Field Building

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.

The field of civic engagement needed a network of grantmakers and donors that spanned a number of strategies. Civic-engagement leaders envisioned a network that would include national service, voter education and community organizing.

These leaders turned to BTW to create such an organization, and to develop its constituency and launch its programming. That organization was Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE). To establish PACE’s presence in the field, BTW:

• Designed and organized a national conference
• Recruited nationally known speakers
• Created a Web site
• Published monographs and publications on civic engagement strategies

To introduce PACE to new networks, BTW facilitated discussions about online organizing and the impact of the Internet on civic involvement and voter education.

By the end of PACE’s first program year, it had attracted new members and participants that reflected a spectrum of civic engagement strategies.

The Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), a joint project of Tides and The California Endowment, is a partnership designed to strengthen the capacities of California community clinics and health centers.

In 2004, CCI engaged BTW to design and implement a multi-year, multi-program evaluation of the Initiative’s impacts. Throughout the evaluation of each of CCI’s programs, BTW has gathered data on the cumulative impacts of CCI on the community clinics field, public policy and philanthropy.

BTW’s 2008 report outlines how CCI has effected broad and deep social change within the community clinics field in California, and describes critical factors for achieving deep, systems-level changes.

The use of coaching in the nonprofit sector is poorly understood and underused.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and Harnisch Family Foundation created the Coaching and Philanthropy Project to look at the support and use of coaching by its early adopters.

BTW has partnered with CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Leadership that Works to take an unprecedented “deep dive” into learning about nonprofit coaching. Knowing when and how to use coaching is critical; we are identifying practices and models to help nonprofits and philanthropies become conscience consumers of the practice.

The After-school and Summer Enrichment Subprogram of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation helps build a sustainable system that provides better programmatic and financial support for California’s after-school and summer programs.

Having supported field efforts since 2005, the Foundation wanted to conduct a multi-year evaluation to learn whether its contributions are resulting in lasting improvements.

BTW published a five-part report in Fall 2009, describing how the Foundation’s efforts have built critical infrastructure components for the field. This and subsequent reports will help the field understand its accomplishments in technical assistance, workforce development and leadership for summer enrichment and after-school programs.