Business Commons^™

The Boston Foundation’S Collaborate Boston Prize, Jennifer Aronson

The Foundation Review

This article describes how the Boston Foundation is leveraging Collaborate Boston, a competition launched in 2013, as a tool to support interorganizational and cross-sector collaboration in greater Boston to catalyze, surface, and implement ideas that have the potential to strengthen communities facing complex challenges.

After a discussion of Collaborate Boston’s theory of change and the prize design and process, the article shares early results from the inaugural 2013 competition, the foundation’s reflections, and subsequent iterations for 2014 and beyond.

The article concludes with an examination of the ways a prize can be a powerful tool for social change, and outlines …

Activating The Power Of Place: A Case Study Of Market Creek, Elizabeth Castillo, Angela Titus

The Foundation Review

This article tells the story of a placed-based initiative to develop well-being and wealth in the historically underserved Diamond Neighborhood in San Diego, and discusses the place-based philosophy of the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation and the foundation’s motivation for place-based work.

Its theory of change is presented through examples, along with the entry points the foundation chose for engagement and how it developed community capacity to engage effectively in this change work.

The article also discusses plans to transition ownership to the Diamond Neighborhood community when the foundation sunsets in 2030.

Catalytic Funding, Partnership, Evaluation, And Advocacy: Innovation Strategies For Community Impact, Lora Warner

The Foundation Review

With long-term commitments to concentrated geographic regions, community foundations are in a unique position to highlight problems and stimulate other nonprofit organizations and funders to develop local solutions. Seizing an opportunity to address a growing community concern over cutbacks in youth arts education, the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region undertook an initiative that utilized several innovation strategies in a way that would impact the community and its own work.

This article describes how the foundation combined catalytic funding, partnership with grantees, creative use of evaluation, and design of advocacy tools to promote and strengthen youth arts programming. The …

Effective Consulting Partnerships To Philanthropy, Ellen Irie, Kim Ammann Howard, Ria Sengupta Bhatt, Naomi Orensten

The Foundation Review

This article explores the realm of partnerships among consultants who are supporting philanthropy, surfaces the forms those philanthropy-consulting partnerships take, and describes their benefits and inherent challenges. It also describes what foundations most need to know about initiating and supporting philanthropy-consulting partnerships.

Types of consulting partnerships are a function of the needs they address and the contexts in which they were initiated. A useful way of looking at consulting partnerships is according to their structure – whether the relationship with the client is primarily horizontal or vertical in nature. In a vertical structure, a client hires a consultant, who in …