Strengthening Small, Community-Based Nonprofits

Grantees Work To Build the Capacity of Grassroots Nonprofits and Develop More Leaders of Color

By Rick Nahmias and Adriana Godoy Leiss

Conventional wisdom in the nonprofit field holds that larger organizations have an advantage in fundraising, especially when tapping major dollars from the big foundation players.

Many believe it’s even tougher for minority-led or small, grassroots nonprofits to crack open these philanthropic doors to secure adequate funding to address the needs of their underserved communities, many of which are made up of ethnic minorities.

“Folks are up against David and Goliath battles,” said Kafi Blumenfield, president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, a leader in working with small, grassroots nonprofits. “The odds against them are huge.”

In December 2008, in response to substantial discussion in the philanthropic community about how foundations could do more to reach underserved populations, TCWF joined forces with the Weingart Foundation to collaboratively fund a Liberty Hill pilot program that uses a multipronged approach to address the issue. Each foundation made a $1 million, two-year grant to provide training and capacity-building funding to small, grassroots, minority-led health and/or human service organizations in Los Angeles County. During the program’s first year, Liberty Hill regranted funds to 42 organizations totaling $900,000 to build the institutional strength and leadership of community-based groups.

CompassPoint Nonprofit Services in San Francisco, a leader in providing professional development and training to nonprofit staff, was also funded by TCWF in December 2008 to launch a different kind of capacity-building pilot program. Known as the Leadership Program for Next Generation Leaders of Color, the 12-month institute is specifically aimed at developing the leadership skills of people of color working in health and human services organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Small, community-based nonprofit organizations play a critical role in addressing the challenges faced by minority and other predominately low-income communities in California,” said Gary L. Yates, president and CEO of TCWF. “Strengthening the next generation of leaders and small, community-based organizations that serve ethnic minority populations is an important strategy for improving the health of the underserved in California.”

Through such grants, TCWF hopes to level the playing field by supporting programs that provide training, assistance and grant dollars to small, grassroots nonprofits and their leaders. The end goal is to help these organizations strengthen their institutions and the capacity of the leaders of color working in health and human services organizations in California.

Making grants to reach marginalized and underserved populations in California is deeply rooted in TCWF’s mission and goals.

Making grants to reach marginalized and underserved populations in California is deeply rooted in TCWF’s mission and goals. According to a report of TCWF’s grantmaking in 2009, 71 percent of grants were to organizations that primarily serve low-income or ethnic minority populations and 58 percent were to organizations with operating budgets of less than $2 million. (In 2008, those numbers were 57 percent and 60 percent, respectively.)

“It is a reflection of the changing demographics of California,” said TCWF Program Director Sandra J. Martínez. “What we are doing is helping to plant seeds for the future.”

Martínez, who oversees grantmaking in special projects, said that CompassPoint was a good choice for a new leadership development program because it is a nationally known organization that has studied, developed and implemented successful leadership models. And the Liberty Hill Foundation has a long history of making effective grants to smaller nonprofits that are often unable to get funds from larger foundations.

“It is strategic to support both CompassPoint and Liberty Hill because they have the knowledge, skills and track record in developing leadership and building the capacity of nonprofits, particularly in communities of color, which is in line with TCWF grantmaking priorities,” said Martínez.

Strengthening a Challenged Sector
Sixteen leaders of color from health and human services nonprofits in the Bay Area attend monthly seminars and receive leadership development coaching, facilitated peer-coaching and technical assistance from CompassPoint Nonprofit Services.

Funding intermediary organizations like Liberty Hill and Hispanics in Philanthropy (see sidebar below) to regrant capacity-building funding to small, grassroots organizations has proved an effective strategy because these intermediaries are locally based, culturally competent and oftentimes quite familiar with the values and customs of populations in their respective regions. This grantmaking approach extends the Foundation’s reach into underserved, hard-to-reach populations to strengthen nonprofits that serve low-income communities of color.

Furthermore, by funding leadership development activities like CompassPoint’s and those being undertaken by the Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management (see sidebar on pg. 14), TCWF is addressing another particularly important need: to bolster and train a pipeline of diverse executives, staff and board members to serve as the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Strengthening tomorrow’s leaders is especially important as current, longtime executives and founding board members transition out.

A New Type Of Collaboration

The folks we are working with don’t have a lot of money, but there are skills beyond having money that we can provide to help their chances at success.

“It was like a perfect marriage,” said Fred Ali, president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Weingart Foundation, on partnering with TCWF in funding the Liberty Hill pilot program.

“Because of both organizations’ compatibility in grantmaking styles, close working relationships and similar interests, we and TCWF decided to leverage our dollars and do something that would yield greater results,” Ali added.

Weingart Foundation, which makes grants to assist organizations that work in the areas of health, human services and education, also reinforced its dedication in late 2008 to strengthen the capacity of community-based organizations that primarily serve minority and low-income communities. Like TCWF, Weingart Foundation has focused its grantmaking on the needs of poor and underserved communities.

“We undertook some new approaches and deepened commitments to established grantmaking programs,” said Tara Westman, Weingart Foundation’s associate vice president of learning and special initiatives, on the foundation expanding its funding to making unrestricted and capacity-building support grants.

TCWF and Weingart Foundation saw Liberty Hill as an organization that historically has had strong contacts in many of the communities they wanted to reach, and that offered a host of integrated capacity-building activities designed to aid organizations in achieving their missions.

The Hard Work of Making Change

Without the work we have done with Liberty Hill, we’d have no voice.

Liberty Hill’s Blumenfield cited its decade-long funding from TCWF that began with grants focused on environmental health in and around communities of color in Los Angeles County.

“It was natural for TCWF to initiate the conversation about how we could try to increase the capacity of leaders of color running organizations that are working with issues of public health,” Blumenfield said, referring to Liberty Hill’s longstanding track record in communities of color and its relationship with TCWF.

Liberty Hill’s recent pilot program began around a kitchen table, much the same way that many of the organizations it has funded began. The foundation brought in veteran organizers from communities of color to begin conversations and outreach to some of the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles – areas where learning how to apply for a grant isn’t always a top priority.

Next, Liberty Hill provided these organizations with training and assistance in applying for grants that would help them overcome obstacles related to their size or lack of access or experience.

Lastly, it developed a series of workshops aimed at giving grantees the skills they need to overcome some of the common challenges they encounter as young grassroots organizations, in addition to imparting strategies to cope with the struggling economy.

One of Liberty Hill’s grantees, the LA Taxi Workers Alliance (LATWA), advocates for the rights of Los Angeles’ 4,000 cab drivers, who sometimes face intense and exploitive conditions regarding safety, low pay, high stress and toxic health impacts. LATWA is a broad coalition of community activists and workers employed by taxicab companies in and around Los Angeles.

The alliance’s multicultural leaders have been participating in specific Liberty Hill-led workshops on media relations, story framing, grassroots fundraising and learning winnable strategies, whether they find themselves on the inside or outside of structures of power.

“Without the work we have done with Liberty Hill, we’d have no voice,” said LATWA chief organizer Sentayehu G. Silassie, an Ethiopian immigrant who drove a cab in Los Angeles for 18 years.

Sentayehu G. Silassie
Sentayehu G. Silassie, Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance chief organizer

As a result, the alliance has been successful in publicizing such issues as drivers’ health and occupational safety. “The media normally ignore us, but now for the first time we are in every paper – both English and Spanish,” Silassie said.

Liberty Hill said it is not just concerned with its grantees’ fiscal well-being. Its capacity-building program also ensures that they are able to maneuver numerous potentially tricky areas including messaging, leadership – both inside and outside the organization – and communications.

“The folks we are working with don’t have a lot of money, but there are skills beyond having money that we can provide to help their chances at success,” Blumenfield said. “Those include understanding the political landscape, how to get your message out there, communications strategies, and how to fundraise in this climate.”

Nurturing Leaders

CompassPoint takes a different but complementary tack in helping to build the capacity of leaders of color in the nonprofit sector.

A report the organization released in 2008 points to the need for racial and ethnic diversity within the sector’s leadership ranks. Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out, which surveyed emerging nonprofit leaders nationwide, indicated that 28 percent of respondents identified themselves as people of color. It also indicated that this group expressed a greater desire to gain executive management skills.

Strengthening a Challenged Sector

CompassPoint Project Director Marla Cornelius and her colleagues said they also learned a great deal from focus groups while planning the leadership program, which is tailored to people of color employed in health and human service nonprofits and who are managers or director-level staff with three to five years of management experience.

She said that the leaders of color in that group were asked to give specific examples about how culture and other factors impacted their management skills, their relationship with money, and their views about what it is like to be a leader of color in an organization that is not particularly diverse. This led CompassPoint to narrow the institute’s frame to two significant leadership challenges – managing people and managing money – which Cornelius noted tend to be demanding areas for mid-level staff.

“How we manage staff has huge financial implications,” she said.

Strengthening a Challenged Sector

The inaugural class of the 12-month Leadership Program for Next Generation Leaders of Color began in October 2009 with 16 “next generation” nonprofit leaders from around the Bay Area. The institute holds monthly seminars and offers leadership development coaching, facilitated peer-coaching and technical assistance consulting.

At a seminar on fundraising, the class emphasized the principle that organizations must be financially literate to have power. Exercises included having participants examine their own personal relationship with money, which CompassPoint believes translates into greater clarity in their work.

Cornelius said that the organization also sees the institute as a liberating place in which to do the reflective work that it believes allows for greater candor, resulting in deeper learning. She added that participants, like Beverly Corriere of Cleo Eulau Center (CEC), appreciate the frank, intense – yet sometimes emotional – discussions.

“The program allows me to free myself from the past and move forward to be the best leader I can be,” said Corriere, administrative director of CEC. The nonprofit, based in Mountain View, works in underperforming schools to help build the strengths, confidence and resiliency of both teachers and students, and provides direct counseling services to students who are on probation or who have been expelled from school.

Cornelius also sees this work as beneficial and broadening to CompassPoint’s own core values, allowing them to re-examine their curriculum and training materials.

“This program has been phenomenally successful and has helped us evolve our practice,” Cornelius said. “It has made us all at CompassPoint be more reflective about what it means to be a capacity builder – and to work with people in communities of color.”

Strengthening a Challenged Sector

There are still challenges to the work of both CompassPoint and Liberty Hill. The growing California state budget deficit is having a detrimental impact on the people these organizations serve.

“A new capacity-building initiative launching in the middle of a nationwide economic storm is really, really tough” said Liberty Hill’s Blumenfield. “At a time when organizations are fighting to keep their doors open, we are having to explain just how important it is to not necessarily grow, but to strengthen their core operations so they can weather this time.”

Still, both CompassPoint and Liberty Hill are clear that TCWF’s funding in their respective work couldn’t be better timed.

At CompassPoint, Steve Lew, senior program director, summed up his organization’s own internal learning from the process.

“I can’t overstate the importance – the ‘ah-ha’ moment we’ve all had – making it OK to talk about social differences and power within organizations,” Lew said. “Not just critiquing it but asking, ‘How do I make a difference in improving an organization’s effectiveness and my role as a multicultural leader?’”

For TCWF and Weingart Foundation, honing the leadership skills of people of color and strengthening the capacity of California’s grassroots health and human services nonprofits is an important strategy to ensure an effective nonprofit sector in California.

“A few years down the road,” said Ali of Weingart Foundation, “we hope these grantee organizations will be stronger, more effective and better prepared to administer their missions, leading to an overall strengthening of the sector.”

Hispanics in Philanthropy

San Francisco-based Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP) received a three-year, $250,000 grant from TCWF in December 2009 to support its work of providing capacity-building grants, convenings and technical assistance to nonprofit health organizations in California led by and serving Latinos.

“This is part of a body of work that began more than 10 years ago, which TCWF historically has been a part of, and which functions as a funders’ collaborative,” said Diana Campoamor, HIP’s president.

Known as the Funders’ Collaborative for Strong Latino Communities, HIP’s process is simple: take a small organization, help grow its budget, strengthen its board, and assist with a particular program area, she said.

“HIP’s program is designed to identify, support and connect these emerging leaders,” who, Campoamor pointed out, “are often greatly underfunded and who come from organizations that are often the last to be funded and the first to be cut.”

Centro La Family Advocacy Services (CLFA) in Fresno is one such organization. For more than 30 years, CLFA has been providing the Latino community with culturally competent health and social services, helping families gain access to state medical benefits and health insurance with a goal of preventing chronic disease. CLFA received a $75,000 capacity-building grant from HIP to complete organizational assessments of various aspects of its operation in order to determine strengths and weaknesses.

To date, CLFA has conducted five different internal assessments and, as a result, came to recognize and reprioritize the importance of finding new office space. Through capacity-building discussions and funding from HIP, the organization better understood the need to relocate – mostly to greatly improve client accessibility – and received the resources to make the move happen, resulting in CLFA more effectively serving its clients.

Campoamor compares HIP’s role to being like the “alternative press” of philanthropy.

“We keep our ear to the ground to pick up the stories and make sure they make it to prime time,” she said, referring to how HIP helps build emerging nonprofits into strong, viable organizations.

Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management

The Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management (SCCNM) created the Nonprofit Leadership Development Program (NLDP) in September 2008, with TCWF as its sole funder.

“It was an ideal window of opportunity,” said Regina Birdsell, SCCNM president and CEO. “It allowed us to carve out 18 months to create and deliver a pilot project from two related angles: those looking to advance and those looking to hire.”

Birdsell said that the grant allowed SCCNM to explore the current needs of Los Angeles’ ethnically diverse emerging leaders and boards committed to effective executive leadership.

The program, which runs for approximately six months, has two focus areas in expanding the skills of leaders of color to run nonprofit health and human services organizations. First, NLDP focuses on “the number two” – those senior managers with the potential and desire to advance into an executive director position, who need leadership skill-building. Second, it looks at boards facing transitions – organizations that are thoughtfully looking ahead to a change in the executive director role.

“We provide intensive training, peer learning and consulting opportunities for this group of emerging leaders,” Birdsell said. “Simultaneously, we coach several boards through a process to reflect on their mission and the future direction of their organization,” to then help board members create a clear description of ideal executive director candidates.

Maura J. Harrington, SCCNM’s chief operating officer and director of consulting, pointed out one of the program’s elements that proved most helpful to the emerging leaders.

“The major coaching came through in leadership projects, where participants identified one single issue their organization was currently struggling with,” Harrington said. “They had the opportunity to apply the course content and receive feedback on the solutions they proposed as they worked through the leadership project components.”

Harrington noted the example of Los Angeles’ Girls & Gangs, which used this opportunity to successfully move its leadership paradigm from a volunteer executive director to a paid management position.

“This process helped them work better together as a board, prepare for the transition and hire the right person to lead their organization,” Harrington said.

Featured Grantees Online