Business Commons^™

Turning The Ship: Moving From Clinical Treatment To Environmental Prevention: A Health Disparities Policy Advocacy Initiative, Mary Kreger, Claire D. Brindis, Abigail Arons, Katherine Sargent, Annalisa Robles, Astrid Hendricks, Mona Jhawar, Marion Standish

The Foundation Review

· This article examines success factors for a statewide initiative to reduce health disparities by establishing environmental policies to reduce asthma risk factors for school-aged children.

· Twelve local coalitions and a statewide network focused on schools, housing, and outdoor air policies.

· Multiple types and levels of policy advocacy were encouraged by the Initiative so that issues at the local level linked to larger issues across the state, and conversely state-level policies supported local endeavors.

· Factors that contributed to the success of the initiative included: structuring the initiative on a systems change model; employing multiple technical assistance providers …

The Potential Of Partnerships For Health Advocacy And Policy Change: The Legacy Of The Partnership For The Public’S Health Initiative, Clarissa Hsu, Dave Pearson, Ron Maynard, Carol Cahill, Allen Cheadle

The Foundation Review

· This article reports on a study of 11 partnerships between public health departments and community organizations that were funded by The California Endowment to support advocacy and organizing to improve health outcomes in the communities.

· The evaluation examined the sustainability of the partnerships as well as the policy and advocacy work of the organizations.

· Almost 90 percent of the activities in policy change and community capacity building was sustained, whereas partnership and health department capacity building activities were the least likely to be sustained.

· The policy change legacies at the community level were strong and included …

Children’S Futures: Lessons From A Second-Generation Community Change Initiative, Karen E. Walker, Claire Gibbons, Marco Navarro

The Foundation Review

· This article describes Children’s Futures, a 10-year initiative in Trenton, N.J., that seeks to improve the health and well-being of children from 0 to 3 years old and ensure that they are ready for school.

· During the first five years, the initiative was successful in implementing a number of evidence-based practices to improve children’s health, such as providing home visits to pregnant women, measuring and improving the quality of day care centers, and improving the use of information systems to track childhood immunizations.

· Efforts to provide services for fathers and improve home-based child care were not successful; …

The Blind Men And The Elephant: Learning A Little At A Time About Civic Engagement, Melanie Moore Kubo, Ashley Mckenna

The Foundation Review

· This article, written from the perspective of the evaluator, describes what happened in one community in which four noncollaborating funders were supporting community development programs.

· The Treeline Collaborative evolved from grassroots origins to become a leading organization in the community, serving as a one-stop shop for many programs and providing a structure for civic engagement of residents.

· A collaborative evaluation would have enabled a deeper understanding of the Treeline Collaborative, the outcomes it attained and missed, and the multiple roles it plays in the community, perhaps leading to more effective program and funding decisions.

A Model For Multilevel Advocacy Evaluation, Tanya Beer, Ehren D. Reed

The Foundation Review

· The Colorado Trust provided three years of general operating support to nine advocacy organizations working to increase access to health through policy change work.

· The nine grantees had a variety of goals and strategies and had different levels of organizational capacity, but were evaluated using a uniform evaluation approach.

· The evaluation was designed to build grantees’ own evaluation capacity to incorporate real-time feedback, monitor progress toward goals, and to assess growth in the overall health advocacy community in Colorado.

· Individual grantees identified short- and intermediate- term outcomes related to The Trust’s intermediate outcomes, which were in …

Strategic M&A’S: Stronger In Tough Times?, Carol M. Sanchez, Stephen R. Goldberg

Peer Reviewed Articles

Global acquisitions were worth $6.5 billion in the first quarter of 2008, were down 44% from the previous quarter, and down 41% from the first quarter of 2007.1 But the value of strategic M&As dropped less, only 33%, while the number of deals rose 8%, and cross-border deals represented 38% of the total value of global M&As. Kroll argues that strategic M&As, while likely to experience some drop in volume in 2008 and until the credit crisis bottoms out, will withstand the pressures of financial markets much better than financial M&As. Strategic M&As are deals conducted by companies that want …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Colorado Trust’S Healthy Communities Initiative: Results And Lessons For Comprehensive Community Initiatives, Ross Conner, Doug Easterling

The Foundation Review

· This article summarizes how 29 diverse communities throughout Colorado implemented the Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative (CHCI), which was conceived and funded by The Colorado Trust to engage community residents in the development of locally relevant strategies to improve community health.

· In line with the World Health Organization’s Healthy Cities model, CHCI emphasized (a) inclusive, representative planning; (b) a broad definition of “health”; (c) consensus decision making; and (d) capacity building among local stakeholder groups.

· Communities implemented an array of projects (on average, six per community) that extended well beyond traditional health promotion and disease prevention. The most …

Scope, Scale, And Sustainability: What It Takes To Create Lasting Community Change, Tina R. Trent, David M. Chavis

The Foundation Review

· This article examines success factors that relate specifically to the ability of a comprehensive community initiative (CCI) to achieve the scope and scale required to generate community-level outcomes and to sustain those positive impacts over time.

· The CCIs selected for study represent a wide range of goals, strategies, and organizational structures.

· Six factors were found to cut across scope, scale, and sustainability. These factors include having a single broker or entity that holds the vision of the change effort; clearly defined roles; alignment among interventions, resources, and geography; meaningful community engagement; competent leadership and staff; and strategic, …

Using Community-Based Participatory Evaluation (Cbpe) Methods As A Tool To Sustain A Community Health Coalition, Leslie Aldrich, Daniel Silva, Danelle Marable, Erica Sandman

The Foundation Review

· Participatory evaluation has set the standard for cooperation between program evaluators and stakeholders. Coalition evaluation, however, calls for more extensive collaboration with the community at large.

· Integrating principles of community based participatory research and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Strategic Prevention Framework, which guides much coalition work, into coalition evaluation has proved useful to foster community affiliations and support reciprocal relationship building. The resulting evaluation method, named community based participatory evaluation (CBPE), takes time, money, and skilled personnel but can lead to more accurate results and coalition sustainability.

· The CBPE method has proved essential …

The Pros And Cons Of Comprehensive Community Initiatives At The City Level: The Case Of The Urban Health Initiative, Diana Silver, Beth C. Weitzman

The Foundation Review

· This article describes the trade-offs between the city-level and neighborhood-based approaches in examining the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) Urban Health Initiative (UHI), an $80 million, 10-year effort to improve the health and safety of young people.

· Eight cities engaged in a two-year planning process; five received funding for an eight-year implementation phase. Plans that engaged in bottom-up activities, but left power and control in the hands of civic, business, social service, and political leaders, were favored. Those who had focused exclusively on neighborhood-based approaches were not funded for implementation.

· RWJF chose a city-level focus because they …

The Challenges Of Place, Capacity, And Systems Change: The Story Of Yes We Can!, Pennie Foster-Fishman, Robert Long

The Foundation Review

· Yes we can!, a comprehensive community initiative (CCI) funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, was designed to improve educational and economic outcomes within the foundation’s hometown of Battle Creek, Mich. Since 2002, Yes we can! has supported five core strategies designed to trigger the systems changes needed to reduce educational and economic inequities in Battle Creek.

· Yes we can! has achieved some important wins to date; for example, more residents are involved, more neighborhoods have stronger neighborhood associations, and more organizations are engaging residents in their decision-making processes. However, the scale of wins remains small, and the …

Philanthropy’S Civic Role In Community Change, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, Anne C. Kubisch, Stacey Sutton

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six key roles for philanthropic organizations’ engagement in communities. It draws on Living Cities, a consortium of financial organizations, private foundations, and public sector organizations that has been working since 1991 to improve distressed neighborhoods in 23 cities.

· The six civic roles described are (a) convening and leveraging diverse networks of relationships, (b) developing local data and plans for community change, (c) leveraging new resources on behalf of communities, (d) mobilizing political will, (e) framing new messages about community development and communicating more strategically, and (f) generating and testing new ideas and building and sharing …

Foundation Readiness For Community Transformation: Learning In Real Time, Prudence Brown, Marie Colombo, Della M. Hughes

The Foundation Review

· This article describes the internal structures and processes adopted by The Skillman Foundation to support the iterative practice of “learning and doing” in the first phase of a rapidly evolving, ambitious community change enterprise in six Detroit neighborhoods.

· The foundation invested in its own and its partners’ capacity to learn in real time so that together they could adjust and readjust their strategies in response to initial results and, in doing so, deepen their working relationships and build further capacity for effective implementation.

· Challenges to supporting this learning culture included increased visibility and pressures to produce results …

Evaluating A Voter Outreach Initiative, Amy Dominguez Arms

The Foundation Review

· This article describes an initiative designed to increase voting rates among low-income and ethnic groups in southern and central California communities.

· A rigorous evaluation demonstrated that participation rates could be increased by up to 10% among these groups.

· Using local, well-trained canvassers and making contact during the four weeks preceding the election were some of the more effective practices.

A Road Made By Walking: Participatory Evaluation And Social Change, Janet Rechtman

The Foundation Review

· This article describes how participatory evaluation was used in a Ford Foundation–funded project to promote mixed-income housing in Atlanta.

· The project resulted in an increase in mixedincome housing, but also in social outcomes such as increased knowledge about housing issues.

· Validity and reliability of the findings are demonstrated through feedback from the community members, rather than through statistical methods.

Youth Civic Engagement For Dialogue And Diversity At The Metropolitan Level, Barry Checkoway

The Foundation Review

· Youth civic engagement can take various forms, of which intergroup dialogue is one. Some forms – such as electoral participation – are inappropriate for young people.

· This article describes Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit, the nation’s most segregated metropolitan area.

· High-school-age students participated in intraand intergroup dialogues, metropolitan tours, residential retreats, and community action projects.

· Youth participants increased their knowledge of their own racial and ethnic identities and those of others, increased their awareness and understanding of racism and racial privilege, and developed leadership skills and took actions to challenge racism in …

Embedded Philanthropy And The Pursuit Of Civic Engagement, Mikael Karlström, Prudence Brown, Robert Chaskin, Harold Richman

The Foundation Review

· This article examines a range of civic engagement strategies pursued by embedded funders conducting community-change work in chronically disadvantaged communities.

· Embedded funders are place-based foundations that (1) commit to working in a particular community or communities over an extended period of time; (2) pursue direct and ongoing relationships with a range of community actors; (3) make community relationships and partnerships a primary vehicle of their philanthropic operation; and (4) provide extensive supports and resources beyond conventional grantmaking.

· Working as an embedded funder tends either to correlate with a prior commitment to civic engagement or to promote the …

Beyond The Npr Crowd: How Evaluation Influenced Grantmaking At The California Council For The Humanities, Clare Nolan, Alden Mudge

The Foundation Review

· This article describes an initiative designed to engage a broad cross section of Californians in the humanities. Initial findings from book reading groups were that participants were predominantly white, middle-aged women.

· Changing the type of programming to include poetry slams, photography, digital media, and writing programs broadened participation of various ages and ethnic groups.

· The location of the program also made a difference, with schools and community-based organizations drawing more diverse audiences than libraries.

Proving Foundation Impact On Public Policy Empirically: The Case Of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation And Consumer Choice For Adults With Developmental Disabilities, Ann Whitney Breihan

The Foundation Review

· Foundations that work on national public policy issues face challenges in demonstrating impact.

· This case study of how the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s initiative to support choice of program provider for developmentally disabled adults uses some advanced statistical techniques to demonstrate the impact of the foundation’s funding.

· This study suggests that to get the greatest impact on policy change, foundations should consider offering modest competitive grants to governmental departments; spending the funds in regional groupings; and focus on jurisdictions that have demonstrated interest in the policy area by spending their own funds.

Setting The Table For A Sustainable And Just Food System, Kien Lee, Kolu Zigbi, Marjorie Nemes

The Foundation Review

· As consumers and producers, people of color have been affected disproportionately by systemic problems in the food system.

· This article describes the Diversifying Leadership for Sustainable Food Policy initiative, a joint effort of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to build the capacity of organizations led by people of color to engage in policy and advocacy work.

· Grantees successfully built their capacity to engage in policy work (e.g., increased capacity to identify policy targets), increased their organizational capacity (e.g., diversified boards), improved their communities’ capacity (e.g., created opportunities for dialogue and improved …

New Voices At The Civic Table: Facilitating Personal And Social Change, Laura T. Pinsoneault, Linda Nguyen

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure.

· All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation.

· Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing.

· Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces …

Finding The Win In Wicked Problems: Lessons From Evaluating Public Policy Advocacy, John Sherman, Gayle Peterson

The Foundation Review

· Many of the social issues private foundations and other philanthropies attempt to address — poverty, homelessness, global climate change — are wicked problems. That is, they defy easy definition, lack permanent solutions, and have multiple stakeholders.

· The wicked problems framework helps make explicit the challenging nature of the issue to be addressed, requires an inclusive style of leadership that seeks stakeholder involvement, and demands candid exchange among stakeholders about the nature of the problem and effectiveness of efforts to address it.

· A wicked problems framework provides a set of criteria and questions for evaluators of advocacy efforts …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding The Dynamics Of Complex Social Systems, David Peter Stroh

The Foundation Review

· The nonobvious interrelationships among elements in a complex system often thwart people’s best intentions to sustainably improve system performance.

· The complex, nonlinear problems that most foundations address can be solved most effectively by thinking systemically instead of linearly about these problems.

· Systems thinking offers a range of analytic tools to improve our capacity to think systemically, including ways to distinguish problem symptoms from root causes, reinforcing and balancing feedback, system archetypes, mental models, and system purpose and goals.

· Applying these tools enables us to target highleverage interventions that can lead to sustainable, system-wide improvement.

· These …

Effective Advocacy Evaluation: The Role Of Funders, Johanna Morariu, Kathleen Brennan

The Foundation Review

· This article addresses the role of funders in supporting advocacy and advocacy evaluation work.

· The growth and strengthening of the advocacy evaluation field has lessened the “hard to measure” stigma attached to advocacy grantmaking.

· An increasingly broad array of evaluation designs and methods better capture advocacy data, enable rapid analysis and learning, and foster accountability.

· Based on a study of advocacy grantees and a study of advocacy grantmakers, the authors conclude that supporting evaluation and capacity building, providing multi-year funding commitments and core support, and creating custom reporting requirements and timelines are strategies that funders can …

Tools To Support Public Policy Grantmaking, Martha Campbell, Julia Coffman

The Foundation Review

· This article provides guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms.

· Five essential steps for developing public policy strategy are described: choosing the public policy goal, understanding the challenges, identifying influential audiences, determining how far those audiences must move, and deciding how to move them.

· Two tools developed specifically to support foundations during the strategy development process are presented.

Measuring The Impacts Of Advocacy And Community Organizing: Application Of A Methodology And Initial Findings, Lisa Ranghelli

The Foundation Review

· The increasing emphasis by funders on strategic grantmaking and measurable outcomes may be a disincentive to support policy and advocacy work, because of the perception that outcomes can be difficult to assess.

· A tool for measuring impact can reduce the barriers to funding advocacy and policy work.

· The tool draws upon the literatures on evaluating advocacy and organizing, social capital building efforts, and return on investment approaches to evaluation.

· The tool was applied in two sites, where funders found it useful to understand advocacy impacts and learn how advocacy can enhance their grantmaking goals.

Entrepreneurial Orientation Among The Youth Of India: The Impact Of Culture, Education And Environment, Nancy M. Levenburg, Thomas V. Schwarz

Peer Reviewed Articles

Expanding the level of entrepreneurial activity within all nations is an increasingly important political and economic goal, especially for developing countries. Literature suggests that culture, education and environment play key roles, yet these attributes vary greatly across nations. This study explores the level of interest in entrepreneurship among what may be India’s next generation of entrepreneurs, namely undergraduate business students, and draws comparisons with students enrolled in the US. Despite a combination of social structures and cultural values within India that historically constrained entrepreneurship, a number of efforts in recent years seem to have significantly shifted the national mindset regarding …

M&A Update: Will The Rebound Stumble?, Carol M. Sanchez, Stephen R. Goldberg

Peer Reviewed Articles

After a multi-year lull, merger and acquisition activity has started again to pick up speed. In 2004, the value of global M&A activity grew 40% to just under $2 trillion, compared to $833 billion in 2003. This is the first time the market has seen such growth since 1998 when it increased 80% from 1997. M&A activity in the post-millennium years weakened because investors were jittery after the dot.com bust and September 11 attacks in the United States. By 2005, it seemed that much of that fear had abated, as M&A activity was strong through June. There were more large …