This article examines how three organizations collaborated on work to control commercial tobacco use in Minnesota’s Indian Country, and shares lessons learned on how they came to incorporate tribal culture, respect traditional tobacco practices, and acknowledge historical trauma to inform their grantmaking.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Education First participated in a half-dozen joint funding efforts to support the success of the Common Core State Standards in the nation’s K-12 public education system. Looking critically at these efforts, the authors learned lessons about why some collaborations are more effective.
Bringing people together is one of the key roles of philanthropy. It’s important to make sure you have the right people in the room so that the time spent is productive and the outcome is useful for everyone. To ensure you’ve tapped the right players for your next gathering, ask yourself these three questions before you issue invitations: What is our overall goal? What roles are essential to accomplish our goal? How can we make the best use of others?
To better understand the system of community investment, and with the hope of developing interventions that would permit it to achieve greater scale, efficiency, and impact, the authors developed a framework they called “capital absorption.” This work offers potential routes forward for understanding and addressing need in low- and moderate-income communities in postindustrial cities throughout New England.
This paper examines development models that intentionally integrate elements from two or more sectors, the capital challenges inherent in such projects, and the unique role that CDFIs and philanthropy play in overcoming those challenges. This paper focuses on neighborhood-level efforts that go beyond single sector investments that are emerging through partnerships and collaboratives working to deliver community driven solutions. Includes case studies.
Do you have a collaborative mindset? This tool will help you take collaboration seriously – and playfully – and figure out your strengths and opportunities to improve your skills.
This guide looks at how funders collaborate with and bring support to indigenous communities around the world. Through examples from a diverse range of foundations, this guide explores how grantmakers work with indigenous peoples, the approaches they take, and the practices they find effective.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Funding Partnerships provides matching grants for innovative community-based projects aimed at improving the health and health care of underserved and vulnerable populations. The premise underlying Local Funding Partnerships has remained constant over its 25 years—by collaborating with local funders instead of acting alone, RWJF could improve the health and health care of Americans, while getting a larger return on its investment.
For decades, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has worked with other funders to solve complex social problems. Recently, The Bridgespan Group helped the Foundation take stock of what it can learn from its many collaborations. This report shares our findings, including five collaborative models Packard uses and factors that raise the chances of a collaboration’s success. Other funders will find the Packard experiences instructive as they consider their own collaborations. Reading time 3 min.
In this article, an initial evaluation of the Family Leadership Initiative, part of the larger Gatherings of Hope Initiative, a collaboratively designed program to strengthen families and improve children’s education in Grand Rapids, Mich., shows high levels of satisfaction, with students reporting some academic improvements. For the congregations, FLI provided a rare opportunity to collaborate with each other.
This reflective practice article examines lessons learned from community-based substance abuse prevention efforts in the faith community and describes how those lessons will shape the work of the Assistance for Substance Abuse Prevention Center. The article also introduces the Faith-Based Prevention Toolkit developed to help members of faith community implement and sustain substance abuse prevention activities in their congregations. The authors hope that other foundations will incorporate the lessons into their work in the faith community.
This article describes a method for instructing social work students in the art of enhanced collaboration with foundations, shifting the focus from “writing a winning proposal” and “finding alternative funding sources” to “developing collaborative partnerships for sustainable community development and social change.” The program consists of four major steps: charitable foundation review and case presentation, self-guided review of real-world proposals, mock grant proposal development, and side-by-side proposal review.
This article shares a story of the development and initial use of the Discovery Community Self-Assessment Tool as a process of social construction critical to collective action and a possible indicator of network learning.
This article describes a creative relationship between the Ball Foundation and the Rowland Unified School District. The Ball Foundation observed that grantees who had a closer relationship with them were more successful than those who had a more traditional relationship. The adaptive approach they adopted requires both the funder and the grantee to be committed to learning and adapting strategies as needed to respond to both results and changing contexts.
The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) produced six case studies on jointly funded programs related to the environment, global health, and information technologies in developing regions around the world. A two-dimensional tool probing eight factors that influence donor (funder) partnership performance and interinstitutional communication was developed and used in conjunction with a Partnering Process Model to guide the preparation of the case studies. Among the factors considered (history of the partnerships, level of commitment, decision-making, etc.), communications among donors and within IDRC was the most important variable related to success of the partnerships.
Starting in the late 80s the Institute for Medicine began calling for involvement of health professionals in the development of policy affecting health. The Partnership for the Public’s Health was designed to build the capacity of local health departments and communities to work together to improve health through advocacy and policy change. Results included 1) the extent to which building the capacity of health departments and community groups to jointly advocate for policy change led to sustained work in health advocacy 2) policy-related legacies of the initiative.
