Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

Coherent Assistance In Education Improvement: How Foundations Can Help, Ann Jaquith, Rosa Chavez

The Foundation Review

Philanthropic organizations are experimenting with ways to support capacity building in order to scale innovations and leverage funding for greater social impact. Increasingly, philanthropies are also attending to their own organizational needs for learning in order to inform strategy, shape future work, and measure effectiveness.

This article shares the lessons of the Aligned Partners Project, a three-year study of a foundation-funded interorganizational collaboration to align the work of three technical assistance organizations to meet the needs of one school district. It identifies challenges to providing coherent assistance as well as grantmaking practices that could address them.

A foundation seeking to …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Turning Changemaking Inward: How One Health Philanthropy Transformed Its Grantmaking Approach To Drive Deeper Impact, Christina Ellis, Laura Pinsoneault, Sarah Deering, Jesse Ehrenfeld, Erin Fabian, Cheryl Maurana

The Foundation Review

In 2014, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment made a significant shift in focus to supporting adaptive rather than programmatic solutions to address critical health issues, and adopted a new approach that emphasized engagement with key stakeholders, recognizing the importance of contribution over attribution and requiring a long-term perspective on outcomes.

The endowment identified three new “changemaker” roles for itself, alongside new funding mechanisms and a set of conditions where positive change could be supported to influence health. While changemaking began as a description of the endowment’s strategic direction, today this philanthropic philosophy permeates all that …

Lessons From The Assessment For Learning Project: Strategies For Building An Authentic Learning Community, Heather Lewis-Charp, Daniela Berman, Sarah Lench, Tony Siddall

The Foundation Review

This article explores findings from an evaluation of the Assessment for Learning Project, a grantee engagement strategy led by the Center for Innovation in Education focused on creating a learning community founded in continuous reflection and safety for risk-taking. The article shares the project’s model and approach, grounded in the core design elements of a field-facing learning agenda, grantmaking that leads with learning, and collective leadership.

This article highlights the Assessment for Learning Project’s practices, such as a Request for Learning rather than traditional Request for Proposals; a requirement that grantees provide formative feedback to each other; and public demonstrations …

Is More Always Better? A Reflection On The Dynamic Nature Of Nationally And Regionally Focused Funder Collaboratives, Jo Carcedo, Merry Davis, Megan Folkerth, Lori Grubstein, Chris Kabel

The Foundation Review

Funding collaboratives allow foundations to align, increase effectiveness, and collectively address systemic issues. Such alliances are increasingly important in the quest for social change in the face of large-scale challenges like climate change, political polarization, and inequity, which require contributions from across sectors to create meaningful impact. An exploration of why such collaboratives form, how they evolve, and what impact they have offers insights for foundations interested in tackling such complex challenges.

The BUILD Health Challenge® is a funding collaborative that includes national and regionally focused funders working together to drive sustainable improvements in health. Through a reflective survey and …

Examination Of Online Voter Registration Within Non-Profit Organizations Post 1993, Jonathan Mcnicholes

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Voting is a key eliminate to the validity of our democracy. Nonprofit organizations are one of the fastest growing organization structures within our society, with growing opportunities to engage voters in pursuit of their goals along with enhanced pressure following the movements surrounding the 1993 voter registration act. In this Thesis I analysis what categories of nonprofit organizations promote voter registration using their websites, to order to establish which organizations are utilizing their resources to promote their goals. The data I use is taken from the Washington Representatives studies which consists of 43,012 nonprofit organizations within Washington DC. My research …

Prescribing Public-Private Partnerships To Global Health Initiatives, Elizabeth Rhoads

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For six weeks I served as a finance intern with the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC) and created a Portfolio Presentation to deliver to TBC’s corporate board members in May. With my background in Public Health and interest in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, I was interested in learning how cross-sector partnerships can help accelerate global health development. My internship with TBC provided me with valuable firsthand experience in my topic of research, Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), which I was able to compare alongside a formal literature review. In this research paper I combine my research with my internship experience to …

Using Social Network Analysis To Understand The Perceived Role And Influence Of Foundations, Todd L. Ely, Katie Edwards, Rachel Hogg Graham, Danielle Varda

The Foundation Review

Collaboration between foundations and other organizations is critical to the success of foundation-supported initiatives, but the power dynamics among foundations, grantees, and their broader communities can be challenging. Social network analysis is a tool to assess collaboration among organizations and its outcomes. A unique yet often underemphasized benefit of this method of analysis is its focus on dyadic relationships between organizations, which presents an opportunity for foundations to evaluate their role in a network and how they are perceived by the very organizations whose missions they support.

This article leverages a social network analysis of community partners focused on addressing …

Human-Centered Design And Foundation Staff: A Case Study In Engaging Grant Beneficiaries, Nicholas G. Randell, Megan Macdavey

The Foundation Review

As part of ongoing efforts to engage grant partner voices in their work with young people who have intellectual disabilities, program staff at the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation have explored the notion of being physically proximate to these young people as a way to more authentically listen to them and their families — those for whose benefit the foundation’s grant dollars are ultimately intended.

The staff’s most recent engagement strategy looked at a way of solving problems and designing solutions for people that puts those people at the focal point of the process: human-centered design. For the Tower Foundation, …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Archiving Forward And Backward: Two Perspectives On Capturing The Impact Of Limited-Life Foundations, Lori Eaton, Phoebe Kowalewski

The Foundation Review

Foundations that document their knowledge through an archives are creating a rich legacy of information. Archives preserve and provide access to the raw data that allow researchers to study and analyze grantmaking and its impact on people and communities.

Limited-life foundations may have an even greater incentive to capture their work in an archives: Once they close their doors, much institutional knowledge is lost. By examining two specific cases — the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, which began planning for its archives early it its work, and the Atlantic Philanthropies, which began the process later — this article discusses what …

Assessing Change And Deepening Impact In Early Learning Systems: The Formal-System Self-Assessment Tool, Erika Takada, Clare Nolan, Meera Mani

The Foundation Review

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is investing in a 10-year strategy, Starting Smart and Strong, that partners with three California communities to develop and test solutions to support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare children to be ready for school. Central to this strategy are community efforts to create comprehensive early learning systems that model quality teaching practices, secure and ensure adequate distribution of resources, and have capacity to improve, innovate, and scale.

One of the challenges in systems evaluation is identifying meaningful indicators of interim progress toward longer-term change. From the start, the evaluation has been learning …

Collaborating Within To Support Systems Change: The Need For — And Limits Of — Cross-Team Grantmaking, Chris M. Kabel, Anna Cruz, Annjanette Rosga, Theresa Esparrago Lieu, Natalie Blackmur

The Foundation Review

To be responsive to the many facets of communities’ challenges and solutions, the Kresge Foundation works intentionally at the intersections of its seven grantmaking areas. One way it fulfills this intention is by awarding cross-team grants, which involve financial and intellectual contributions from multiple Kresge programs in order to enable cross-sector, multidisciplinary work among grantees.

As Kresge’s cross-team practice has grown and the field has increasingly expressed interest in cross-sector approaches to addressing long-standing challenges, Kresge partnered with the strategic learning firm Informing Change to explore how this approach to grantmaking and greater degree of internal collaboration is working from …

Sustainable Development Goals: Exploring A Foundation’S Contribution Through Text Analysis, Filippo Candela, Marco Demarie, Paolo Mulassano

The Foundation Review

Compagnia di San Paolo, an Italian grantmaking foundation, conducted a text analysis using a set of keywords extracted from grantees’ project descriptions to measure how successfully its work aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and to identify interrelationships among the goals themselves.

This article describes the foundation’s research methods and shares the results of its analysis, which found significant contributions to the goals in a number of areas funded by the Compagnia and less alignment in others. The analysis is particularly noteworthy in its identification of an unintentional pattern of convergence between the foundation’s activities and the …

Participatory Grantmaking: A Test Of Rubric Scoring Versus Popular Voting Selection In A Blinded Grantmaking Process, Oktawia Wojcik, Lesleigh Ford, Keely Hanson, Claire Boyd, Shena Ashley

The Foundation Review

Because small, community-based organizations play a critical role in delivering services and expressing diverse community values, it is important to find ways to minimize disparities in their access to philanthropic resources. Participatory grantmaking is widely viewed as a practice with good potential to mitigate this tendency.

This article addresses the design of this approach to grantmaking and, specifically, whether changing the decision-making process in addition to changing the decisionmakers has an effect on how grants are allocated. It examines the design of two grant review processes — one based on popular voting, the other a more traditional rubric approach — …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Using Input From Landlords Participating In The Dothan Housing Authority's Housing Choice Voucher Program (Hcvp) To Streamline Operations And Increase Retention, Michael C. Threatt

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

The Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) is a public-private partnership between a landlord, voucher holder, and a Public Housing Authority (PHA). However, this public-private partnership appears to be a two-sided partnership instead of a three-way partnership as the HCVP was designed. Over 110,000 landlords have withdrawn from the HCVP since 2009, which has negatively affected housing choices for voucher holders. This phenomenon of landlords leaving the HCVP is a catastrophe problem for the rental housing crisis that is a part of the larger affordable housing crisis. The perception of institutional bureaucracy for landlords is their reality, and the unintended consequence …

Sense Of Community Responsibility At The Forefront Of Crisis Management, Eric C. Martin, Neil Boyd

Faculty Journal Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that a sense of community responsibility is crucial to mitigate the effects of viral spread. Many citizens across the world have heeded the call to isolate and self-distance, yet large numbers of individuals do not seem to understand their responsibility for others. This article explores how a sense of community responsibility is born in community contexts, how various features of a crisis impact community responsibility, and how public administration plays a crucial role in facilitating mitigation and solutions to crisis. The article also explores the utility of the Community Experience Model in crisis …

Making Health Equity Real: Implementing A Commitment To Engage The Community Through Fellowships, Saphira M. Baker, Mark D. Constantine

The Foundation Review

Between 2016 and 2019, Richmond Memorial Health Foundation jumpstarted its transformation from a health legacy foundation committed to increasing access to health care to one promoting regional health equity through a racial and ethnic lens. A central component of this new focus was the trustees’ decision to invite community members to inform and advance the health equity strategy through two distinct community fellowship programs — the Equity + Health Fellowships. These programs ultimately provided the foundation with a new language, benchmarks, and structure for welcoming broader community engagement.

This article highlights the outcomes of both programs, how the experience with …

Moving Upstream: An Intersectoral Collaboration To Build Sustainable Planning Capacity In Rural And Appalachian Communities, Laura Milazzo, Holly Raffle, Matthew Courser

The Foundation Review

As part of an effort to address health inequities in Appalachian and rural Ohio, the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services developed an upstream intersectoral health innovation that specifically addressed the lack of infrastructure and other capacity issues that create barriers to obtaining federally funded prevention services among communities with the highest need for those services.

The department partnered with two nonprofit organizations and a university to create a performance-based, stepping-stone investment strategy that provided monetary awards to community organizations and included intensive, customized training and technical assistance that promoted capacity- building for data-driven strategic planning.

This article …

Balancing The Competing Demands Of Strategic Philanthropy: The Case Of The Delaware River Watershed Initiative, Edward W. Wilson, Carol Bromer, David Laroche

The Foundation Review

Strategic philanthropy requires striking a balance between two extremes. On one side is unilateral agenda-setting by the foundation and excessive reliance on its own intellectual frameworks and methods. On the other side is too much deference to competing voices from the field, with the risk that funding will be haphazard and incoherent. This article describes how the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, supported by the William Penn Foundation, has struggled to position itself between these two extremes.

Based on an evaluation conducted during the first four years of the initiative, the article examines four interrelated tensions: upfront planning versus emergent strategy, …

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Can Coaching Help Community Partnerships Promote Health Equity, Community Engagement, And Policy, Systems, And Environmental Changes? Results From An Evaluation, Jung Y. Kim, Lisa Schottenfeld, Michael Cavanaugh

The Foundation Review

Foundations and other entities have increasingly funded coaching and technical assistance to support multisector community partnerships to promote health and health equity. However, much remains to be learned about how coaching can best support these partnerships.

As part of its efforts to build a culture in which everyone in the United States has a fair opportunity to be healthy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to provide structured coaching to strengthen the capacities of community partnerships. The foundation contracted with Mathematica to evaluate the coaching program, focusing on whether it had an …

Strengthening The Ecosystem Of Capacity-Building Service Providers: A Case For Why It Matters, Caroline Altman Smith, Carla Taylor

The Foundation Review

Nonprofits frequently find it challenging to find providers best suited to meet their capacity-building needs. This can be especially true when looking for providers to strengthen racial equity capacity. Many nonprofits lack the time, networks, or expertise to identify what’s available and vet various options for cost, relevance, and quality.

When the Kresge Foundation designed a program to build leadership capacity through a racial equity lens among its grantees, it wanted to strengthen the marketplace of offerings as well. Kresge’s Fostering Urban Equitable Leadership program sought to build leadership capacity and add value for grantees by offering a curated menu …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Cultivation Approach To Place-Based Philanthropy: Evaluation Findings From The Clinton Foundation’S Community Health Transformation Initiative, Douglas Easterling, Sabina Gesell, Laura Mcduffee, Whitney Davis, Tanha Patel

The Foundation Review

Cultivation is a decentralized approach to place-based philanthropy where the foundation seeks to activate local stakeholders and assist them in translating their ideas into action. Rather than convening a strategic planning process, cultivation presumes that the seeds of high-payoff solutions are already circulating somewhere in the community. The foundation’s role is to support local stakeholders in developing and implementing their own ideas in ways that produce meaningful impacts.

This article describes the cultivation approaches taken by the Clinton Foundation, Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and The Colorado Health Foundation, and presents findings from an evaluation of the Clinton Foundation’s Community …