All in the Family

Achieving harmony among two domestic-violence groups was key challenge in a merger

By Debra E. Blum

The Center for Domestic Violence Prevention and Sor Juana Inés were two nonprofit groups with a lot in common. They worked in the same California county, running crisis hotlines and offering counseling to people in abusive relationships. They both grappled with revenue declines when the recession hit hard in the Silicon Valley area, where they were located. And the executive directors of both organizations resigned, coincidentally, in the same month four years ago.

Their circumstances were so closely aligned, in fact, that even outsiders openly questioned why the two groups carried on as separate charities. At a San Mateo City Council meeting in 2002, city officials raised the idea of a merger.

“They were trying to figure out why two domestic-violence agencies were requesting funds for what to them looked like the same thing,” says Susan R. Ferren, who led Sor Juana Inés’s governing board at the time. “To tell you the truth, we were thinking about the same issue.”

The following year, the two groups merged to form Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse, or CORA, in Burlingame, Calif. The move brought the charities full circle in a way: Sor Juana Inés was founded in 1993 by a former staff member of the Center for Domestic Violence Prevention to focus more specifically on the needs of Hispanics. But the merger was hardly a cheerful homecoming.

Melissa Lukin, CORA’s executive director, likens the situation to a second marriage in which teenage kids from previous marriages are thrown together in the same household.

“You can’t just say, Here we are living together, you have a new parent, let’s all get along,” says Ms. Lukin, adding that her experience as a consultant who specialized in training nonprofit boards to work together helped her land the job at CORA.

Before hiring Ms. Lukin, though, the boards of the domestic-violence center and Sor Juana Inés together hired a consulting company, La Piana Associates, in Emeryville, Calif., to guide them through the merger. The company worked with the charities for a year, integrating their boards, staffs, programs, fund-raising efforts, financial statements, and other operations. The consultants also helped CORA move into new office space and to hire Ms. Lukin.

No numbers exist on how many charities merge each year, but David La Piana, founder of the California consulting company and author of several books on nonprofit mergers, sees a steady increase in interest in such unions. Mergers among charities straining to stay afloat amid tough economic times, cuts in government funds, and competition for donors’ dollars continue apace, he says. But what Mr. La Piana sees more of is interest in mergers among larger, financially fit organizations that want to gain more clout or expand their efforts to carry out their missions.

“There’s been a maturation in thinking about mergers,” Mr. La Piana says. “It’s not just small, desperate organizations saying, We have to merge by Friday to stay alive. It’s more rooted in strategic thinking.”

Financial Needs

The Center for Domestic Violence Prevention and Sor Juana Inés had strategic reasons to merge — they believed that by working together they might better reach more people in need. But their case did involve a good measure of self-preservation — one domestic-violence group in the county soliciting donors and government agencies, they both decided, was better than two.

The merged organization has generally fared well with grant makers.

The San Francisco Foundation, which gave about $25,000 a year to Sor Juana Inés, but did not support the domestic-violence center, now gives to CORA. The Blue Shield of California Foundation, which had given one $1,000 grant to each of the two organizations before the merger, provided $85,000 to the merged group to spend on technology upgrades. And California’s Department of Health Services is giving CORA a total of $440,000 this year, more than the combined total that both organizations received in most years before the merger.

Some funds have dropped off, though. One city agency had given the two groups a total of $15,000 before the merger, but now gives CORA only $10,000 a year. A private foundation similarly reduced its grant to CORA, explaining that the combined total of the two organizations’ grants was well beyond the size of the foundation’s average gift for a single group. Another foundation that had awarded a small annual grant to Sor Juana Inés dropped its support after the merger because the grant maker’s mission is focused exclusively on helping Hispanics.

Those setbacks seemingly have not made a dent in CORA’s progress. Its budget last year was $2.9-million, more than the combined revenue of the two groups before the merger. Some of the increase came from the first installment of a $1.7-million bequest — the only such gift either organization had ever received. CORA intends to create an endowment with the donation, also something the two charities never had.

The new group has been able to step up its services, too.

Last year, CORA fielded 4,700 calls on its crisis hotline, and an additional 1,300 calls on its legal-information hotline. It offered emergency and transitional housing to 50 women and 40 children affected by domestic violence, and provided counseling and support-group services to more than 2,300 people. CORA also ran abuse-prevention programs that last year reached roughly 8,700 people.

Because of different record-keeping styles and some variations in services, it is difficult to say exactly how much more CORA has been able to accomplish than the two groups did separately. What is clear to CORA officials, however, is that the two charities joined to form a whole new creature.

“It didn’t come out as one plus one equals two,” says Rhina Ramos, who worked at Sor Juana Inés and is now CORA’s Latino outreach and education coordinator. “One plus one equaled another.”

Takeover or Merger?

At the start, Ms. Ramos and her colleagues at Sor Juana Inés were worried that the larger Center for Domestic Violence Prevention would simply swallow up the smaller group, as in a takeover, not a merger. Sor Juana Inés’s staff had shrunk from 12 to 3 by the time of the merger, with some employees leaving because of financial cuts and others leaving because they didn’t support the move. Five of the group’s 14 board members had left, too.

In response to the concerns, the domestic-violence center, which had 30 employees and a budget nearly three times the size of Sor Juana Inés’s, committed to arranging the merger as a union of equals.

The center brought to the table financial stability and a more mature infrastructure. Sor Juana Inés offered expertise in dealing with the needs of the area’s substantial Latino population, and an active pool of Spanish-speaking volunteers. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 22 percent of people living in San Mateo County are of Hispanic origin.

A key goal of the merger, according to Ms. Lukin, became integrating Sor Juana Inés’s cultural identity into the larger group. About two-thirds of CORA’s 37 employees are bilingual. Nine are Latino. Three speak Tagalog to serve the area’s growing Filipino population. Counselors who speak Spanish as a first language are always available to take calls from the organization’s crisis hotline.

“We understand that it makes a difference if you have someone from the Latino community answering the phone versus a Caucasian who can speak Spanish,” Ms. Lukin says. “We don’t think of this as being culturally sensitive. We think of it as being part of our organization’s culture.”

At CORA, says Ms. Ramos, she has expanded a volunteer outreach program in a way that she had been unable to do at Sor Juana Inés because of staff and budget limitations.

Based on a grass-roots model of spreading information in traditional Latino societies, Ms. Ramos runs a program exclusively in Spanish that trains volunteers to teach people in their communities about domestic-violence issues. So far, she has held four eight-week sessions to train 70 volunteers, called promotores, or promoters.

“The promotores program is a very recognizable and successful marker of the carryover to CORA of Sor Juana Inés,” says Ms. Ferren, who is now a CORA board member. “The merger was a grueling process, but we created a new, healthy, effective organization.”

William Coy, a La Piana consultant who worked on the CORA merger, says the case was indeed tough, and may have been trickier than most. It involved two organizations dedicated to a cause that is already marked by urgency and trauma, he says, and it had the added angle of at least a perceived cultural divide. Neither organization having its own executive director at the start of the merger by turns smoothed and muddied the process, he adds.

The two charities started fresh with a new chief officer, instead of facing the often messy process of picking one executive director for the top spot. At the same time, the absence of leaders at the two groups meant some disorganization in the day-to-day work of the merger, and a vacuum where employees might have otherwise found guidance during what proved to be a stressful time.

Mr. Coy says he took an unusually hands-on role, acting almost as an interim director to both organizations. In setting up the new offices, for example, he directed employees to gather bids from phone-system providers and then he presented the options to the two organizations’ governing boards.

“A consultant would not typically directly task staff to do something so specific,” Mr. Coy says, “but that’s what this situation demanded to get things going.”

Now that the group has gotten this far, Ms. Lukin says, it is time for its next big post-merger step: an organizationwide evaluation. The Peninsula Community Foundation, which gave $63,000 to the domestic-violence center and Sor Juana Inés to hire the merger consultants, in August awarded CORA $45,000 to pay outside consultants to measure how the group is doing.

Says Ms. Ferren: “We want to get everything right.”