Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation: Taking a networked approach to building nonprofit capacity

The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation: Taking a networked approach to building nonprofit capacity

THE CHALLENGE

Spend down a $1.2 billion endowment in 20 years in a way that leaves communities stronger

THE OUTCOME

Investing in the capacity of nonprofits to better equip them to innovate and collaborate around complex social issues

OUR APPROACH

The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation was founded in 2014 through the bequest of its namesake, the late longtime owner and founder of the Buffalo Bills football team. Before his death, Wilson set a 20-year lifespan for the foundation. As the foundation staff and board considered how best to spend down $1.2 billion by 2035 in two regions (Southeast Michigan and Western New York), they knew they needed to prioritize building the capacity of the regions’ nonprofits so nonprofits would be better equipped to carry on their work after the foundation closed.

In 2017 the foundation decided to invest in creating a center in Detroit to support nonprofits in Southeast Michigan. The vision of the center is a physical space with staffed, structured programming where nonprofits can collaborate and innovate around challenges facing the region and access resources and support they need to effectively deliver solutions.

The foundation engaged local partners including TechTown, Michigan Nonprofit Association, and Michigan Community Resource to help them design and launch the center and its services. After making an initial round of grants to these key partners, the foundation realized it needed to engage a neutral third party to facilitate design sessions, provide ongoing project management to keep the work on track, and support the partners in continuing to engage key stakeholders across Southeastern Michigan. The foundation chose Community Wealth Partners to serve in this backbone role, bringing insight on national best practices for capacity building and offering guidance on measuring the center’s impact.

A physical space to

collaborate and innovate

EARLY RESULTS

Our team provided the capacity, skills and expertise the foundation and its partners needed to turn the vision for Co.act Detroit into a reality. We facilitated working sessions among the partners and shared insights from a national scan of related efforts to help the partners define a shared vision for the center and consider the services they might offer. The center, named Co.act Detroit, will work with nonprofits to build their capacity so that over time they become better equipped to innovate and collaboratively address the region’s most pressing complex social challenges. With our facilitation, research, and support, the partners defined a five-stage continuum to understand nonprofits’ evolving capacity for collaboration and innovation and to provide the right resources and supports at the right time.

 

We also helped the partners define how they will assess the center’s impact on the region’s nonprofit sector. Partners will track outcomes on three levels:

  1. guest experience of those visiting the center
  2. organizational capabilities for the center itself and the organizations accessing services
  3. network and system impact.

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Kresge Foundation: Advancing racial equity through capacity building

The Kresge Foundation: Advancing racial equity through capacity building

THE CHALLENGE

Strengthen grantees’ leadership capacity with a racial equity lens

THE OUTCOME

A leadership capacity-building program designed with grantee input, tailored to meet grantees’ needs, and helping grantees advance toward racial equity to achieve their goals

OUR APPROACH

As The Kresge Foundation seeks to expand opportunities in cities, it partners with a range of nonprofits working to create more equitable outcomes. Recognizing these nonprofits would benefit from support to advance their own leadership and racial equity capacity, the foundation partnered with Community Wealth Partners to design and implement a capacity-building program.

Kresge’s FUEL Program (Fostering Urban Equitable Leadership) was designed to reach a broad swath of grantees across the foundation’s six program and practice areas. Because participants have diverse needs, the program works with a network of providers to offer a range of services related to racial equity and matches participants with the services most suited to meet their needs.

The program has a dual focus on investing in both grantees and the participating service providers . The goals of the program for grantees are 1) stronger senior teams, 2) stronger mid-level staff, 3) more diverse talent, and 4) more equitable practices. For service providers, the program aims to strengthen their collective work across the social sector through means such as deepening awareness of one another’s work and expertise to be able to make referrals and trying to make language and definitions more consistent across the field to aid the field’s understanding of racial equity and its components.

Community Wealth Partners led a five-phase process, in partnership with the Kresge Foundation, that included the following elements:

  1. Strategy and Design – Engaging grantees to understand their needs, vetting service providers, seeking input from grantees and service providers to inform program design, and developing the program’s goals and theory of change
  2. Planning and Stakeholder Engagement – Nominating, inviting, and selecting grantees and matching grantees to services
  3. Program Launch – Announcing acceptance and matches to grantees and kicking off work with service providers
  4. Implementation and Service Delivery – Supporting grantees and service providers during service delivery as needed and planning and facilitating convenings for the cohort of service providers to share insights and lessons learned
  5. Learning and Evaluation – Gathering and analyzing data from participants, facilitating meaning-making conversations with foundation staff and service providers, and developing recommendations for future programs

The first round of the program reached 10 percent of Kresge’s grantees: 286 individuals from 115 grantee organizations. 

Investing in both grantees

and service providers

EARLY RESULTS

Evaluation data showed outcomes related to all four of the program goals, such as strengthening board systems, structure, and approach; mastering general management skills; modeling best practices that advance equity; effectively recruiting, hiring, and retaining diverse talent; and increasing awareness of racism and equity within organizations. At the close of the program, some grantees noted early outcomes in making their organizations more diverse and, as a result, more effective at creating impact in their communities. Grantees also raised suggestions for improvement, such as allowing more time for grantees to learn about the program and consider whether they want to apply and providing more guidance to help grantees determine which service among the offerings is the best fit for them.

In response to these strong early results and the extent to which grantees saw value in the FUEL program, Kresge has decided to invest in a second phase. We partnered with Kresge to run the program, adapting it based on pilot program learnings and grantees’ suggestions for improvement. We also partnered with Kresge to run a similar program focused on building racial equity capacity with grantees in its environment program.

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KaBOOM!: Setting strategy that ensures all kids get the play they need to thrive

KaBOOM!: Setting strategy that ensures all kids get the play they need to thrive

THE CHALLENGE

Despite more than 15,000 playgrounds built or improved, too many kids are still not getting the play they need for healthy growth and development

THE OUTCOME

A new bold goal for greater impact and a strategy for achieving that bold goal

OUR APPROACH

Since its founding in 1996, KaBOOM! made significant progress toward its vision of ensuring every kid has access to a safe place to play. By 2012, the organization helped build or improve over 15,000 playgrounds, reaching more than 6.5 million kids.

Despite these accomplishments, staff at KaBOOM! recognized that too many kids still were not getting the play they need for healthy growth and development. Active play can help curb obesity; enable the development of important social, cognitive, and creative skills; and help protect kids from the harmful effects of toxic stress. Yet, too many kids lack easy access to great, safe places to play.

Community Wealth Partners partnered with KaBOOM! to set a bold, long-term goal and build a national strategy to ensure all kids—particularly the 16 million kids living in poverty—get the active play they need to become healthy and successful adults. Together, we reframed the problem: from a focus on outputs (the number of playspaces) to outcomes (kids’ health and wellbeing). Then, we reframed the solution: linking the building of playspaces to national imperatives (such as addressing childhood obesity and preparing the next generation workforce to drive economic competitiveness) and to the need to embrace our collective responsibility to protect and promote play.

With this reframed problem and solution in mind, we worked with KaBOOM! to develop a strategy roadmap—a plan articulating how the strategy would enable KaBOOM! to realize their bold goal and how the team would implement it. We worked together to think through key questions like, How might the organization make play a priority for parents and cities across the country? From these questions, we helped KaBOOM! develop an influence strategy for moving key stakeholder groups, such as mayors and other leaders, to take action.

Following the direction of the roadmap and influence strategy, KaBOOM! added new programs and initiatives to ensure that the work it was doing to build playspaces would be effective at driving widespread behavior change (kids get active play every day) and norm change (society reinforces the expectation that kids get the play they need to thrive). KaBOOM! has long succeeded at enlisting corporate sponsors and cultivating community engagement to build neighborhood playgrounds. Now, KaBOOM! is leveraging these skills to build public-private partnerships with municipal agencies—housing, schools, parks, etc.—to meet the need for playspaces across entire public systems. To be more responsive to community partners’ needs, KaBOOM! is also expanding the types of playspaces it builds, from larger-scale innovative playgrounds to sports courts to adventure courses for older kids to “play everywhere” installations that integrate the opportunity to play into everyday spaces, from bus stops to vacant lots.

Change the norm so that all kids

get the play they need to thrive

EARLY RESULTS

These new approaches have enabled KaBOOM! to gain traction with a larger group of stakeholders, including city governments, community organizations, and institutional philanthropy. This has paid dividends—both in terms of impact and funding—for the organization. The new strategy enables KaBOOM! to reach more kids and helps build stronger ties in communities. We are currently partnering with KaBOOM! to develop a framework to apply the outcomes KaBOOM! measures for its community builds to its public-private initiatives—including outcomes related to how much kids are playing as well as community outcomes such as social cohesion, neighborhood safety, and a sense of pride and agency among residents.  

“The strategy led to a new mindset for organization in two key ways,” said James Siegal, CEO of KaBOOM!. “First, we are aiming higher in terms of the potential impact of our work, particularly when it comes to our role in influencing large-scale municipal systems. Second, we are embracing innovation and experimentation as a key driver of our impact. We now use part of our reserves for a research and development fund, and have even attracted support from our funders, to enable us to bring the best playspaces to communities that have experienced significant disinvestment.”

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Helios Education Foundation: Strengthening organizational culture to achieve greater results

Helios Education Foundation: Strengthening organizational culture to achieve greater results

THE CHALLENGE

Heal the pain points associated with a growing organization, an evolving strategy, and new ways of working

THE OUTCOME

A stronger organizational culture that helps teams work better together and leads to desired results

OUR APPROACH

In 2016, Helios Education Foundation was experiencing growing pains. The staff was expanding from 15 people to 30, and they were trying to work in new ways, moving from focusing primarily on grantmaking to engaging in education policy and bringing evaluation expertise onto the team. Suddenly, there was an old way and a new way of doing things, and the change was not easy.

This began two years of culture work with Community Wealth Partners to bring the organization together around a set of behaviors that would ensure the foundation was well positioned to achieve its vision that every individual in Arizona and Florida can attend and succeed in postsecondary education.

We led the staff in revisiting its organizational values with a focus on identifying specific behaviors and actions that would reinforce those values and help the team achieve results. For example, staff identified collaboration as a central value, and behaviors to support that value included greater shared ownership and delegation of projects, open two-way communication, and sharing credit with colleagues and partners. Identifying these behaviors was only the first step toward shifting the foundation’s culture. With our support, the foundation established an internal culture working group—a cross-functional staff team dedicated to building culture—that identified and prioritized changes the foundation should make in order to enable organizational behaviors that would lead to the results they want to see. Changes included redesigning grantmaking processes and reorganizing staff to break down silos, enable stronger collaboration, and achieve greater impact.

Alongside this work with Helios’ staff, we also worked closely with the foundation’s senior leadership team because they play a critical role in shaping culture and serving as champions of important organizational changes. Through direct team coaching, this group of leaders became more intentional around how decisions are made, clarified the purpose of the senior leadership team and management philosophy, and improved meeting protocols. Senior leaders also received coaching to better equip them to lead their teams through significant organizational change as well as training in how to have difficult conversations and build trust. These changes are helping senior leaders more fully live their values, empower staff to adopt behaviors to live the foundation’s values, enhanced collaboration among staff and with external stakeholders. All of these changes are enabling the senior leadership team to more effectively lead the foundation toward its desired results.

Suddenly, there was an old way

and a new way of doing things

EARLY RESULTS

The culture work led to changes across the organization, and we continue to provide support and partnership throughout those changes. “Today, we are a different organization than we were two years ago,” said Paul J. Luna, president and CEO of Helios Education Foundation. “Our expectations of each other are clearer, and we each know how to drive results. We have tools for building trust and communication that we use when we encounter challenges. As a result, we are better positioned to attract and retain talent. The culture work has had a positive impact on our external relationships as well. Partners have noted a change in how the foundation engages with the community, and we feel we can be stronger partners in the community as a result of our focus on culture. There is always room for improvement and tending to our culture will be an ongoing effort, but I am confident it is strengthening our organization and allowing us to have greater impact than we had before.”

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Echoing Green: Developing a strategy for an ambitious new vision

Echoing Green: Developing a strategy for an ambitious new vision

THE CHALLENGE

After 30 years of catalyzing successful social entrepreneurs, Echoing Green had a vision of influencing the social entrepreneurial ecosystem for greater impact. The nonprofit needed a strategy to achieve that vision.

THE OUTCOME

A focused yet flexible strategy, a three-year implementation roadmap, and coaching to help them lead through change

OUR APPROACH

For 30 years, Echoing Green led the social entrepreneurship field, supporting visionaries around the world in transforming their communities. Because of its success in identifying and catalyzing talent and building the field of social entrepreneurship—primarily through its fellowship program—the nonprofit knew that in order to better enable its fellows’ impact, it could do more to influence the ecosystem around them to make it easier for fellows to forge the right connections and receive more capital investment. This ambitious vision needed a practical strategy that considered Echoing Green’s resources, network, and ability to implement it.

Echoing Green hired Community Wealth Partners to help create a five-year organizational strategy. Because the nonprofit wanted to maintain the strength of its fellowship program while exploring new opportunities to influence the ecosystem, the strategy needed to be flexible. Echoing Green also underscored the need for strong staff engagement and buy-in, alignment among the board and senior team, a realistic scope, an actionable roadmap to implement the strategy, and clarity around how senior team members would make decisions based on the strategy.

We led a process to confirm Echoing Green’s mission and vision; identify, test, and refine its strategic priorities; conduct market research to understand its positioning and value proposition to the field; analyze its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and gather insight on the nonprofit’s direction from funders, investors, and peer organizations. The process helped Echoing Green grapple with questions about how diversity, equity, and inclusion informed their work and culture and how to balance their ambition to create impact through programs with the need to strengthen their infrastructure so that teams work better together and operations run more smoothly.

We partnered with Echoing Green to design an inclusive process that thoughtfully engaged the nonprofit’s staff, board, and fellows. “Echoing Green has an exceptional and large number of engaged and thoughtful stakeholders—from our board and staff, to our fellows and program participants, to our network of donors and supporters,” said Cheryl Dorsey, Echoing Green’s president. “We knew that engaging everyone would be crucial to our successful creation of a strategic plan. Community Wealth Partners acted as an incredible partner in ensuring that our various stakeholder groups were involved and communicated with regularly throughout the process, particularly our board and staff.”

From that process, we assessed the viability and potential impact of eight priorities, using criteria like market need, the landscape for funding opportunities, Echoing Green’s internal strengths and assets, and the nonprofit’s motivations and aspirations. Echoing Green ultimately selected three priorities that would balance the organization’s current work with opportunities to expand into new areas:

  1. Strengthen the fellowship Program, which aims to strengthen and accelerate extraordinary emerging social entrepreneurs
  2. Increase equitable access to capital for social entrepreneurs, decrease structural barriers to resources, and equip fellows with the resources needed to succeed
  3. Help social entrepreneurs take collective action by connecting fellows with each other and other leaders and enhancing their ability to navigate their current environment

Undergirding these three strategic priorities was Echoing Green’s commitment to invest in the institutional maturation of the organization in order to achieve excellence in its work, and to live the equity it wants to see in the world.

Once the team aligned on these priorities, we worked with them to develop a high-level implementation roadmap to guide the following three years of work. We also provided other tools to help them implement the strategy, including decision-making tools and a guide for further defining and aligning on their culture. We then transitioned into a thought partnership role, coaching leaders to develop detailed implementation plans including a financial model and fundraising plans, bring those plans to their board of directors, and confidently and effectively lead the organization through the changes required to implement the strategy.

An inclusive process was key

to the plan’s success

EARLY RESULTS

Six months after the process wrapped up, Echoing Green continued to feel confident in its direction. The strategic plan provided structure to help the team understand its work, make decisions about tradeoffs, and anticipate outcomes. Most exciting, Echoing Green engaged new partners—in line with the plan—and saw excitement from existing partners. It believes its potential for impact is greater as a result.

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Communities In Schools: Scaling impact while supporting financial sustainability

Communities In Schools: Scaling impact while supporting financial sustainability

THE CHALLENGE

Seize an opportunity created by new legislation to expand impact and bring in new revenue

THE OUTCOME

Two new products that, in the first year since rollout, have enabled the organization to expand to five new markets and bring in $500,000 in additional revenue

OUR APPROACH

In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which included a provision clarifying that federal funds can be used support programs offering non-academic support to struggling students, including supporting students’ social and emotional learning. This change opened the door for Communities In Schools to consider opportunities to scale its model of surrounding students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and succeed in life. Communities In Schools already worked in 2,300 schools to support about 1.5 million students through its affiliate network across 25 states and the District of Columbia, and the organization saw many possibilities for how it could sustainably increase its impact now that the legislation allowed schools and districts to use federal funds in new ways.

Community Wealth Partners partnered with Communities In Schools to help them assess the many possibilities they saw and hone in on the ones that were best positioned to advance their strategy, reach more students, and do so in a way that was financially sustainable. We worked with staff and board members to develop early hypotheses about new ways they could offer programs or services to school districts, schools, and educators. We then conducted targeted market research with a diverse array of potential customers and beneficiaries to assess market needs, explore which of the organization’s assets best meet those needs, and consider the social impact, scale, and revenue potential of various opportunities. Once the board and staff aligned on the strongest opportunities to pursue, we developed a plan for Communities In Schools to prototype and pilot some efforts in the short term—to test concepts and learn—as well as a longer-term plan to create new products.

From this work, Communities In Schools decided to launch two products:

  1. licensing of its in-school support model.
  2. professional development courses for school and district staff.

Prototyping in the short term,

planning for the long term

EARLY OUTCOMES

“Thanks to Community Wealth Partner’s interviews and analysis, the licensure product has quickly gained traction with school districts and state education leaders,” said Dale Erquiaga, president and CEO of Communities in Schools.  “In addition, Community Wealth Partners’ research helped us develop targeted curriculum for four professional development courses.”

In the first year, these products helped Communities in Schools extend its reach into five new markets and brought in an additional $500,000 in revenue.

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City Year: Building smarter partnerships to help students succeed

City Year: Building smarter partnerships to help students succeed

THE CHALLENGE

City Year found itself fielding partnership requests without clarity on how to prioritize and form partnerships that deliver the greatest impact for students and schools

THE OUTCOME

A partnership strategy that helps the City Year network expand its reach and impact

OUR APPROACH

Partnerships are core to City Year’s mission of supporting student success and developing the next generation of leaders. Because of its strong track record and commitment to partnership, City Year—which serves over 300 public schools in 29 cities across the country—founds its national and local offices consistently fielding partnership requests from other nonprofits and local collaboratives. Many of the requests seemed like good opportunities, but the organization wondered how many partnerships it could effectively manage and which ones would make the biggest difference in advancing its work in schools.

In 2016, City Year hired Community Wealth Partners to create a nonprofit partnership strategy that would enable it to deliberately build and manage partnerships, particularly more formalized, ongoing, one-to-one partnerships with peer organizations dedicated to supporting under-resourced schools. The goal was to create a strategic framework and disciplined business process for prioritizing collaborations that would drive the greatest gains for City Year’s students and schools; enable focused decision-making and strategic use of funding across the organization; and be responsive to the unique needs facing its communities and schools.

As a first step in this project, we worked with City Year’s national office to understand the organization’s diverse perspectives on partnerships; identify partnership areas that would deliver the highest return on investment for students and schools; prioritize among those partnership areas; and develop a clear set of criteria for assessing potential partnerships with specific organizations. We co-created a strategy that was flexible enough for partnerships to be implemented in different ways based on the unique needs of each of the nonprofit’s 29 locations. We also helped develop a business process, management tools, and a three-year roadmap to guide City Year in implementing the partnership strategy, along with a vision for a “proof of concept” pilot so the organization could further test and refine the partnership strategy and management approach.

A strategy to deliberately build

and manage partnerships

EARLY OUTCOMES

Through the process, City Year identified summer learning as a priority area for expanding its impact to make sure children are getting year-round support. In 2018, the nonprofit piloted a partnership with BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), which designs and delivers summer and afterschool learning experiences. Results from the small pilot programs in Boston and Providence demonstrated that students who participated in BELL’s summer programs from City Year partner schools (called BELL scholars) made gains in math and literacy similar to what BELL achieved nationally. In the summer of 2018, BELL scholars gained on average two months in literacy skills and two and a half months in math skills. While the partnership strategy work will take time to fully implement, City Year continues to learn and refine its approach.

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Annie E. Casey Foundation: Assessing capacity needs for more effective advocacy

Annie E. Casey Foundation: Assessing capacity needs for more effective advocacy

THE CHALLENGE

Grantees wanted help prioritizing their organizational needs and finding the right technical assistance to equip them to drive policy change for children and families

THE OUTCOME

Between 2014 and 2016, grantees increased organizational capacity scores in all six target competency areas, resulting in significant state policy gains for kids

OUR APPROACH

For two decades, the Annie E. Casey Foundation had supported KIDS COUNT, a grantee network of 53 state-based organizations dedicated to advocating for policies that ensure all children have what they need to thrive. While network members were collecting state-level data on the most critical needs of children and families and helping shift policies to better support kids, capacity across the network varied. The foundation found itself frequently responding to urgent grantee needs rather than equipping grantees to proactively build their capacity for more effective advocacy.

Beginning in 2011, the Casey Foundation partnered with Community Wealth Partners to develop a customized tool to help grantees assess their capacity. We began by working with the foundation and network to develop a list of core competencies that they defined as essential for high-functioning child advocacy organizations. We worked closely with the foundation and grantees to design a self-assessment—to be completed by grantees and their stakeholders—that would give grantees a clear picture of their strengths and opportunities for growth and inform the foundation’s investments in building the capacity of this grantee network.

So that the foundation could strengthen trust with grantees and make them comfortable with the process, we served as an intermediary. We sent grantees the assessment, collected and analyzed their responses, and then created two types of reports:

  1. a report for the Casey Foundation that showed only aggregated information across the portfolio of grantees;
  2. individual organization reports for each respective organization’s leaders, which included recommendations for improvement. The foundation never saw the individual organization reports.

The foundation’s capacity building support continues far beyond the assessment: To equip grantees to get the support they deem most important, all KIDS COUNT network members have access to a diverse array of technical assistance providers and an online resource library, which is organized by competency areas. As a technical assistance provider, we partner with grantees to provide customized support, including leadership and team coaching.

Equipping grantees to

proactively build their capacity

EARLY RESULTS

Since 2011, we have administered the assessment every two or three years. All 53 grantees have taken the assessment at least once. While the individual organization reports help grantees home in on their needs, the aggregate reports inform the foundation’s decisions to ensure the network has access to the most important capacity building support. For example, when the foundation saw in 2014 that the network scored lowest in the “racial equity and inclusion” category, it engaged more technical assistance providers with racial equity expertise. The aggregate results also provide insights on competencies that are most likely to lead to greater impact. For example, data show that organizations that assessed themselves as strong in “strategic leadership and decision making” successfully advocated for nearly 25 times more public dollars and reached more than four times the number of children and families as those whose scores indicated they were not as advanced in this area.

The capacity indicator assessment, customized technical assistance, and leadership and team coaching for grantees have been some of the ways we have partnered with the Casey Foundation for more than a decade to help grantees build capacity to achieve the outcomes they seek.

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