Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summary

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Ripple Effects Of Process Change, Rebekah Usatin, Nancy Herzog, Myriam Fizazi-Hawkins

The Foundation Review

· Decisions to change processes in one area have the potential to cause ripples throughout the entire grantmaking process, impacting both donor and grantee. Recognizing this, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) thoroughly examines and/or tests any changes before they are integrated into the grantmaking practice. In 2009, NED launched a pioneering grantee self-evaluation process that significantly altered its grantmaking processes.

· This article describes how NED tasked a team of staff from the different sections of its grantmaking program to determine the most effective way to capture the information needed to determine whether a grant should be recommended for …

The Impact Grants Initiative: Community-Participatory Grantmaking Modeled On Venture Philanthropy, Adin Miller, Elisa Gollub, Ilana Kaufman, Adina Danzig Epelman

The Foundation Review

· The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund (JCF) launched the Impact Grants Initiative (IGI), a model of grant making based on venture philanthropy, but offering high engagement opportunities for previously unaffiliated local donors and community leaders.

· Before adopting the IGI model, the JCF used a community-participatory grantmaking approach that had become stale in engaging its donors, community leaders, and professional staff. Younger existing and potential donors were developing interests in documented outcomes, metrics, and impact, and those interests did not align with JCF’s grantmaking approach.

· IGI builds on the concepts of venture philanthropy, combining theories and techniques …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Using A Priority Grid As A Tool For Shaping Strategy And Building Impact, Lori Fuller

The Foundation Review

· This article describes the priority grid – an analytic tool to assess grant proposals – and how it has fundamentally changed and improved the work of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.

· Developed by the Trust, the priority grid focuses staff attention on key strategic elements: alignment with focus areas, depth of impact, and scope of impact. It has also served as an agent to develop, disseminate, and implement a foundation’s grantmaking strategy, helping program officers understand how specific projects serve the larger goal and cultivate projects and applications that align with the foundation’s long-term mission.

· With …

In Other Words, The Budgets Are Fake: Why One Funder Eliminated Grantee Budgets To Improve Financial Due Diligence, Molly Schultz Hafid, Carol Cantwell

The Foundation Review

· In 2013, the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock eliminated budgets from its application requirements. Over the last 18 months, it has worked to overhaul the financial information it requests and the ways in which it is used.

· This article examines the role of financial information in the grant application process, the practice of developing and reviewing funder budgets, and the ways in which they too often fail to provide information relevant to a thorough review of the financial health of a nonprofit organization.

· The Veatch Program provides a case study in how to engage board …

Climbing The Mountain: An Approach To Planning And Evaluating Public-Policy Advocacy, Sam Gill, Tom Freedman

The Foundation Review

· This article proposes a new methodology for planning and evaluating public-policy advocacy. The methodology is designed around a series of stages, each with a different set of strategic planning and assessment requirements.

· The article suggests that both planning and evaluative approaches that fail to take account of the necessary stages required to develop and then implement an advocacy strategy will likely assign the wrong indicators of success.

· This analysis is based on direct experience working with both policy processes and a wide range of foundations and nonprofits that have invested in public-policy advocacy, including the Rockefeller, Ford, …

2014 A National Review Of Community Leadership Programs, Caster Family Center For Nonprofit And Philanthropic Research, University Of San Diego

Nonprofit Leadership and Capacity Building

In May 2014, LEAD San Diego commissioned the Caster Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research (Caster Center) to conduct a national review of organizations that support leadership development and civic engagement (i.e., community leadership programs). The Caster Center researched 32 such organizations and conducted phone interviews with 12 of them. The interviewed organizations included nine community leadership programs: six were independent nonprofits, two were nonprofits housed within a Chamber of Commerce, and one was a Chamber of Commerce program. The remaining interviews were with two statewide community leadership programs that were foundation funded and a university research center.

Community Assistance For Refugees And Gender Roles: What Could Make This C.A.R. Run Better?, Nathan E. Meyer

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Community Assistance for Refugees is a non-profit service organization in downtown Mankato, Minnesota. Secondary migration to southern Minnesota has increased the refugee population as well as the need for research assessing the needs and concerns of refugees. The purpose of this project was two-fold: first to analyze how C.A.R. is able to meet the needs of its clients and second, to investigate ways in which C.A.R. could improve its services. Traditionally female refugees are less educated and less mainstreamed into American society. This research was designed to help all clients, but special attention was paid to the specific needs of …

Study The Differences On Maritime Search And Rescue System Between China And Britain, Weizheng Chen

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Foundation For An Independent Tomorrow: Treatment Effects Of The Stages Of Employment Job Readiness Program On Program Completion And Employment Outcomes For Ex-Offenders, Michael Hammer, Stephanie Pocchia, Stacy Howell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Foundation for an Independent Tomorrow (FIT) is a local not for profit organization that seeks to assist residents of Southern Nevada by providing workforce development services (e.g., interviewing skills, job searching techniques, resume assistance) to increase a program participant’s opportunities to obtain and maintain employment. FIT is currently being federally funded through the Department of Labor’s Workforce Investment Act (WIA) grant, with a specific goal of serving the re-entry, or ex-offender, population. This population presents with a very unique set of barriers to obtaining employment, and in order to combat these barriers, FIT created the Stages of Employment job readiness …

A New Look At Nonprofit Online Fundraising: Persuasion Through The Means Of Credibility And Psychological Consistency, Kaytlin Lemier

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

A study was conducted to examine how the persuasive elements of a message contribute to non-profit organizations’ potential to gain financial support. The purpose of the study was to apply theories of persuasion to advance an understanding of the underlying elements relevant to successful fundraising appeals. The two main constructs examined were credibility and psychological consistency. Applied to the context of non-profit fundraising, credibility refers to the judgments granting institutions and/or donors make about the believability of the non-profit organization or its individual representatives, and psychological consistency refers to donors’ internal drive to reduce inconsistencies between their behavior and their …

An Examination Of South Carolina’S Institutions Of Reform And Their Impact On The Self-Narratives Of African American Men, Ashley E. Krejci-Shaw

Capstone Collection

In the State of South Carolina (SC), African American male adolescents disproportionately face disciplinary action in public schools and other institutions. In 2013, South Carolina’s Department of Juvenile Justice (SCDJJ) released data that listed Black male children comprising 57% of all juvenile referrals in the state. This disproportionate trend is also present in South Carolina’s correctional system. In 2013, South Carolina’s Department of Corrections (SCDOC) reported that out of 20,777 male prisoners, 13,631 were Black. For adolescents or young adults looking to continue their education, alternative programs are available. One program that captures educationally displaced children in South Carolina is …

The Importance Of Community Resilience: Developing The American Red Cross International Services Department In The New Hampshire Region, Sarah Romac

Capstone Collection

Disaster management and humanitarian aid organizations have had to reevaluate how communities and individuals can better adapt and prepare for future disaster events. One concept organizations are incorporating into their overall framework is strengthening community resilience. Increasing a community’s resilience level increases its ability to cope with the changes that affect it. Creating awareness of the vulnerabilities in an area, addressing these vulnerabilities with preparedness training, disaster risk reduction (DRR), and sustainable changes made over the long-term can develop a community’s adaptive capacity to be more resilient.

For my practicum, I was given the opportunity to be the International Services …

Transparency, Performance Assessment, And Awareness Of Nonprofits’ Challenges: Are Foundations And Nonprofits Seeing Eye To Eye?, Ellie Buteau, Mark Chaffin, Ramya Gopal

The Foundation Review

· In order for nonprofits and foundations to work most effectively together, they must understand each other’s perspectives.

· This article discusses the alignment between the perspectives of nonprofit and foundation chief executive officers on four aspects of foundation practice: transparency with the nonprofits they fund, support for nonprofit-performance assessment, awareness of nonprofits’ challenges, and the degree to which foundations use their resources to help address nonprofits’ challenges.

· Nonprofit and foundation CEOs are aligned when it comes to the degree to which foundations are seen to be aware of nonprofits’ challenges and use their resources to help address them. …

From Citywide To Neighborhood-Based: Two Decades Of Learning, Prioritization, And Strategic Action To Build The Skillman Foundation’S Youth-Development Systems, Della M. Hughes, Marie Colombo, Laura A. Hughes, Sara Plachta Elliott, Andrew Schneider-Munoz

The Foundation Review

· This article explores the Skillman Foundation’s shift in its approach to fulfilling its mission to improve the lives of children and youth and to making grants – moving from a traditional grantmaker to a place-based investor and change-maker.

· Three aspects of Skillman’s approach have directly shaped the evolution of its youth-development investments: recognizing Detroit’s economic, social, political, and environmental challenges; articulating overarching goals to provide direction and setting priorities for the scope and focus of its programmatic work; and using rapid learning to inform strategic decisions and social-innovation practices designed to tackle deeply entrenched problems.

· This article …

Shifting From ‘Evaluation’ To Valuing: A Six-Year Example Of Philanthropic Practice Change And Knowledge Development, Angela Frusciante

The Foundation Review

· Knowledge development is an emerging field in philanthropy and sits at the convergence of movement toward engagement, data-based decision-making, and networked learning for social and policy change.

· This article explores five knowledge-development trajectories at one family foundation that has funded a long-term change initiative. The trajectories include tools and frames that have been developed for increasing organizational learning, beginning network learning, and informing both program and operations for enhanced strategy implementation.

· Making the organizational shift from entrenched notions of third-party evaluation to creating a diversified knowledge development approach opened up new opportunities to think and talk about …

Editorial, Teri Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Improving Care And Service Coordination For Vulnerable Populations Through Collaboratives: One Funder’S Approach, Impact, And Implications For The Field, Lisa Payne Simon, Amber Slichta, Ann F. Monroe

The Foundation Review

· Improvement collaboratives are short-term learning systems that bring together teams from multiple organizations to seek improvement on a focused topic within the organizations. Most commonly applied in clinical settings, improvement collaboratives are less frequently applied in social-service settings or across agencies to support coordination of care and services for vulnerable populations.

· This article describes findings from four collaboratives conceived and funded by the Health Foundation for Western & Central New York. It examines the foundation’s collaborative structure (a modified Breakthrough Series model in which health and social-service organizations work together in multi-agency teams to implement best practices and …

Survey Instruments Used To Evaluate Foundation-Funded Nonprofit Capacity- Building Programs: Considerations For Organized Philanthropy, Catherine H. Brown

The Foundation Review

· Alongside a growing interest in nonprofit capacitybuilding programs has come a growing concern with the impact of these programs, especially by organizations that fund them. This article describes how the McKinsey Organizational Capacity and Assessment Tool and, to a lesser extent, the Abt Associates survey have been used to assess changes in nonprofit capacity as part of nonprofit capacity-building programs.

· Drawing on field experience with both survey instruments in the context of a foundationfunded nonprofit capacity-building program, this article compares the respective benefits and costs of these instruments from the perspective of evaluators as well as survey respondents. …

Where Heart Meets Smart: The Making Of A Grantmaker, Elizabeth A. Castillo, Mary B. Mcdonald, Christina P. Wilson

The Foundation Review

· Graduate programs in nonprofit management increasingly include philanthropic studies in their curricula. However, these programs generally focus on a grant seeker's point of view.

· This case study describes a graduate philanthropic studies course at the University of San Diego developed from a grant maker's perspective. Students partner with a local private foundation to serve as its program officers for a special initiative.

· By becoming grant makers the students experience the intellectual, emotional, and practical challenges of effective grant making. They develop grant making competencies and an appreciation for the art and science of philanthropy. The foundation benefits …

Public-Philanthropic Partnerships: A Review Of Recent Trends, Alan Abramson, Benjamin Soskis, Stefan Toeopler

The Foundation Review

· The last decade has seen a surge of interest in public-philanthropic partnerships (PPPs), due not only to these collaborations’ notable successes but also to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The Obama administration unveiled a series of initiatives that looked to philanthropy to help identify innovative programs.

· To explore the issues involved in PPPs, this article looks at two key federal initiatives, Michigan’s Office of the Foundation Liaison, and the involvement of foundations in state and local responses to the 2007 financial crisis and the implementation of the federal economic stimulus package.

· The growth of public-philanthropic partnerships …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Raising The Bar – Integrating Cultural Competence And Equity: Equitable Evaluation, Jara Dean-Coffey, Jill Casey, Leon D. Caldwell

The Foundation Review

· Whether implicit or explicit, social justice and human rights are part of the mission of many philanthropies. Evaluation produced, sponsored, or consumed by these philanthropies that doesn’t pay attention to the imperatives of cultural competency may be inconsistent with their missions.

· The American Evaluation Association’s Statement on Cultural Competence provides those who produce, sponsor, and use evaluation an opportunity to examine and align their practices and policies within a context of racial and cultural equity and inclusion. The use of such a lens is paramount when evaluating a program whose goals touch on issues of equity or inclusion. …

Executive Summary

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Adapting An American Non-Profit Model To An International For-Profit Model: A Case Study Of Clean The World Business Model In Hong Kong, Yun Guan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The non-profit sector in the United States had grown at a fast pace in the recent decades, partially as a result of the economic development and the influence of social and political factors. By pursuing mission rather other bottom line, nonprofit organizations faced fierce competition for government grants and private donations. Limited financial resources constrained their efforts to create social and environmental value. The emerging hybrid nonprofit business model offered a new approach for nonprofits to pursuing self-sustainable development both domestically and internationally. However, adapting a unique American nonprofit model into an international for-profit model could be challenging because of …

Reinforcing The Safety Net: A Collaborative Survey With The Massachusetts Nonprofit Network, Heather Macindoe, Lindsay Morgia, Erynn Herman

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The more than 35,000 nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts employ 20% of the state’s workforce and serve as a vital part of the social safety net. Many of these organizations face challenges concerning fiscal sustainability. Funding often covers current services with little surplus to address organizational capacity issues. Successful public-nonprofit partnerships are key to building a resilient nonprofit sector. This study contributes to the nonprofit sector’s knowledge of how best to engage with policymakers at the state and local level.

From Altruism To Investment: Venture Philanthropy And Its Impact On Shared Governance At Liberal Arts Colleges, Joshua D. Merchant

Dissertations

Competition for philanthropic dollars has escalated in recent years, particularly in higher education. A new type of charitable giving – venture philanthropy – has emerged and is impacting both educational policy and practice. Venture philanthropy involves donors using business models, championed practices of venture capitalists, and decision making procedures to drive their philanthropy and ongoing engagement with organizations they support.

Venture philanthropy has the potential to improve the financial vitality of colleges and universities. However, it also poses significant questions to the academy as more colleges and universities engage with donors who embrace its tenets. The primary research question seeks …