Social and Behavioral Sciences 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 …

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 …

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 …