It Takes a Village

Board members pull together to help a charity raise money and expand programs

Betty Masi, president of the board of SOS Children’s Villages-Florida, has an ambitious list of goals for the child-welfare charity, which provides housing and other services to 55 foster children in Coconut Creek, Fla.

“We need to focus on becoming a household name,” she says. Once that happens, she hopes the charity can raise enough money to start offering services for foster children in another Florida city.

For a charity that just a few years ago was raising only about $200,000 in private support, that kind of talk may seem unrealistic. But Ms. Masi, along with more than 20 other board members who joined the group since the late 1990s, have helped the charity make an important financial transition.

In the first decade after it opened its doors in 1993, the group got up to 80 percent of its support from its parent organization; today, it brings in $1.2-million, or 40 percent of its annual revenue, from private sources, while the rest comes from government agencies.

The new board members, who took over from the trustees who established the organization, have also helped the charity build a $1.2-million endowment, expand its programs, increase its visibility in South Florida, and develop big plans for its future.

Novel Approach

SOS Children’s Villages-Florida was founded in 1988 by Estella Moriarty, a family-court judge who thought SOS might solve some of the problems she saw in her courtroom.

In contrast to traditional foster care, SOS villages, which were started in Austria in the mid-20th century and have spread to 132 countries, don’t separate children from their siblings or bounce them from one family to the next. They offer children the opportunity to grow up in a house with one staff member serving in the role of parent, while receiving support from case workers, tutors, and volunteers who work with SOS.

Ms. Moriarty wrote to the organization’s headquarters in Innsbruck, Austria to obtain support to bring the first village to the United States. As it does with affiliates starting in developed countries, which receive less sustained support than do SOS groups formed in poorer nations, the organization offered to pay the construction costs for the village and to reimburse the group for any deficits it incurred for 10 years after it opened. Since the Florida group was started, two other SOS affiliates have also been founded in the United States.

Ms. Moriarty recruited 12 child-welfare advocates to join her on the charity’s board. Together, they chose an eight-acre site near the border of Broward and Palm Beach Counties, oversaw construction of the group’s 15 buildings, hired staff members, and brought children into each home.

But by the late 1990s, as the day approached when the charity would lose its overseas support, the trustees realized that they were not eager to do the fund raising or planning that the organization would need to maintain and strengthen its services. Meanwhile, new members with a lot of enthusiasm for the organization were starting to join the board, but they had little idea of what their role was or how they could best help the charity.

“They weren’t truly functioning as an effective board,” says Debbie Mason, whose company, Strategists Inc., was hired in 2000 to help trustees and staff members figure out what to do next. “They would come to meetings and have discussions, but there was no plan on which to base a vision.”

To help the board develop a common vision, Ms. Mason worked with trustees to write a strategic plan they could use to help them build a stronger organization. The plan set goals for all aspects of the group’s work: establishing board committees, raising money, improving programs, finding ways to ensure staff members would stay on the job for long periods of time, and recruiting new trustees who would help the board achieve greater fund-raising success.

In the search for new board members, trustees mined their personal and professional connections, bringing business acquaintances to events like the charity’s Thanksgiving dinner, which is held on the organization’s grounds each year for children, staff and board members, and other SOS supporters. Ms. Masi, the current SOS board president and vice president of Seawood Builders, a Deerfield Beach, Fla., construction company, was herself plucked by a business associate and board member to attend the dinner.

“They picked out the most appropriate people and convinced them to come on board, knowing that once they got hooked they wouldn’t leave, because what we do for these children is so inspiring,” she says of the efforts to find new trustees.

The “courtship,” as Ms. Masi refers to it, was so successful that about 90 percent of those identified as prospective trustees accepted. And few have left: Ms. Masi believes the only people to step down from the board since 2000 left because they moved away.

As SOS Children’s Villages-Florida packed its board with influential community leaders, it became a desirable organization to support, “both for its mission and the associations,” says Ms. Masi. And it also developed a board so committed to the group’s mission that some of them serve as mentors to the children in the charity’s care.

That combination of enthusiasm and influence helped the charity avoid the financial squeeze it might otherwise have faced. The board members turned a golf event that netted about $60,000 in 1999 into one of Palm Beach County’s best known annual fund-raising events, netting $350,000 in 2004.

Board members also agreed to increase the minimum amount each trustee must give, from $500 to $1,000. One board member recently offered to provide $100,000 if other donors would join together to match that amount.

In 2001, the board agreed to take on the additional fund-raising challenge of creating an endowment, and helped to raise more than the $600,000 needed to receive a $200,000 matching grant from the Community Foundation of Broward.

Looking Ahead

As soon as trustees and employees started to think strategically, they began to identify other areas that the charity would have to deal with in the coming years.

In 2002, Ms. Mason conducted a second planning session and found that board members were becoming increasingly worried about what would happen to the youngsters who joined SOS in its first years. Many of them were nearing age 18, so SOS would no longer get government money to take care of them.

In response to that need, the board and staff worked together to make changes that would ease the transition to independence. SOS hired a case worker who provides support to children after they have left the charity’s care. It has also started a committee to find ways to provide low-cost housing and other opportunities to former foster-care children. Nearly every board member has signed up to serve on the committee.

As the charity matures, it continues to rely heavily on strategic planning to define its goals and how it meets them. The group has drafted two strategic plans since Ms. Mason, the consultant, developed a plan in 2000 and intends to draft another one next year.

Every board meeting, says Ms. Masi, begins with a presentation from one of the staff members or consultants who works directly with the children. Then conversation turns to the progress of a particular child. Later, board committee chairmen report on how much progress the trustees made toward their goals.

“We have identified our goals, prioritized, attacked them, and we bring them to closure,” says Ms. Masi. “Then we move on to the next goal.”