Collaborating Within to Support Systems Change: The Need For — and Limits of — Cross-Team Grantmaking

To be responsive to the many facets of communities’ challenges and solutions, the Kresge Foundation works intentionally at the intersections of its seven grantmaking areas. One way it fulfills this intention is by awarding cross-team grants, which involve financial and intellectual contributions from multiple Kresge programs in order to enable cross-sector, multidisciplinary work among grantees. As Kresge’s cross-team practice has grown and the field has increasingly expressed interest in cross-sector approaches to addressing long-standing challenges, Kresge partnered with the strategic learning firm Informing Change to explore how this approach to grantmaking and greater degree of internal collaboration is working from the point of view of Kresge staff and what enables or inhibits it, as well as whether and in what ways grantees uniquely benefit from cross-team grants. This article highlights key findings from this exploration, including grantees’ appreciation for Kresge’s cross-team approach. Nevertheless, the resource-intensive level of the foundation’s internal collaboration compelled many Kresge staff to seek evidence of impact in the short term, despite the challenges inherent in measuring complex, emergent, and unpredictable cross-sector work. Kresge’s experience with cross-team grantmaking surfaces a deeply embedded challenge across philanthropy: the historical practice of structuring grantmaking work by program content area is often misaligned with the urgent need to work across sectors to drive complex systems change. As philanthropy seeks to support collaboration among grantees and launches new multifunder collaboratives to affect systems change, structures within foundations may need to change to actualize this ideal

Investing in Leadership Development: A Tool for Systems Change in the Community Health Center Field

Over the course of 12 years, the Blue Shield of California Foundation committed nearly $20 million to growing a pool of community health center leaders who were prepared to be effective agents of change in their organizations and in the safety net field. This signature investment, the Clinic Leadership Institute, was implemented in partnership with the Healthforce Center at University of California, San Francisco, in anticipation of a generation of California health center leaders beginning to transition into retirement. During the institute\u27s 10 cohorts, access to community health centers dramatically increased with the Affordable Care Act, and this — coupled with rising costs of health care — continued to underscore how crucial community health centers were to accessible and quality care for poor and underserved populations. A study spanning 10 cohorts of alumni found that the institute served a critical role in supporting community health center leaders and their organizations in navigating these changes, while also building alumni networks advocating for community health centers in county- and state-level policy. The program equipped 258 individuals to lead and deliver care in a field marked by continuous change, complexity, and mounting demand. Drawing on these findings, we make the case that investment in leadership development is a critical philanthropic tool for field building and, ultimately, systems change. We explore how the foundation made the most of this investment through intentional funding, design, and strategic considerations