A Philanthropic Experiment in Collaboration and Capacity Building

I mentioned earlier that a group of Austin philanthropists is working on a collaboration around building the capacity of local arts education organizations.  I now have more information on the project, and as an example of philanthropic collaboration and capacity building it’s pretty interesting.  The project, called Mind Pop, is a $225,000+ collaboration among Still Water Foundation, Webber Family Foundation, Applied Materials, Tapestry Foundation, the Education Foundation of America and additional funders who they are still working to secure. The leaders of Mind POP hope to improve the unequal access Austin students have to high quality arts education and the lack of capacity and collaboration among arts education organizations in town.

Their goals for the project are to:

• Establish a baseline for measuring improvements in access and quality
• Pinpoint inequities in the community to design targeted solutions
• Strengthen relationships between key community partners
• Fund four pilot projects designed by the key partners to address systemic change
• Improve the capacities of 25-40 arts education orgs and provide seed funding to strengthen their programs
• Act collaboratively, laying a foundation for ongoing coordination and potential  national funding going forward

The project has three phases over the next year.  Phase One is an analysis to understand gaps in resources in the current arts education landscape.  Phase Two is a series of professional development sessions for arts education organization leaders to address the four most critical barriers to capacity that they see. These two phases will happen concurrently. Then, Phase Three will be the distribution of $150,000 in grants to the arts organizations that participated in the capacity building sessions. This money is comprised of four systemic change grants at $25,000 each and 40 mini-grants at $1,000-2,500 for organizational change projects.

The details, partnerships and funders are still being worked out, so this is all subject to change, but I imagine the basic overall design of the project will stay the same.

Although the scope and dollar amount of the collaboration and capacity building project is relatively small, it is impressive for two reasons.  First of all, I like to see philanthropists pooling resources for greater leverage.  Particularly in Austin, where our foundation assets are small compared to the foundation assets of other cities, collaboration is crucial to achieve broader and deeper social impact.  So the fact that these family and corporate foundations are creating a pooled fund of money means a greater amount of capital working for the same goal, which hopefully means a greater chance that the goals are realized.  And secondly, this project is interesting because it seeks to understand AND remedy problems of capacity within the nonprofit sector.  I have talked at length about the need for greater capital to fund organization building in the sector.  Philanthropists are often hesitant to see their money go anywhere other than direct program services.  But when philanthropists like those in Mind POP recognize how important capacity and organization building is to addressing the root cause of social problems (like unequal access to arts education) they are moving the sector forward.  They are recognizing and demonstrating to their colleagues that capacity can and should be supported.

It will be interesting to see how this project progresses and the outcomes it achieves.  I’ll keep you posted.

Tags: Applied Materials, Austin, Capacity Building, Education Foundation of America, Mind POP, philanthopists, Still Water Foundation, Tapestry Foundation, Webber Family Foundation

A Gathering of Funders

I was invited to speak at the Central Texas Education Funders monthly meeting about social innovation yesterday morning.  It was an honor to talk to this engaged, savvy, thoughtful group of philanthropists who are passionate about making education better in Central Texas.  Some of the foundations present were: Webber Family Foundation, Aragona Foundation, RGK Foundation, KDK Harman Foundation, Applied Materials Corporate Giving, United Way, Impact Austin, Still Water Foundation, among others.

My presentation provided an overview on social innovation (social entrepreneurship, growth and capacity capital, social investing, etc.) occurring nationally and here in Austin.  After the presentation there was a great discussion among the group that covered exciting experiments in growth and sustainability in our region, why Austin seems to be behind other cities in social innovation activity, the impact of the recession on growth, and the need for collaboration and mergers, and much more.

Ellen Ray from the Still Water Foundation announced an experiment that she and a few other local foundations have launched to grow the scope and capacity of arts education organizations in town.  I hope to have more information on this exciting project in a later post.  In addition, Jessica D’Arcy from the Webber Family Foundation explained how the Central Texas Education Funders group is putting together a funding matrix so that the group can understand which of their membership is funding which projects in town.  Compiling this knowledge could be the first step in understanding how to leverage the resources of the group to make a greater impact.  And Chris Earthman from the Aragona Foundation shared some interesting data about how hypercompetitive Austin really is in terms of foundation funding for our nonprofits.  Austin has one of the highest nonprofit to foundation ratios in the country, which furthers the argument that we have to expand the social capital market here.

So much money exists in Austin, yet at the same time those organizations working towards solutions to our social problems are tripping over each other to get enough capital.  That is a huge disconnect.  If we can learn from other cities about the new financial vehicles that are emerging to help social entrepreneurs, we might begin to see more of Austin’s wealth transfer into the social impact space.

This was a great gathering of funders talking about how to move the needle forward and get Austin more prominently in the social innovation game.  I’d love to see more discussions about how we do just that.

Tags: Applied Materials, Aragona Foundation, Austin, Central Texas Education Funders, Impact Austin, KDK Harman Foundation, nonprofit, RGK Foundation, social capital market, Still Water Foundation, United Way, Webber Family Foundation