Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

An End To Business As Usual: Nurturing Authentic Partnerships To Create Lasting Community Change, Jeffrey Sunshine, Bernadette Sangalang

The Foundation Review

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation created Starting Smart and Strong, a 10-year place-based initiative in three California communities, to develop and test solutions that support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare young children to be healthy and ready for school. The initiative brings together public and private partners to create comprehensive early-learning systems and ultimately scale what works.

This article offers key insights into the foundation’s experience, three years into implementation, with managing this complex initiative and how program officers were compelled to think differently about the best roles staff can play to support grantee communities and amplify …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Creating Habits For Inclusive Change, Pennie Foster-Fishman, Erin Watson

The Foundation Review

The act of transforming community outcomes requires diverse stakeholders across an array of settings to become actors of change. While this movement to action lies at the heart of effective community change, it also remains one of the most challenging aspects of collective work.

Drawing from the ABLe Change Framework systems-change model, this article presents four processes used in numerous communities across the United States to effectively engage diverse stakeholders in taking actions to improve local systems. These processes prioritize the voices of the most disadvantaged within communities and engage them as key actors in the change process.

This article …

Book Review: Decolonizing Wealth, Juan Olivarez

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Equity For All: Building The Infrastructure For Change Through Community-First Funder Collaboratives, Ellen Braff-Guajardo, Kaying Hang, Leslie Cooksy, Monica Braughton, Fontane Lo

The Foundation Review

Foundations increasingly recognize that improving conditions in many communities requires addressing inequities in access to rights and resources. Yet there are challenges to effective investment in underresourced regions, especially when foundations have limited familiarity with the region and may assume limited local capacity to leverage philanthropic investments.

This article discusses how Sierra Health Foundation partnered with other California and national foundations to establish the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund, a collaborative whose grants focus on strengthening the capacity of communities and organizations in the Valley to advance policy and systems changes that promote health and racial equity.

This article highlights …

Community Navigation As A Field Of Practice: Reframing Service Delivery To Meet The Needs Of Communities’ Marginalized Populations, Joby Schaffer, M. Julie Patiño, P. Barclay Jones, Ladawn Sullivan

The Foundation Review

Community navigators help individuals and families access local services and assistance through a combination of referrals and interpersonal support. The Denver Foundation launched the Basic Human Needs Navigator Learning Community in February 2014 to help navigators working with local organizations and community members practicing navigation independently improve their practice and identify similarities and differences in their approaches.

This article discusses the multiyear, peer-learning project, including the general lessons the foundation learned about both navigation and the use of a learning-community approach to reach its field-building goals.

Reports from participating organizations and community members over four years suggest the efficacy of …

A Partnered Approach To School Change In A Rural Community: Reflections And Recommendations, Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Mary Fant Donnan, Dianne Garcia, Melinda Snead-Johnson, Eugene Kotulka, Lia Sandilos

The Foundation Review

With so many education policies and practices made at the local level, community-based foundations are in a unique position to support their local school districts in taking a comprehensive, systematic approach to improving the lives of young people. This article describes a research–practice partnership designed to produce school improvement in a rural community in western Virginia and reflects on a three-year collaboration among The Alleghany Foundation, two school districts, and the University of Virginia.

The partners identified challenges and strengths within the school districts and the community; gathered and analyzed existing district data and new findings from interviews and surveys …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence For The Social Sector, Veena Pankaj

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

By Us And For Us: A Story Of Early Childhood Development Systems Change And Results In A Rural Context, Lisa Payne Simon, Kirsten Scobie, Phoebe Backler, Catherine Mcdowell, Charles Cotton, Susan Cloutier, Clare Nolan

The Foundation Review

Since 2007, the Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund — a donor-advised fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation — has invested in early childhood development in Coös County — New Hampshire’s largest and most rural and economically disadvantaged county. Community providers from a range of disciplines formed strong professional relationships and agreed on common goals and evidence-based strategies to improve services for children and families.

This article describes how local community members joined forces with the fund to create an integrated early childhood development system for Coös’ children and families. It provides background on the investment and initiative strategy, summarizes …

Thriving Communities: A Model For Community-Engaged Grantmaking, Mary Francis, Colleen Desmond, Jeffrey Williams, Jennifer Chubinski, Jennifer Zimmerman, Ashlee Young

The Foundation Review

Interact for Health is a health conversion foundation serving the three-state region of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio. Its current community change initiative, Thriving Communities, is a community-learning model that helps embed health promotion and advocacy work in communities while those communities build an equitable infrastructure with stakeholders to more rapidly spread evidence-based practices.

This article explores the three tools developed for the Thriving Communities initiative: Success Markers, the Developmental Pathway, and Relationship Mapping. Interact for Health has found that these tools build core competencies and confidence among grantees as well as a process for community engagement that produces results at the …

The Evolution Of A Collaborative Network: Understanding Partnerships In A Policy Mandated Collaboration Through Social Network Analysis, Pallavi Singh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Federal funding agencies that administer financial support in the form of program grants to non-profit organizations (NPOs) that provide child and family services increasingly require NPOs to formalize inter-organizational partnerships in order to receive this vital source of funding. That is, by mandate NPOs must participate in inter-organizational collaboration networks to receive these essential federal funds. Therefore, there is a need to understand the collaboration behavior of NPOs in a policy-mandated environment. This study considers collaboration behavior as information sharing and advice-seeking between the organizations who are part of a collaboration network as a result of a policy mandate.

Drawing …

Changing Donor-Ngo Relations Thorough Viable Alternatives To Conventional Grantmaking, Kio Okawa

Capstone Collection

The purpose of this research is to explore ways in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can become more sustainable in light of a crucial challenge facing them today: that of financial instability. In the charitable sector in the U.S, NGOs, especially small-scale NGOs, have struggled with securing daily operating revenue rather than revenue for long-term program operations, in spite of the continuing needs of their beneficiaries (Janus, 2018; Le, 2017; Meehan & Jonker, 2017). Fundraising has come to involve relationships between NGOs and institutional donors such as foundations, government agencies and corporations. Competition among NGOs and rampant power asymmetry between donors …

Bringing Legacy To Life: How Video Storytelling Inspires Multigenerational Involvement In Family Philanthropy, Kelly C. Medinger, Debbie M. Brodsky

The Foundation Review

Most family foundations go through some sort of process to define donor intent and formalize their values, whether at the beginning of their life span or after their founders’ passing. Video is a powerful tool in that process, vividly bringing stories to life for family members, older and younger alike. So how can video help foundations capture the important story of their donor intent and legacy, and use it to inspire future involvement in their mission?

With the experience of the Marion I. & Henry J. Knott Foundation serving as the backdrop, this article examines how a donor legacy video …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Splendid Legacy 2: Creating And Re-Creating Your Family Foundation, Ashley Blanchard

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

From Charitable Giving To Strategic Impact: The Fremont Area Community Foundation, Carla A. Roberts

The Foundation Review

In 2011, the Fremont Area Community Foundation launched a community investment strategy, focused on education, poverty, and economic development, that shaped corresponding aspirational goals aimed at improving the quality of life for residents of rural Newaygo County, Mich.

While there had been significant community involvement and input into foundation planning for a number of years, the announcement of these strategic goals and their implementation created some apprehension among the local nonprofits. The new funding paradigms were a big change, and it took several years for many of the grantees, with assistance in the form of backbone services and tools to …

A Visionary Organization: From Donor Intent To New Horizons Of Race And Gender Equity, Carolyn Chernoff, V Varun Chaudhry

The Foundation Review

This article documents the unique trajectory of the Leeway Foundation and its transition from sole-director family foundation to an independent foundation. Over 25 years, Leeway shifted in structure and grantmaking, yet has remained in line with its founder’s original mission: to fund women artists in the Philadelphia region.

This article focuses on the shift from the founder’s initial intentions to what is now an organization informed by models of racial and gender equity, funding women, trans, and gender nonconforming artists working for social change. Leeway thus serves as a case study for examining transformational shifts in mission, vision, and constituency …

Unplanned Donor Legacies: How To Avoid Them, And How One Family Foundation Corrected Course With An Evaluation, Saphira Maude Baker, Kelly Chopus, Casey Cox, Anita Mcginty

The Foundation Review

As funders turn to community change, intentionally addressing the unique power differential between funder and grantee partners and structuring ways to mitigate this imbalance is essential to honest communication. Funder relationships with their grantees impact the legacy of major community initiatives. This article explores this relationship and its effects through the lens of the recent evaluation of one family foundation — the Robins Foundation in Richmond, Virginia — and its follow-up actions.

Through a participatory evaluation process, we derived three principal approaches for this donor, and others, to consider in contemplating funder-grantee partnerships and the way these may influence the …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Leading With Values: Grants Management And The Case For More Consistent, Effective Grantmaking Practices, Elizabeth Myrick, Nikki Powell, Tonia Bain

The Foundation Review

This article identifies and explores a set of philanthropic priorities and aspirations that are widely shared by grantmakers today, and examines how the notion of shared values might inspire a fieldwide pursuit of more consistent, effective, values-driven grantmaking practices.

To study the relationship between grantmaker values and grantmaking practices, a survey of more than 300 organization members of PEAK Grantmaking, a national association of specialists in grants management, asked how the respondent foundations’ values influence their work. The results of the survey not only provided an overview of common values, but also captured reports from grantmakers on how their organizations …

Editorial, Michael Moody

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Less Is More: How Grantmakers Are Using Simple Financial Metrics, Hilda H. Polanco, Luther K. Snow

The Foundation Review

This article explores how the Financial Health Analysis Tool can bridge the gap between the capacity of grantmakers to conduct financial analysis and the need to incorporate financial considerations into both grantmaking and ongoing engagement with grantees.

The tool presents four years of key financial indicators in graphs and charts that create a kind of dashboard of a nonprofit's financial health over time. This small set of simple metrics highlights patterns and trends that can help grantmakers and nonprofits see how the financial management of an organization is advancing its mission and strategy.

Using a series of interviews with a …

Resilient Funders: How Funders Are Adapting To The Closing Space For Civil Society, Chris Allan, A. Scott Dupree

The Foundation Review

The closing space of civil society around the world over the last decades has created profound challenges for funders. Many analyses of how to respond to this reality focus on advocacy and promoting enabling policy environments. Few consider key practices of resilient funders that enable them to continue to operate under shifting political circumstances.

Increased adaptive capacity along three dimensions – varied procedures, multiple strategies, and an adaptive environment – promotes the flexibility to weather the shocks and stresses of tightening restrictions and increasing violence. Within those dimensions, funders are finding that three characteristics of resilience are especially critical: flexibility; …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teri Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summary

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Partner-Centered Evaluation Capacity Building: Findings From A Corporate Social Impact Initiative, Lisa Frantzen, Julie Solomon, Laura Hollod

The Foundation Review

Funders can play a proactive role in helping to fill the gap between funders’ expectations and nonprofits’ ability to evaluate grant results. Using a partner-centered design, Johnson & Johnson piloted an evaluation capacity-building initiative that supported eight grantees in strengthening their ability to measure and use findings concerning health-related outcomes, by focusing on key evaluation challenges identified by the grantees.

Grantees’ approaches to capacity building naturally grouped around the areas of evaluation- framework development, data-systems strengthening, and staff training. Through individualized projects, grantees increased their ability to both do and use evaluation.

This article describes the design, implementation, and results …