Annenberg Program Brings Charity Leaders Together

May 15, 2011 | Read Time: 4 minutes

When the Annenberg Foundation began its leadership-development program known as Alchemy five years ago, the Los Angeles philanthropy established a simple rule for charities that wished to participate: They didn’t have to pay a dime to participate, but each organization’s chief staff member and board member had to attend the three-day training session—together.

For the co-leaders of the 500 charities that have gone through the program, this enforced togetherness is often an entirely new experience, says Leonard Aube, Annenberg’s executive director.

“People will tell us, ‘I just spent more time with my board chair in the last three days than in the last three years,’” he says.

Building a successful working relationship between an organization’s staff and board leaders is at the core of Alchemy’s mission, says Lawrence Pierce-Durance, who helped to create the program and travels from his home near Vail, Colo., to train participants on fund-raising issues.

“Just simply having these people thrown together and engaged in substantive discussions is incredibly useful,” says Mr. Pierce-Durance.

In a recent session, he had group leaders examine separately what would happen if their charity ceased to function tomorrow and then compare their accounts, he says: “The process gets them on the same page as far as who they are and where they’re going.”

Annenberg’s Alchemy is one of a growing number of efforts by foundations to strengthen the relationship between charities’ executive and board leaders by joining them together for an education program. Some Alchemy graduates also attend Alchemy+, an advanced leadership-training program. Annenberg spends about $1.3-million a year on the two Alchemy programs, mostly in the form of services such as teaching, which is done by the Annenberg staff.

Different Visions

Nine times each year, teams averaging 40 individuals—representatives from about 140 charities annually—attend the intensive leadership training sessions. Over three days, the leaders receive training in such topics as the roles and responsibilities of boards, effective governance, and how to attract big donors. Nonprofit leaders then return three months later to assess their progress.

“Unless there is a well-defined, well-articulated vision that’s shared by the leaders, it’s very difficult to deliver programs and services, not to mention manage real change,” says Mr. Aube.

Diane Brigham, executive director of Ryman Arts, a Los Angeles arts charity that teaches classical drawing and painting to high-school students, attended Alchemy in 2007 with the chairman of her Board of Directors, Martin Sklar, a longtime executive of the Walt Disney Company.

She still has fond memories of the program’s elevator-speech exercise. Working together, she and Mr. Sklar had to distill the mission of their charity down to a few sentences and share it with the charity representatives in the room. (Some of the CEO and board-leader teams who participated in the elevator-speech exercise, they say, discovered that they had very different conceptions of what their charities did.)

The exercise “sounds simple, but it helped us build the skills we need for making the case for Ryman in the community,” says Ms. Brigham, who has since attended Alchemy+, and is also what Annenberg calls a community champion, one of a dozen Alchemy alumni who assist participants in the program, including helping them put in place the ideas they have learned.

Redefined Roles

Ms. Brigham and Mr. Sklar say that their shared Alchemy experience has helped them get the charity’s Board of the Directors more involved and put Ryman Arts on better financial footing. Since the two completed their Alchemy training, Ryman has increased its pool of donors by 15 percent.

“We’re approaching fund raising with more confidence than we ever have before,” says Mr. Sklar, who notes that the charity has recently begun expanding its programs into Orange County schools.

The duo have also redefined the role that the board is expected to play in raising money for the charity. When one very well-connected board member seemed reluctant to use his extensive network of contacts on the charity’s behalf, Mr. Sklar gave him a choice: Help out or step down.

“He acknowledged that he didn’t have the time for the level of involvement we needed,” recounts Mr. Sklar. “He ended up resigning but in a very positive way.”

Mr. Sklar notes that the nonprofit recently recruited two new trustees, both of whom joined clearly understanding their fund-raising duties.

For now, Alchemy is open only to nonprofit organizations in the Los Angeles area with budgets of no more than $5-million that serve the poor and others in need. But Mr. Aube says that he hopes to see the program reproduced in some form elsewhere in the country.

“There is definitely interest out there,” he says, adding that Annenberg is happy to share the Alchemy curriculum. “Nonprofits are hungry for something that works, and what we’re showing here is that when staff and board leaders join together in a common purpose, transformation can happen.”

Alchemy’s Seminar: A Sampling of Topics