Professional Singer Found Her Voice as Leader of a Washington Volunteer Group

Siobhan Canty is comfortable taking risks in life: As a professional musician, she learned how to succeed in a competitive and unpredictable field.

“I trained as a classical singer and did it professionally for 10 years,” Ms. Canty says. However, she adds with a laugh, “during that time I had the really smart idea of making extra money by working at nonprofits.”

After that decade spent juggling music and work at a variety of Washington charities (a vocation inspired by her social-activist parents), Ms. Canty, 44, joined Greater DC Cares as a program director in 1998. It was at this umbrella organization, which coordinates a network of volunteers and local corporate donors on an annual budget of $1.8-million, that the varied experience and knowledge she gained working in the city’s nonprofit trenches found its focus.

“After about a year there, it hit me: This organization was actually a community foundation, only one that dealt in assets other than money,” says Ms. Canty. “At the time Greater DC Cares had a great reputation and it was doing good work, but we only did hands-on volunteering. The largest day of service we’d had in terms of businesses was 25 people. It struck me that here was this community foundation responsible for servicing and investing all assets other than money in our community, and it wasn’t fulfilling its promise.”

This was a revelatory moment for Ms. Canty, who quickly developed her epiphany into a working model for “mixed-asset philanthropy” — an approach to giving that combines monetary support for charities with pro bono services, goods, and hands-on volunteers, along with the training necessary to use all that help. In 2000, Ms. Canty was tapped to become the organization’s chief executive; she wasted no time turning her idea into a reality. Ms. Canty stepped down from her job (which paid $120,000 annually) this fall to start her own consulting company, Philanthropic Revolution, to promote the idea of mixed-asset philanthropy.

“The mixed-asset philanthropic model has roots in D.C. now,” says Ms. Canty, adding, “Those roots have grown strong enough for me to work on a national level to promote some of these concepts and best practices.”

Succeeding Ms. Canty at Greater DC Cares is Madye Henderson, who previously worked at United Way of America, where she served as vice president of community-impact development.

Ms. Canty’s predecessor as Greater DC Cares’ leader, Phil Collyer, who now oversees the business-partners program at the National Human Services Assembly, in Washington, says he is proud of all she achieved during her time there.

“Siobhan really created a vision for not only Greater DC Cares but also the sector it serves, a creation that is entirely hers. We had struggled for years to identify our place in the community until she came along and did such a fantastic job of articulating it,” says Mr. Collyer. “She gave real voice to the concept of mixed asset philanthropy, as she has named it. She is a pioneer of putting it all together in that way — lots of organizations had been doing all these things for many years, but she is the first one who has really made a place at the table for this kind of organization.”

Under Ms. Canty’s leadership, local organizations like Interstages, an arts program for needy students in Washington’s middle schools, benefited from a spectrum of services aimed at bolstering small grass-roots groups. With Greater DC Cares’ non-monetary aid, says Noel Tieszen, Interstages’ co-founder, the small group quickly grew from a corner of her one-bedroom apartment to permanent offices, and into “a real entity that helps kids every day.”

“Siobhan’s staff basically said to us, ‘What do you need?’ and then matched pro bono services to help us grow,” says Ms. Tieszen.

In an interview, Ms. Canty reflected on her decade at Greater DC Cares, and her next step.

Is there anything you would have done differently?

I would have created a communication plan for Greater DC Cares around this mixed-asset model sooner. I thought we would build these programs and execute them well, and our reputation would grow, and communications would come along with that. In fact, now I understand it was really critical, when you’re asking your partners and clients to go through a change like that, to have a communication plan that is out in front, that specifies the kind of experimentation you’re undertaking and the kind of time that is going to be needed to try those things.

What do you see as current trends in volunteerism?

Based on the recent election we are definitely going to see a much more active, younger community getting engaged. And I think we already see them, but the question is how we integrate our efforts to engage them in practice, with their orientation around technology. That is the key to unlocking their greatest potential.

One change I know is happening is skilled volunteering. The problem is that, unfortunately, I don’t think the nonprofit sector is really ready for it. Who is really building the capacity of the sector and the individual organizations that make up the sector to prepare them to receive these kinds of assets?

In nonprofits, development directors are frequently the highest paid, most-trained people on staff. Yet those who manage volunteers are frequently the least-trained, lowest-paid people. Generally speaking they certainly are not trained to know how to manage pro bono consulting teams, board members, corporate partnerships, and the like. We once had 10 pro bono consultants from Deloitte that wanted to go do business development with nonprofits in D.C., and our job was to do project development for them. So we went to our nonprofit partners and said, “We have these consultants, what do you need them to do?” and they literally said, “We need them to paint this wall.”

Because that is who they are, and we cannot underestimate the cultural transformation that we need to foster and the practical management capacity we need to invest in, in order to really capitalize on pro bono consulting and other non-monetary assets. The problem is it’s not sexy.

I was talking to someone from the White House about the need for this massive investment in this infrastructure, and they said, “That’s going to take a long time!” And I said, you know, we’re going to spend a long time doing something, so we might as well spend a long time doing the right thing and deal with these difficult issues now.

Has the poor economy translated to increased demand for volunteers from Greater DC Cares’s clients?

I didn’t really see a big increase in the calls for volunteers, but to be honest, when nonprofits are struggling it is difficult for them to be good partners and certainly to develop new relationships. It’s difficult for them to analyze their needs and ask for more at a time when they are so overtaxed. I think the exceptions are organizations that use hands-on volunteers — for example, food banks — who can kind of plug any kind of volunteer into an increasing need.

What I do see is a powerful argument for increased reliance on non-monetary assets. The problem is, in a time like right now, you cannot say to a nonprofit, let’s stop everything and train you how to use pro bono consultants, train you how to provide a return on investment to corporations. It’s just not the time to do it. The lesson we need to take from this is once we get through this time, we have to take advantage of better financial markets to invest in this kind of capacity for nonprofits, so they are not as compromised the next time we face a situation like this.