared to only 16 percent among whites.

What factors other than the housing boom and bust are driving disparities in household wealth and asset accumulation? The Urban Institute report Private Transfers, Race, and Wealth (36 pages, PDF) examines the role of financial support from extended family members and friends, large gifts, and inheritances in asset accumulation and finds that African Americans and Latinos are much less likely to receive large gifts and inheritances than whites -- a fact that contributes significantly to racial and ethnic wealth gaps. Funded by the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations, the report also found that large gifts and inheritances are a bigger factor in wealth accumulation among African Americans than among whites or Latinos, and that the disparity in private transfers of wealth accounts for an estimated 12 percent of the black-white wealth gap.

Does the wealth gap influence racial/ethnic disparities in child development, health, and economic mobility? And if so, how? According to Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children (16 pages, PDF), a report from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development based on 2007 data, 32 percent of white households with young children were income-poor while 14.2 percent had no assets, compared to 69 percent of Latino and 71 percent of African-American households that were income-poor and 40 percent (for both groups) that had no assets. Lacking the financial resources to pay for high-quality early childhood education or college tuition, children in income- and asset-poor households face a future of limited economic opportunity, the report argues. Indeed, racial/ethnic disparities in child outcomes related to health status and skills development appear as early as the age of 2. The report also notes that while there is an inverse correlation between a mother's educational attainment, economic insecurity, and child outcomes, the wealth gap between households headed by white and African-American mothers with bachelor's degrees increased fivefold between 1994 and 2007. Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research, and the National Institutes of Health, the report calls for helping economically vulnerable households of color build wealth and accumulate assets as a way to improve child well-being.

Would narrowing the wealth gap in and of itself eliminate disparities in health status and child outcomes? Any effort to mitigate the former must first address the links between location, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status as well as the physiological effects of bias and discrimination, Why Place & Race Matter (113 pages, PDF), a report from the California Endowment and PolicyLink, argues. According to the report, race/ethnicity is a greater determinant of health status than income, while structural racism continues to shape the economic, social, and physical environments of low-income communities of color -- which, in turn, affects the health status of residents of those communities. Among other things, the report argues that strategies for building healthy, thriving, sustainable communities must be race-conscious and focus on addressing both community conditions and individual interventions simultaneously.

To mitigate racial/ethnic wealth gaps, these reports suggest, policy makers and funders first need to address disparities in health, environmental justice, educational achievement, neighborhood safety, and other areas. Do you agree? And, if so, what strategies are working and deserve more attention and support? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

And don't forget to visit PubHub, where you can browse more than two hundred and sixty reports on topics related to minorities.

-- Kyoko Uchida

This Week in PubHub: Funding for Social Justice

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she looked at four reports that examined specific grantmaking strategies and practices designed to maximize fundamental long-term social impact.)

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday, this week in PubHub we're featuring four reports that examine trends in funding for social justice and advocacy efforts in support of the rights of marginalized populations.

Foundation support is essential if advocacy and community organizing efforts to improve the lives of marginalized populations are to succeed, a report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy argues. Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in the Gulf/Midsouth Region (88 pages, PDF) found that between 2005 and 2009 twenty organizations in the Gulf/Midsouth region secured more than $4.7 billion -- $114 for every dollar invested -- in benefits for marginalized communities, trained more than 31,000 local residents in civic engagement techniques, and achieved significant policy changes in the areas of environmental justice and LGBTQ and immigrant rights, with foundations providing 78 percent of the funding for said activities. Funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the report urges grantmakers to invest more in building the region's advocacy and community organizing infrastructure, make flexible investments in groups working in rural areas, and support organizations with people of color in leadership positions.

Of course, foundations that fund social justice activities saw their endowments take a hit during the post-Lehman financial crisis, as described in the Foundation Center report Diminishing Dollars: The Impact of the 2008 Financial Crisis on the Field of Social Justice Philanthropy (35 pages, PDF). While the report found that giving for social justice as a percentage of total giving by foundations in the sample varied only slightly between 2005 and 2009, in 2009 it fell below 2007 levels, with small foundations experiencing the sharpest declines in the value of their assets. Funded by the Cricket Island, Edward W. Hazen, and Ford foundations in partnership with NCRP, the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, and the Social Justice Philanthropy Collaborative, the report projects that unless the field sees five years of above-average investment returns, social justice grantmaking in 2015 will remain below 2008 levels.

The good news, according to Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color (112 pages, PDF), is that giving within and on behalf of communities of color is increasing. Commissioned by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with support from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the report found that, given the disproportionate need in communities of color, those communities typically have received a too-small percentage of mainstream philanthropic dollars -- a gap that was exacerbated by the Great Recession and cuts in public-sector funding. In response, the report argues, donors of color and others have begun to direct more resources to communities of color, with an eye to building advocacy skills in those communities and empowering local leaders and residents to lead short- and long-term change efforts. The report calls on mainstream funders to advance this kind of identity-based philanthropy by providing seed funding for grassroots efforts and forging stronger connections with local philanthropic leaders and other change agents.

What about trends in social justice work abroad? Mobilising for Social Justice: Migrant Rights Centre Ireland's Community Work Model (50 pages, PDF), a report from the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland that was funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies, offers case studies of MRCI's "community work practice" model on behalf of migrant workers' rights -- work that, among other things, encourages marginalized migrant groups to take part in decision-making structures through participation in discussion/action groups, empowers them through consciousness-raising and skills-building activities, and promotes advocacy and collective action.

What are your thoughts about the future of funding for social justice philanthropy? Are you aware of any new trends or developments that could energize the field or take it to the next level? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments section below.

And don't forget to check out PubHub, where you can browse more than a hundred and fifty reports on the topic of civil and human rights.

-- Kyoko Uchida

Weekend Link Roundup (November 26 - 27, 2011)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Community Improvement/Development

On the White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president and CEO Albert Ruesga issues a call to support community-based organizations, which, he says, "are just too good and too important to fail."

On the Knight Blog, Philadelphia program manager Donna Frisby-Greenwood announces the beta launch of Change By Us, a platform for Philly residents who want to share ideas, join or create projects, build teams, and find resources to advance their projects.

Economy

Did you find yourself fumbling for words when the dinner-table discussion turned to income inequality and the Occupy Wall Street movement this weekend? The next time that happens, you might want to mention this finding about the widening income gap, courtesy of the Weakonomist:

In 1967, the lowest fifth (called a quintile) of income earners earned 9 percent of what the top quintile earned. In 2010 that number was 6.5 percent. That means the gap between the top and bottom has widened.

But there's a problem with statistics like that. It's a measure of household income. Household income is the total income of anyone living at a particular address. Since 1967, the total number of households in the US has grown 95 percent, while the population has only grown 56 percent. How can that happen? When a household splits in half, you get two households. Say mom and dad get divorced and each make $30k a year. You go from having one household that makes $60k to two that make $30k. How does this get reflected in the data? It skews the low-income numbers down. In the lowest quintile household, on average, there are zero income earners. In the top, of course, there are two. If more households had two income earners, you'd see less of the widening gap....

International Affairs/Development

Philanthrocapitalism authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green explain why the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness created by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2005 to manage development assistance has been disrupted "beyond repair" by the financial crisis.

Leadership

GuideStar president and CEO Bob Ottenhoff weighs in on organizational leadership, which happened to be the subject of Ashoka CEO and founder Bill Drayton's remarks upon accepting the John W. Gardner Leadership Award and is discussed at length in Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs' book Leadership Agility. During his remarks, Drayton urged nonprofits to trade in their hierarchical structures, which, he said, don't work anymore because they "are no longer able to respond quickly or sufficiently enough," for a team approach, while Joiner and Josephs argue that today's organizations need to "nimbly anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions," and that the team approach is one way to do that. "There's a lot to think about here," writes Ottenhoff. "In some ways, these observations seem to be stating the obvious. But if [it's] so simple, why aren’t we doing it?"

Public Policy

On the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Niki Jagpal looks at at a new study from the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life which found that there has been a "dramatic increase in the size and influence of the 'religious lobby.'" These findings, Jagpal writes, "are important for any foundation concerned with advancing our democracy or engaging in policy."

Regulation/Oversight

In and op-ed for the New York Times, Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff looks at the favorable tax treatment accorded donor-advised funds, many of which are affiliated with and managed by large financial institutions like Fidelity, Schwab, and Goldman Sachs, and calls on Congress to enact rules "that require donor-advised funds to distribute all of their assets to real public charities within seven years of their contribution."

Social Media

To kick off the holiday season, Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz highlights a few campaigns that embrace a sense of fun, including a #GoodSpotting sweepstakes organized by the Case Foundation that invites Twitter users to share pictures of an individual or organization doing good using the hashtag #GoodSpotting; participants who enter the contest on the foundation's Facebook page can win up to $500 in holiday spending cash -- and up to $5,000 for the charity of their choice.

Guest blogging at Beth's Blog, Mary Trudel and Rory MacPherson of Trudel | MacPherson Arts Consulting share findings from a new national study that looked at social media use by arts organizations. Among other things, the study, How Strong Is Your Social Net?, found that 70 percent of the 1,600 arts groups surveyed feel that social media is delivering on its promise and hype.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- Regina Mahone

Funding for Capacity Building: 5Qs for Karen Brown, Fairfield County Community Foundation

(Karen Brown is vice president of programs at the Fairfield County Community Foundation, where she is responsible for overseeing grantmaking and providing philanthropic advisory services to donor-advised fundholders. Laura Cronin, a regular contributor to PhilanTopic, interviewed Brown recently.)

Laura Cronin: Nonprofit executives have been managing against a backdrop of economic turmoil for three years years now. What have the most successful Fairfield County groups been doing to keep it together during these difficult times?

Karen Brown: One key element of navigating this economic climate is transparency. Funders need information from grantees in order to make the case internally for all the grants in their portfolio. One exemplary executive director in our area has done something very simple and smart along these lines. After each of his board meetings, he sends a synopsis to us and to his other funders. It doesn't include every single detail of the meeting, but it gives a full picture of what transpired, and when I read it I feel as if I was there. It keeps me in the loop, and it's probably a document he needs to create anyway, so it's efficient. It's just an example of how communicating with funders and donors can be managed in a cost-effective way that gives them the information they need to make informed decisions.

LC: While great management is no substitute for a robust economy and a healthy fundraising environment, what kind of strategies should nonprofits pursue to ensure that they have the capacity to manage through tough times?

KB: We've been urging grantees to continue to invest in staff and professional development and not to look at those kinds of investments as frills. Employee morale and team building are crucial in a difficult economic climate. And funders need to consider supporting these programs in order to help organizations hold the line on their budgets without sacrificing effectiveness.

Other groups we fund are asking for support for short-term strategic planning -- looking two years out instead of the traditional five. This gives them something to focus on and a set of near-term goals that can keep them on track.

Funders can also be helpful by providing support for organizational assessments. We've assisted several grantees in hiring outside experts to come in and take a thorough look at all aspects of their operation, from leadership to fundraising to their business systems. That kind of thorough organizational assessment can help a grantee focus more attention on its key strengths and identify areas in need of improvement. The key is finding the right third-party help.

LC: The Fairfield County Community Foundation has been very involved in promoting capacity building for its grantees. Can you descibe what that looks like? And what kind of results are you seeing?

KB: We give our grantees access to our Center for Nonprofit Excellence, which provides nonprofit executive directors, senior staff, and board members with high-quality, affordable professional development workshops tailored to their experience level. In addition to training, we also fund capacity building, which some foundations regard as outside the scope of their grantmaking but we build in to ours. For example, we provide grants for technical assistance and technology development, as well as financial management assistance for nonprofits with operating budgets under $1 million. And we connect grantees to local organizations that provide pro bono legal services, professional development opportunities, and management expertise.

Last spring, as part of our response to the challenges of the current climate, we offered a workshop on planned giving with one of the best experts on the subject in the state. Planned giving is an important development tool that many nonprofits need to learn more about, especially as their loyal donors age. With that in mind, CNE offered an intensive half-day workshop on the topic and then offered follow-up consulting to a group of our grantees. We did that because we've found that complex workshop topics work best when paired with follow-up consulting, preferably from the same workshop trainer. That kind of approach can make capacity building work a bit more expensive, but we feel it helps our grantees' have greater impact and is well worth doing.

LC: Based on the results you've seen, what advice do you have for funders interested in boosting the capacity of their grantees to meet the demands of the current environment?

KB: There are several things they can do. First, they can set aside a portion of their grantmaking budgets for technical assistance grants to mission-critical grantees. Those monies in turn can be used by grantees to purchase high-quality consulting from experts in any number of areas. It's also helpful for the funder to learn who the quality, experienced consultants in their region are, so they can offer referrals when needed.

Second, funders can design and/or fund cohort learning for their grantees on priority topics. By cohort learning, I mean bringing a group of nonprofit leaders together for a series of sequenced workshops, with required work between the workshops. It helps, of course, if the nonprofits are invited to set the agenda for the workshops.

Last but not least, funders can survey their grantees directly about how they can help them navigate the current environment. Surveying grantees always surfaces ideas that foundation staffers may not have considered, and often many of these ideas are no- or pretty low-cost.

LC: One of the great things about the nonprofit sector is the fact that there are so many people out there in the field doing terrific work to improve the lives of others. In times likes these, it's important to to share those stories. Do you have one you can share with us?

KB: One really exciting project we launched in response to the current economic climate was a new electronic giving circle. We focused it on a very specific community need: to double the number of poor children in Bridgeport, the biggest city in the county and state, who receive nutritious food through the Connecticut Food Bank's Kids' Backpack program. We worked closely with fifteen donors to create the online campaign, with a goal of raising $125,000 for the program, and in one week we were able to more than double, to nine hundred, the number of students receiving food through the program. The giving circle concept made sense to our donor base, and by choosing a concrete goal in terms of how much we wanted to raise and by clearly outlining the need so that donors knew their gifts would help the food bank scale the program to serve more students, we were able to quickly galvanize support for the effort. At the same time, we were able to create a stronger sense of community among donors, which we believe will lead to additional gifts for other community needs in the future.

-- Laura Cronin

5 Questions for...Carol Coletta, President, ArtPlace

Launched last month, ArtPlace is a public-private collaboration designed to drive revitalization in cities and towns by putting the arts at the center of economic development. During its inaugural funding round, ArtPlace awarded more than $11 million to thirty-four community-based projects across the country working to integrate artists and arts organizations into local transportation, housing, community development, and job creation efforts. Prior to joining ArtPlace, Carol Coletta served for six years as president and CEO of Chicago-based CEOs for Cities, a national network of "urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities." While there, Coletta and her team worked to convince urban leaders of the importance of "quality of place" and the attraction and retention of talent. When tapped to help establish ArtPlace, Coletta said she thought it was an opportunity "to work directly on quality of place, which I knew to be such a key element of what makes communities successful."

Philanthropy News Digest: ArtPlace has been described as an initiative to accelerate “creative placemaking” in the United States. What is creative placemaking, and why is it important?

Carol Coletta: That's a good question. It has been used as a very broad umbrella to describe many things, but it all boils down to this: a portfolio of strategies with art and culture at the heart aimed at changing the trajectory of community.

For the past six years I've been running an organization called CEOs for Cities, and prior to that I ran the Mayors' Institute on City Design, an NEA program. While I was at CEOs for Cities, we came to the point where we understood that much of what makes cities successful is talent. The quality of place becomes really essential to the attraction and retention of people, and that’s the most important thing you can do for community. So, I think what makes creative placemaking and ArtPlace so important is that it's not an add-on. It's not a nice to-do. It really becomes an essential part of a community's economic success.

PND: The ArtPlace approach is based on the idea that the ability to attract and retain talent depends, as you say, on quality of place, and that the best proxy for that is "vibrancy." How do you plan to measure the vibrancy of a place?

CC: By examining the changes that take place in the people, the activities, and the value created in a community. We're actually developing a new set of vibrancy indicators -- including a transparent analysis of data collected by others on a regular basis -- that can be updated inexpensively and used by anyone. We expect to make it available through our Web site by the second quarter of 2012.

PND: The idea of a creative class serving as an engine of economic growth and prosperity figures prominently in the work of Richard Florida and others. But the context for their work is almost always urban. Is ArtPlace doing anything to promote the concept of creative placemaking in suburban and rural areas?

CC: Absolutely, because we think it has the same impact there. Let me just say as an aside that the creative class is a very broad term. It defines a very broad group of people, essentially those with college degrees, but I think in many ways the more useful measure is that of human capital. To your point, however, we are interested in what happens in rural and certainly suburban communities. One of the greatest challenges in rural communities is how they retain people. How do you make those places more appealing to keep people there? We are seeing some exciting reinventions happening in rural places, including the Wormfarm Institute in Sauk County, Wisconsin, the Vollis Simplson Whirligig Park in Wilson, North Carolina, and the Art and Agriculture project in Yolo County, California. And, while we still have some testing to do, we believe our vibrancy indicators will work in different parts of the country.

PND: Given that artists, designers, and arts organizations are engaged in creative activity by definition, what are you and your colleagues looking for as you review applications from potential grant recipients?

CC: In many ways we're looking for places where there are real partnerships happening -- not just endorsements or letters of support, but real partnership among artists and other organizations. So when you look at the outcomes, you can imagine one plus one equaling three. Let me give you an example. I think the work we funded in St. Paul, Minnesota, for a project called Irrigate represents a solid partnership of the City of St. Paul, Springboard for the Arts, and the Local Initiative Support Corporation. Since a new light rail corridor is being developed in the same area, you could even include the federal government and the Minnesota Department of Transportation in that partnership. What's interesting is that any one of these organizations could have done their work and it probably would have turned out well, but the fact that they've formed a strategic alliance makes the potential of the work much stronger. That's part of what we'll look at, whether there’s real collaboration and the opportunity to leverage the impact of the work.

We are also looking for work we believe has the opportunity to change the trajectory of the community and generate vibrancy. Not all artistic work is intended to do that. It doesn't make that work less worthy or less valuable. We're just not in a position to fund everything, so we've chosen to fund for this purpose to see if we can make a difference. Frankly, we believe that if we can demonstrate that investing in the arts in this way actually does contribute to vibrancy and to changing the trajectory of a place, that will result in a whole lot more money for arts and culture.

PND: Is it your hope that ArtPlace becomes a permanent feature of the arts landscape in America?

CC: What I hope is that funding for these kinds of initiatives becomes a permanent feature in the landscape of civic decision making, whether that involves a city or county government, a metropolitan planning organization or the federal government, a community foundation, or individual philanthropists. I will consider ArtPlace a success if we are able to influence the field in such a way that people begin to act on the belief that creative placemaking matters to the success of communities.

-- Regina Mahone