posted on: Thursday, October 08, 2009

by Julia Craig

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University recently released a series of C. S. Mott Foundation-funded case studies profiling the work of nonprofits organizing for school reform across the country. “The Impact of Community and Youth Organizing on School Reform” series examined the strategies of residents of seven urban areas across the country in their efforts to enact local school reforms.

One of the organizations included in the series was the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. The Annenberg Institute documented the Community Coalition’s work improving access to college preparatory courses at high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

The South L.A. Report profiled one of the students benefitting from access to college preparatory courses. The summary of the Annenberg Institute’s findings illustrated the power that organizing brought to the struggle for equitable access to resources in the school district. Russlyn Ali, executive director of The Education Trust-West said, “I am pretty convinced that no amount of intellectual framing and data and research that we could have provided would have moved the district. We needed the 800-plus Latino and African American parents to mandate rigor. It was organizing unlike anywhere else I’ve seen in the nation.”

Community Coalition co-created the Communities for Educational Equity coalition in 2004, which organized parents and students to demand more equitable distribution of resources and greater accountability from LAUSD. According to the study, organizing accomplished these goals. One school official commented that it was the largest reform the district passed in 20 years. The South L.A. Report talked to Luis Lopez, who graduated in 2008 and now attends UCLA, where he is doing research on South L.A. as part of his studies. He hadn’t even considered college until his senior year, since neither of his parents went. Luis was the valedictorian of his class. Still, upon enrollment in UCLA, he found that he wasn’t prepared for the rigors of a college setting. He looked around and realized he hadn’t had the same opportunities as his new classmates. As he told the South L.A. Report, “[I]f you compare Beverly Hills High to Fremont, one looks like a prison and the other looks like a university.”

The Annenberg Institute’s work to document the effectiveness of education reform organizing complements NCRP’s Grantmaking for Community Impact Project. L.A. County is the fourth site of the project, following New Mexico, North Carolina and Minnesota. Additionally, Community Coalition is one of NCRP’s nonprofit partners and will participate in the research by providing us with data about their work and accomplishments over the past five years. NCRP senior research associate Lisa Ranghelli and I will be working with Community Coalition and 14 other groups in L.A. County documenting their work to educate funders about the value of advocacy and organizing work. We will release the results of our study in early 2010. I hope you’ll watch out for it!

Julia Craig is research associate at NCRP.

posted on: Thursday, August 20, 2009

by Lisa Ranghelli

Lisbeth Schorr’s recent commentary, “To Judge What Will Best Help Society's Neediest, Let's Use a Broad Array of Evaluation Techniques,” in the Chronicle of Philanthropy made an important argument about the need to recognize and validate the knowledge and expertise of individuals and communities as they seek to solve complex social problems. Schorr cautioned against a reliance solely on “evidence-based” programs, since this gold standard of evaluation is almost impossible to attain – precisely because multi-faceted problems and solutions are hard to reduce to simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships.

Advocacy and community organizing tap the myriad skills and knowledge of a variety of stakeholders, who come together and pool what they know to craft solutions to community problems and create the political will to implement them. Sometimes these can be messy, nonlinear processes, yet their tangible and intangible impacts can be measured in a variety of ways. And the learning from those efforts—both successes and failures—informs future change strategies.

As foundation leaders, academics and practitioners seek ever more ways to measure and assess impact, it will be important to not separate the people on the ground and their knowledge from the seemingly neutral tools of evaluation. FSG Social Impact Advisors’ comprehensive study, “Breakthroughs and Shared Measurement of Social Impact,” noted that new shared systems “offer an important complement to more rigorous evaluation studies by promoting ongoing learning in timely and cost-effective ways.”

Key elements of these measurement systems include: voluntary participation by the organizations providing data; independence from funders in developing and managing the system; and, in more advanced systems, an opportunity for participants to get together and talk about the results, share learning, and improve coordination. These participatory tracking processes allow everyone involved in a complex set of activities to benefit from the information collected. These approaches can help shift focus from unrealistic attempts to learn whether a grant to one organization to achieve a specific outcome was effective, toward less fragmented, more holistic examinations of collective impact. Perhaps convening participants is as important as data collection, so that their “on the ground” knowledge can inform data analysis and future planning based on what the data reveals.

A quick review of the publicly-available approaches highlighted in the report indicates that only a few are attempting to capture data related to advocacy, organizing and civic engagement. The Center for What Works/Urban Institute Indicators Project stands out for having a set of outcomes and indicators for both advocacy and organizing.

Would more attention to advocacy and organizing in shared measurement systems–and the associated collective learning that participants undertake—be helpful to advocates and organizers? Would these tools give more funders confidence to provide grants for these strategies?

Lisa Ranghelli is senior research associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and co-author of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina.

posted on: Wednesday, August 19, 2009

by Julia Craig

A recent blog post on The Plain Dealer identified the ways in which nonprofits are demonstrating social impact to stay competitive in an increasingly challenging fundraising marketplace. As foundations and other donors tighten their belts, nonprofits must compete for fewer dollars while facing greater need. This is a story that’s been told many times during this recession.

For nonprofits like those in Ohio under scrutiny to demonstrate their worth funders, what does impact mean? Big Brothers Big Sisters tracked participants and found that adults who participated in the program as children tended to be better educated, wealthier, and have stronger relationships than peers with a similar background who were not mentored through the program. This type of study is useful for a nonprofit as it demonstrates to funders that their support contributes to success.

For smaller nonprofits without a national affiliate, conducting such research could be financially infeasible. And what about those nonprofits working on changing the system rather than providing services and individual advocacy?

NCRP’s Grantmaking for Community Impact Project has found demonstrable return on investment for grantmakers giving to advocacy and organizing. In New Mexico and North Carolina, a small sample of advocacy and organizing groups reaped billions of dollars in benefits for their communities. Our mixed methodology captures both quantitative impacts (such as passing a state Earned Income Tax Credit) and qualitative benefits (such as reducing the legal limit of uranium in groundwater). However, there is still debate in the field as to how best to measure impact, and what that word even means.

Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy recently sparked a lively debate on high performance and high impact nonprofits. He argued that a high performance nonprofit is directly observable: it is well-run and efficient with strong leadership and good management, while a high impact nonprofit is one that has a sustained impact on its community. This may not be observable except in retrospect. Stannard-Stockton’s post generated a flurry of discussion and dissent, leading John Macintosh of SeaChange Capital Partners to post a rebuttal. He contended that a high performance nonprofit “has a high impact program that is likely to be able to deliver over time under a variety of changing conditions.”

My question is, is impact always about meeting the goals of a given activity or organization? As part of the Grantmaking for Community Impact Project, we asked groups to give us examples of instances when they didn’t achieve their goals but still gained from a given campaign. Many shared stories of not winning a legislative battle, but were able to build relationships with lawmakers, cultivate leadership skills, strengthen organizational knowledge of the legislative process, and feel better prepared for the next opportunity to ensure lawmakers heard their constituents’ voices.

So in figuring out ways to measure the impact of our organizations, let’s not forget about these “soft” successes.

• Nonprofits in Northeast Ohio are being required to provide hard facts to get funding [The Plain Dealer]
• High Performance vs. High Impact Nonprofits [Tactical Philanthropy]
• A Rebuttal & an Example of a High Performance Organization [Tactical Philanthropy]

Julia Craig is research assistant at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and co-author of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina.

posted on: Monday, June 08, 2009

By Lisa Ranghelli

Where I live in Western Massachusetts, tapping maple trees is a livelihood for some and a hobby for others. During the fleeting weeks of sap season, I look forward to putting a tap into a tree and seeing the clear sweet liquid immediately begin to flow into the bucket. The work to collect that sap and turn it into syrup is a labor of love, but there is nothing more satisfying than pouring your own maple syrup over pancakes hot off the griddle.

Tapping individual donors also requires hard work and persistence, but the payoff is equally gratifying, and no doubt more lasting than the time it takes to swallow those delicious bites of syrup-laden pancake.

After all, that’s where the money is: three-quarters of all charitable giving is done by individuals, dwarfing foundation grantmaking. As nonprofit recipients have pointed out, there tends to be a lot less paperwork and more flexibility involved with private donations compared with institutional grants. Yet, a survey of progressive individual donors found that while the vast majority does support organizing, 42 percent of them focus less than 25 percent of their giving on community organizing.

Here enters the Linchpin Campaign. Linchpin, a project of the Center for Community Change, is the brainchild of NCRP board member Marjorie Fine, who is determined to help organizing groups raise more funds from major donors. Fine has extensively surveyed progressive donors about what they fund and why. Now the Linchpin Campaign has released a guide that draws on these survey findings and the collective wisdom of donors and fundraisers to help social justice organizations access individual wealth. Untapped: How Community Organizers Can Develop and Deepen Relationships with Major Donors and Raise Big Money was written by Joan Minieri, an award-winning community organizer and author. The guide has hands-on tools to help organizers apply their organizing skills and knowledge to the task of donor cultivation and engagement.

Untapped reinforces some of NCRP’s own findings about institutional philanthropy – that many donors believe it is difficult to measure the impacts of organizing. And even though donors want to make a difference, they may not see organizing as a cost-effective strategy to achieve tangible results. The guide offers practical advice on how to alter these perceptions. Fine believes that now is an excellent time to fundraise, despite the economy:

There is so much heightened awareness about community organizing and civic participation right now, and whether economic conditions are up or down, people with wealth have money and they continue to give. Untapped resources for community organizing lie with individuals—individuals who want to give and who are looking for opportunities where their dollars can make a real difference.

Like so many maples trees lining a country road, individual donors are waiting to be tapped …

Lisa Ranghelli is senior research associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and co-author of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement.

posted on: Thursday, June 12, 2008

by NCRP

Two new reports highlight important work undertaken by research director Niki Jagpal and senior research associate Lisa Ranghelli prior to joining NCRP's research team. The methods and results of these research efforts will inform NCRP's own work to promote philanthropy at its best.

The Solidago Fund recently released a report quantifying the community benefits achieved by its grantees and the return on investment of its funding for community organizing. Lisa Ranghelli worked with Jeff Rosen and other Solidago staff to develop the methodology and gather and analyze data for the report. She had previously worked with the Needmor fund to do a similar analysis of its community organizing grantmaking (see below). In calculating community benefits, the Solidago methodology allowed for differentiation between shared and full credit for grantee accomplishments. It also determined the foundation’s contribution to these accomplishments by calculating each grant as a proportion of the group’s budget. The report concluded that collaborative strategies yielded the greatest impact and found a return on investment for Solidago of $1 to $59. [Link]

In 2003, Lisa worked with the Needmor Fund, a small family foundation focused on social justice, to collect grantee data on organizational development. Lisa’s work found that the 18 surveyed grantees had collectively grown their membership by more than 30% and their leadership by 53% over four years. The most striking thing she found was that the aggregate dollar amount of their accomplishments during the four year time horizon was more than $1.37 billion. This meant that Needmor’s investment of $2,688,500 effectively generated a return of $1 to $512. [Link]

These two reports, which were preceded by independent research from the Jewish Funds for Justice, provide some of the framework for NCRP’s impact of advocacy and organizing work. For foundations seeking to maximize impact, NCRP wants to show the social and monetary value of investing in community organizing as a way to achieve lasting social change.

Meanwhile, research director Niki Jagpal did extensive post-Katrina research with Jim Carr, former Senior Vice President for Financial Innovation, Planning, and Research for the Fannie Mae Foundation who currently serves as Chief Operating Officer at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Her work focused on the disparate impact on lower-income and African American communities in New Orleans both immediately after the storm and following the one-year anniversary. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies recently announced the publication of a series of reports calling for a new model of disaster response, one that considers “historic patterns of discrimination and inequality.” Niki’s work is featured in one of the reports, “In the Wake of Katrina: The Continuing Saga of Housing and Rebuilding in New Orleans.” [Link]

Niki’s previous work addressing the distinct impact of Katrina and the subsequent recovery efforts on traditionally marginalized communities sets the backdrop for NCRP’s work on developing criteria for Philanthropy at its Best (PAIB). Promoting philanthropy that explicitly identifies and seeks to remedy structural barriers to equality are integral components of PAIB

posted on: Thursday, April 17, 2008

A California Assembly bill is causing quite a stir in the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds. Spurred by a series of studies by the Greenlining Institute, the bill, AB 624, sponsored by 23^rd District Assembly Member Joseph Coto (D-San Jose), would require California foundations with assets over $250,000,000 to collect and make public information about:

• the ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation of foundation board and staff members;
• the number of grants and grant dollars awarded to organizations reporting that 50% or more of their board or staff members are ethnic minorities;
• “the number of grants and grant dollars awarded to “organizations specifically serving African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Caucasian, Latino, Native American, and Alaskan Native communities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities and other underrepresented communities”
• “the number of grants and grant dollars awarded to predominantly low-income communities"; and
  
• "the number and percentage of business contracts awarded to African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Caucasians, Latinos, Native Americans, and Alaskan Natives."

The current draft of the bill is available here.

The problem is, if the ultimate result sponsors hope to achieve is increased benefits from philanthropy flowing to either communities of color, or low income communities[1], compliance with the bill, as written, looks very unlikely to accomplish that.

First of all, complying with the bill would not be easy, both because of the fairly vague or uncertain definitions of the information to be collected, and also because of the amount of energy that would go into collecting that information, both at the foundations and on the part of their grantees. The bill is imperfectly drafted, so much so that the Nonprofit and Unincorporated Organizations Committee of the California Bar Association’s Business Law Section, a group of attorneys expert on exempt organization law, have issued a statement of opposition raising numerous objections, and concluding that the bill is “fatally flawed.”

The problem I see in the bill is that it does not require information be collected that would establish who is served by grant dollars (more on the feasibility, and wisdom, of trying to establish that below). Rather, it simply requires foundations to tally up the numbers, grant dollars and percentages and publish those. In its current form, a foundation could simply publish the aggregate figures (e.g., “300 grants, in the amount of $400 million, to organizations specifically serving communities of color”, or “250 grants, in the amount of $300 million, predominantly low income communities.” While it would be interesting to track whether those numbers go up or down, they are practically useless, otherwise, for advocates. The data likely wouldn’t provide any evidence that philanthropic support to low income people of color living in particular regions or geographic communities is rising or falling, or how the distribution of grant funds within those communities is shifting over time. (Also, the data likely would not be aggregated somewhere, so to get the bigger picture, advocates would have to cull information from dozens of foundation sites.)

As Aaron Dorfman, NCRP’s Executive Director, has pointed out in this space, if diversity in grantmaking is important, it should be measured. Opponents of the bill actually agree on this point, but object that the challenge will be how to measure it completely, and how to measure it in ways that are most useful to advocates for more responsive grantmaking. The leaders of The California Endowment, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation all have published op-eds or letters to the editor opposing the bill. Ironically, these three foundations are among the handful of large foundations with statewide reach most prominent in pushing policy advocacy and systems change to benefit low income communities of color. The controversy over AB 624 seems to be an example of what a friend of mine calls “heated agreement,” where people who basically agree and should be pulling in the same direction instead divide and argue over minor points.

As Dr. Ross of the Endowment observes, for all the debate about transparency, “the real issues are: poverty, equity and opportunity in communities of color and other underserved communities.” If the purpose is to improve the use of philanthropy to tackle those challenges, we’ll need better information than AB 624 mandates, and advocates for more responsive grantmaking and leaders of foundations like the Endowment, Hewlett and Irvine should be able to come up with much better solutions by working together.

A better place to start would be making visible the flow of grant dollars to specific places, the demographic and other attributes of those places, and even the specific subsets of people served in those places. (Another irony: the specific reach of grants for policy advocacy or systems change will be harder to define, but this challenge can be solved, as I will explore in a future post). To do so, we’ll need to make the grants data already disclosed by foundations more accessible to advocates, and supplement that with data about the geographic and demographic reach of those grant funds. This would mean bringing the grants databases out from behind the firewalls of services like the Foundation Center or Foundation Search, or paying the costs of providing free public access to that data. It also would entail beginning to map the reach of grants. With a modest investment of time and resources, we can determine which census tracts are served by which organizations, and show the amount of grant dollars relative to the numbers of people living in an area or, more specifically, the particular characteristics of people actually served. This is not a technological pipedream, it can definitely be done[2], and likely for far less cost and effort than compliance with AB 624 would entail. The design and development of such a system, however, is something that can’t very well be done in advance through legislation.

In the end, AB 624 is unlikely to become law anytime soon (It has a rough road ahead in the California Senate, and if it passes both houses, Governor Schwarzenegger is likely to veto it.) That should give all supporters of responsive philanthropy, within foundations and the broader community, plenty of time to develop approaches more targeted to improving results for low income communities of color.

Peter Manzo is an NCRP board member and the Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy organization based in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of NCRP or the Advancement Project.

[1] 1) Oddly, there is no such straightforward statement on Greenlining Institute’s Web site that this is the purpose, as opposed to more generically making foundations more “effective and efficient.”
[2] 2) HealthyCity.org, a partnership of nonprofits in Los Angeles sponsored by the Advancement Project, already has built tools and methods for making the flow of grant dollars visible, for public agencies and private funders, to help them assess their grants in Los Angeles County and throughout California. (Full disclosure: I am a proud co-founder of HealthyCity.org.).

posted on: Monday, March 17, 2008

By Lisa Ranghelli, Senior Research Associate, NCRP

Last weekend’s Sunday New York Times Magazine (3/9/08) was devoted to philanthropy and charitable giving. I’d like to comment on two interesting articles on current philanthropic thinking about how to best measure the impact of grants and how to determine which strategies are most likely to effect desired change.

Jon Gertner’s article, “For Good, Measure,” raises some important questions about the extent to which funders should seek a ‘return on investment’ for their grants, and how much money they should spend evaluating and measuring impact. The article focused primarily on big fish in philanthropy like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. After all, they have the kind of resources purported to be needed to have an impact on entrenched problems like poverty.

Yet there are thousands of small and mid-size foundations across this country that might not have the resources to conduct major evaluations, but they should also be thinking about their impact. In fact, these funders could be making a much more significant difference—and some are—by realizing that investing in effective grassroots organizing and advocacy can help achieve long-term systemic change on issues they care about, from housing and homelessness to workforce development and education. Speaking of education…

In “How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?” Times Magazine editor Paul Tough brought together a group of ‘interested parties’--two funders, the NYC schools chancellor, a charter schools CEO, and someone from a conservative think tank-- to participate in a roundtable discussion about changes in education philanthropy. He asked the group to advise a hypothetical wealthy donor as to how he should spend $2 billion to make a difference in the field of education. Much of the discussion centered on identifying visionary chancellors and fostering competition through charter schools, with some attention to infrastructure and human resource development. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given who was having the conversation.

There were no teachers, students, parents, or other community members represented around that table. Yet these are the people most affected by schools issues and often the ones in the best position to make change happen through effective organizing and advocacy. For years foundations have used the argument that “organizing and advocacy are hard to evaluate, and it’s hard to measure their impact” as a reason (excuse?) to not fund such strategies. Yet more and more information is coming to light that challenges this claim.

A great example is the forthcoming Annenberg Institute for School Reform report commissioned by the Mott Foundation, which assesses the impact of organizing groups on education reform and student outcomes in seven cities. (Full disclosure: one of the groups studied was People Acting for Community Together in Miami, formerly run by NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman.) Anyone who doubts that the impacts of organizing can be quantified, measured, and linked to specific performance indicators should plan to check out this report when it is released on March 26th here. It is notable that two of the cities included in the report are New York City and Los Angeles, two places held up for their innovations in the Times’ roundtable discussion. The Annenberg report should offer a very different perspective on ways to improve outcomes for students in those two cities, as well as the five other sites.

In fairness to the Times roundtable participants, their conversation eventually touched on issues of nonprofit capacity and the role of policy advocacy. Vanessa Kirsch, who runs a venture philanthropy firm, talked about the need to provide multi-year support to non-profits run by “social entrepreneurs,” so they have time to build their capacity and bring their innovative ideas to scale. Who are these social entrepreneurs? Low-income community leaders and organizers do not seem to be included in this group, but why not? Grassroots community organizing is about building social capital to achieve systemic change. Chris Doby, program officer at the Mott Foundation, made the case that post-Katrina organizers were in fact social entrepreneurs here.

Perhaps organizing groups need to rebrand themselves to fit in with the new lingo of philanthropy. The phrase “community organizing” causes many foundation trustees to cringe in horror, as they imagine Saul Alinsky rising from the dead and banging down their door in the middle of the night. This visceral feeling about organizing prevents trustees from supporting good work on the issues they care most about. It works against their own self interest. Would they feel better knowing that they were investing in social entrepreneurs who can offer them a quantifiable return on their investment?

To what extent do we buy into the business-oriented language sweeping across the philanthropic sector, and to what extent do we push back?