The Experience of an Intermediary in a Complex Initiative: The Urban Health Initiative's National Program Office

Why would a foundation use an intermediary to manage a multi-site initative? What are the important aspects of the relationships among a foundation, intermediary and local sites? How has The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's use of an intermediary played out during the life of a ten-year initiative

Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change from the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative

Between 1996 and 2006, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation invested over $20 million in the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative (NII), an ambitious effort to help three neighborhoods in the Bay Area reduce poverty and develop new leaders, better services, more capable organizations, and stronger connections to resources. On some counts NII succeeded, and on others it struggled mightily. In the end, despite some important accomplishments, NII did not fulfill its participants' hopes and expectations for broad, deep, and sustainable community change. In those accomplishments and shortcomings, and in the strategies that produced them, however, lies a story whose relevance exceeds the boundaries of a single initiative. Our goal is to examine this story in the context of other foundation sponsored initiatives to see if it can help philanthropy support community change and other types of long-term, community-based initiatives more effectively.As we began to review materials and conduct interviews, we learned of NII's accomplishments in each neighborhood, including new organizations incubated, new services stimulated, and new leaders helped to emerge. We also quickly discovered multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives on NII's design, implementation, and outcomes that were hard to reconcile. Some of this Rashomon effect is to be expected in a complex, long-term community change initiative that evolves over time with changing players. Some can also be attributed to the different dynamics and trajectories in each of the three sites.We have tried to describe all points of view as accurately as possible without favoring any one perspective. Moreover, we have tried to look beyond the lessons drawn exclusively from NII and to position all of these varied opinions within a broader field-wide perspective, wherever possible.The frustrations of NII's participants and sponsors are mirrored in many other foundations' major initiatives. Indeed, our reviewers -- who have been involved in many such initiatives as funders, evaluators, technical assistance providers, and intermediaries -- all underscored how familiar they were with the challenges and pitfalls described here, both those related specifically to community change efforts and those pertinent to other initiatives. Because the opportunity to discuss the frustrations candidly has been limited, however, they often are relegated to concerns expressed sotto voce. So it was particularly important throughout the review to solicit from our interviewees ideas or suggestions for improving their work together. We offer these along with our own observations as a way to stimulate further reflection and debate, because we believe that philanthropy has an important role to play in improving outcomes for poor communities and their residents. Few foundations have been willing to contribute to this level of honest and sometimes painful public dialogue. But by commissioning this retrospective analysis, the Hewlett Foundation demonstrates a desire to help the field learn and move forward, and we applaud that

Connecting Neighbors: The Role of Settlement Houses in Building Social Bonds With Communities

Provides lessons learned from the model of service delivery provided by community settlement houses. Examines how the atmosphere, programs, and activities at settlement houses create, foster, and support relationships among participants

Changemaking: Building Strategic Competence

· Foundations have begun to recognize that how they go about their work is as important as what they support. To be better armed to address the urgent challenges facing Detroit’s children, the Skillman Foundation has adopted a changemaking role that draws upon and leverages its knowledge, networks, and civic reputation to supplement its grantmaking investments. · Effective changemaking depends on the accrual of trust and respect that is built over time in relationships with community residents and stakeholders, public and private partners, and others with influence and resources. · Changemaking required the foundation to build new strategic competencies such as working across traditionally siloed grantmaking programs, adding evaluation and learning staff, and increasing communication and alignment between board and staff. · Ten lessons for foundations that want to assume a changemaking role are offered, including paying attention to local context and political realities, understanding and managing the dynamics of credit and control, and communicating clearly and inviting feedback about the foundation’s goals so that its strategies are informed by a timely and nuanced understanding of potential partners’ interests and needs

Community change initiatives from 1990-2010: accomplishments and implications for future work

Community development

What Does It Take? Reflections on Foundation Practice in Building Healthy Communities, 2010–2020

Foundation practice — how a foundation goes about its work — plays a significant role in determining the results of the work, particularly for foundations that take on roles that position them as part of the action rather than solely as sources of funds. This article aims to build upon the lessons from past place-based work by examining the practices of The California Endowment as it designed and implemented Building Healthy Communities, a 10-year initiative to promote health equity. The initiative combined intensive investment in 14 historically disinvested communities with sophisticated state- and regional-level policy campaigns and coalition-building strategies to shift the public narrative toward a deeper understanding of systemic inequities and the potential of people power to transform them. More specifically, the article focuses on how the Foundation’s board was recruited, managed, nurtured, and leveraged to ensure support for the initiative over 10 years. Longterm community and systems-change work is notoriously challenging for foundation boards. The article suggests seven strategies that appeared key to effective board governance of Building Healthy Communities, and ends with some reflections on what it takes for a private foundation to succeed in such a complex and long-term enterprise

The Sandtown-Winchester Neighborhood Transformation Initiative: Lessons Learned About Community Building & Implementation

Describes challenges in implementing a ten-year community building initiative in Baltimore. Includes community capacity investment, early decision-making, power relationships, race and class issues, and neighborhood leadership

Toward Greater Effectiveness in Community Change: Challenges and Responses for Philanthropy

Offers a model suggesting how foundations can most effectively think about, do the work of, and learn from community change. Part of the series Practice Matters: The Improving Philanthropy Project

Evaluating for the Bigger Picture: Breaking Through the Learning and Evaluation Barriers to Advancing Community Systems-Change Field Knowledge

Foundations investing in community systems change often fail to prioritize field-level and cross-initiative evaluation questions in building initiatives. As a result, many of the documented evaluations of such investments lack translatable lessons specific and influential enough to drive related decisions and actions of others in the field. This article developed from ongoing, multiyear peer learning across several foundations that collectively compiled recommendations for community systems-change funders and evaluators to implement more powerful evaluations. They are intended to help funders and evaluators engaged in these efforts build sectorwide knowledge capable of informing improved work across initiatives and communities. This article also prioritizes the inclusion of community in the entire process of field-knowledge creation and use. As the managers and advisers responsible for evaluating funder-led community systems change, we have struggled to ensure that our evaluations are capable of providing useful knowledge to future efforts. For that reason, this article focuses on strategies to address the gaps we see and with the intention that important lessons are captured, analyzed, shared, and used by others