Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Collaboration And Foundation Leadership: Challenges, Opportunities, And Impact, Jennifer Pereira

The Foundation Review

· This article describes a successful collaboration among foundation, city government, and nonprofit stakeholders that leveraged an initial investment of $60,000 to $4.5 million in public and private funding to create a sustainable Green & Healthy Homes Initiative™ for low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Providence, R.I.

· Through a partnership with the Rhode Island Foundation, the Council on Foundations, and the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, the city of Providence developed a comprehensive approach to integrated health, safety, lead-hazard reduction, energy-efficiency, and weatherization interventions for low- and moderate-income families.

· The project was led by a steering committee of …

Four Network Principles For Collaboration Success, Jane Wei-Skillern, Nora Silver

The Foundation Review

· This article identifies a set of four counterintuitive principles that are critical to collaboration success and offers insights for how nonprofit leaders can ensure that their collaborations can have an impact that is dramatically greater than the sum of the individual parts.

· Based on a decade of research developing detailed case studies on a range of successful networks, the authors have identified a common pattern of factors that are essential to effective networking.

· The principles are: focus on mission before organization; manage through trust, not control; promote others, not yourself; and build constellations, not stars.

Achieving Synergy With Collaborative Problem Solving: The Value Of System Analysis, Douglas Easterling, Elizabeth Mayfield Arnold, Jessica A. Jones, Allen J. Smart

The Foundation Review

· Collaborative problem solving has a long and important tradition in philanthropy. While there are notable success stories, it is clear that large-scale impact does not occur by simply bringing various stakeholders together around a common agenda and then offering them funding for planning and implementation.

· One of the most critical ingredients is a high-leverage strategy, which in turn requires a coherent understanding of the system that surrounds the problem.

· Reclaiming Futures, a national initiative aimed at promoting juvenile-justice reform at the local level, explicitly promotes system-level problem-solving by offering a conceptual framework that each site uses to …

Communicating, Collaborating, And Coordinating To Revitalize New Jersey Neighborhoods, Lois W. Greco

The Foundation Review

· Since 2003, the New Jersey public and private funding community has been organizing and implementing a shared, cross-sector approach to revitalizing the state's low-income neighborhoods that incorporates residents and stakeholders, encourages private investment, leverages corporate resources, and produces measurable results.

· The approach has been shaped by the programmatic alignment of the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation's Neighborhood Grants Program and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs' Neighborhood Revitalization Tax Credit program (NRTC) with technical assistance from the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.

· The combined programs have supported initiatives in 26 neighborhoods, funded by $16 …

Getting To Collective Impact: How Funders Can Contribute Over The Life Course Of The Work, Douglas Easterling

The Foundation Review

· Foundations have a long tradition of convening and funding collaborative groups with the hope that this will lead to large-scale impact.

· Although funder-driven collaboration sometimes leads to breakthrough solutions, foundations have also pushed the participating organizations into artificial, awkward, and unsustainable efforts.

· This article argues that funders should support naturally emerging networks and should tailor their support to match the network’s stage of development.

· A five-stage developmental model is introduced and illustrated through a case study of the Central Appalachian Network (CAN).

· Over CAN’s 20-year history, a succession of regional and national foundations have played …