Collaboration: the Key to Effective Philanthropy

By RITA R. SEMEL

A decade ago, Oakland, Calif., had one of the highest infant-mortality rates in the nation. Eighteen of every 1,000 babies died in their first year — almost twice the national average.

In response, the federal government and agencies in Alameda County pumped millions of dollars into an unusual collaboration of 40 government and nonprofit groups and oversaw their efforts to attack a broad range of factors that contributed to the death rate — not only substandard health care, but also crack-cocaine addiction, AIDS, poverty, unemployment, crime, teenage pregnancy, and poor nutrition.

The goal was to cut the mortality rate in half within five years. Some local social-service experts thought that aim was unrealistic, even ridiculous, given the seeming intractability and complexity of the problem. But by 1993, the infant-mortality rate had been cut by more than half to 8.7 per 1,000 babies. The decline was due, in part, to a drop in crack-cocaine use nationwide and an aggressive national campaign that urged young mothers to avoid drugs and alcohol. But in Alameda County, much of the good news on infant mortality stemmed from the collaborative efforts of the nonprofit world and government.

The story offers a number of lessons that the philanthropic world, especially large grant-making foundations, and government at all levels should consider as they try to reduce other seemingly intractable problems: child abuse, high dropout rates among urban high-school students, poverty, the lack of quality, affordable child care, homelessness, and certain kinds of juvenile crime.

The most important lesson is the need for foundations and other sources of money to set ambitious but realistic priorities — in other words, to zero in on one or two of a locality’s most pressing problems — and then concentrate their resources on trying to solve them.

While that approach may sound obvious, it differs from traditional grant making. Grant makers and grantees tend to work alone, isolating themselves from other organizations that may have good ideas and resisting pooling their money and resources in attacking problems. Not only that, but most foundations and other nonprofit organizations have a hard time setting and achieving measurable, worthwhile goals because they are trying to do too many things with little coordination and few expectations of accountability.

Taking a more strategic, results-oriented, collaborative approach requires courage, to be sure. Participants — whether foundations, grantees, or government agencies — must become tolerant of public scrutiny and learn to take criticism if particular efforts don’t pan out.

But the approach of identifying key priorities and finding the balance between short- and long-term goals is one that more and more donors are demanding, and more and more nonprofit groups are embracing.

Hundreds of United Ways across the nation, including the United Way of the Bay Area, have begun adopting the new approach. They are trying to transform themselves from being primarily collectors and distributors of charitable contributions to collaborators with key philanthropic, corporate, and government leaders.

The approach involves enlisting governments, faith-based and other nonprofit groups, knowledgeable private citizens, and, in some cases, business officials to determine the most pressing problems in regions, cities, or neighborhoods, then using the collective financial and creative power of the groups to tackle those problems.

In the San Francisco area this year, social-service programs with strong track records in education, human services, and other categories were awarded three-year grants from the United Way of the Bay Area, but the money came with a caveat: The people who run the programs must work with one another to set and meet specific, measurable goals that extend beyond a particular nonprofit group’s clients to entire neighborhoods or cities.

Such efforts to set priorities and work collaboratively have a number of compelling benefits.

For one thing, by working together on a limited number of problems, it is easier for grant makers and the groups that they support to hold themselves accountable for achieving specific, measurable results. Too often in the past, nonprofit groups have failed to set meaningful goals, thus stumbling in their missions and making it all but impossible to gauge results.

In addition, when significant investments of time and money are made in fixing one big problem in a neighborhood or city, the effects are likely to be felt in a variety of beneficial ways. If, for example, grant makers and nonprofit groups decide that their biggest priority is to raise wage levels for working parents in an impoverished region, the effort could induce a number of other positive changes. With higher wages, parents may be able to reduce the number of hours they work and therefore pay greater attention to their children’s schooling, health, and nutrition. If kids get more parental attention and start to do better in school, then they are less likely to be truant or commit crimes.

A collaborative approach also makes sense because a big social problem like high infant-mortality or homelessness tends to have multiple causes, and a mix of grant makers and social-service providers can bring a variety of skills and resources to bear on the issue.

In the effort to reduce Oakland’s high infant-mortality rate, the collaboration extended beyond a traditional alliance of government officials and nonprofit organizations. It included a group of former prostitutes who knew how to reach out to women whose newborn babies were at risk of dying because of the mothers’ use of drugs and alcohol. The collaboration also included representatives from churches, schools, and child-rearing programs for men. Those people were able to offer information on such issues as teenage pregnancy and the economic and psychological stress caused by the absence of fathers — problems that contribute to high infant-mortality rates.

Efforts to move in a more collaborative, focused direction are courageous, partly because they require government, foundations, and grantees to come up with new ways to define success. In the past, success often has been measured in terms of “operational results” instead of real results. We have asked, for example, how many homeless people walked through our doors today instead of how much have we actually reduced homelessness — or better yet, how effectively have we reduced the social problems that lead to homelessness in the first place.

Moving toward a collaborative approach also requires grant makers to abandon their traditional tendency to distribute their resources in small pieces. Fragmenting grant money has often been done under the guise of fairness and equity. But in truth, many funders have taken that tack because they wanted to avoid the discomfort of saying no when confronted with overwhelming need.

Simply counting the number of people coming through the door of a nonprofit group, or giving small grants to many programs, has also reflected a fear that many problems just can’t be solved. That belief has created a tendency to pay attention to everything because of the misguided notion that it is impossible to fix any single thing.

Of course, while it is good to seek big, systemic changes, the nonprofit world still must ensure that suffering people receive attention when crises occur. It is a worthy goal to help families rise permanently out of poverty, but when an impoverished mother shows up at a soup kitchen’s door seeking food for her hungry infant, the ideals of collaboration and broad-scale change must be set aside. The baby must be fed.

Still, the need for balancing short- and long-term needs isn’t an excuse to reject the collaborative approach. Indeed, the alternative is maintaining the status quo or, worse, allowing society’s toughest problems to become even bigger and more complex, shunting the task of tackling them to the next generation.

We in philanthropy have a responsibility to our neighborhoods and our donors to try new approaches that show promise of actually solving problems, however difficult or entrenched. Otherwise, we risk a greater evil than occasional failure. We risk habitual ineffectiveness.

Rita R. Semel is co-chair of San Francisco’s Homeless Coordinating Board and Executive Vice Chair of San Francisco’s Interfaith Council. In addition, she is on the board of the United Way of the Bay Area and chairs its strategy council.