Many innovative nonprofit ideas and start-up endeavors first appear as projects sponsored by larger, established organizations with a compatible mission. This practice of fiscal sponsorship has occurred in hundreds of nonprofits across the country for decades, but lacked real guidelines until fairly recently.

In response to increasing interest in fiscal sponsorship, Tides Center facilitated the organization of a new group, the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors, to build knowledge about the practice and help build the field.

BTW served as Tides Center’s evaluation partner in this work for four years. We provided written reports, presentations and workshops to share our assessments and field-building recommendations to Tides and the Network.

A published summary of BTW’s research and evaluation experience has been widely distributed. At the close of our project, the fledgling Network had grown to 37 active members with a calendar of activities that included professional development conference calls, active taskforce meetings and a yearly two-day conference.

In Fall 2007, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation commissioned BTW to assess the landscape of Jewish service learning. The foundations wanted to better understand what service programs existed, and where their investments could have the greatest impact.

BTW responded with comprehensive field research and a related action plan. That plan resulted in the emergence of Repair the World, a new organization dedicated to building support of authentic, high-quality Jewish service learning for Jews of all stages of life. With BTW’s guidance, Repair the World granted $1.7 million to Jewish service learning programs in its first year alone.

In the early 1990s, a large federal funding program called AmeriCorps was launched to support community service and volunteering. Community service organizations and the foundations that funded them were uncertain about its benefits.

With BTW’s guidance and support, a small group of grantmakers began meeting and eventually grew to become the center of the national conversation about private philanthropy’s role in service and volunteering.

An evaluation found that grantmakers who were active in an organization were more confident of their knowledge about service and volunteering. The happy result was that their foundations increased their level of grantmaking accordingly.

As the field of national service became more established, BTW guided the funders group to explore and define the role of private philanthropy in national service, community volunteering and civic engagement.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) supported a cluster of eight grantee organizations engaged in grassroots organizing, economic justice and community development.

Over 18 months, BTW led a process of shared learning and reflection for the organizations’ leaders, contributing to their understanding of social movement development, relationship building among the grantees and the Foundation’s knowledge about the value and impact of its grantmaking. BTW also prepared case studies of each of the social change organizations.

These combined efforts seeded an increased appreciation among grantees and the Foundation in the value of connecting across strategy, geography and content.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation sought to create a nationwide model to engage more young people in service learning as part of their academic life. BTW advised the Foundation on the development and implementation of Learning in Deed, a four-year, $13.5 million initiative.

This complex model included a number of components:

• A policy-and-practice element
• A national commission on service learning
• Research networks
• Leadership networks

BTW played a critical role in framing this initiative. Learning in Deed went on to build capacity to advocate for service learning as a K–12 teaching strategy across the country, and established a service-learning research database at the University of Indiana.