March 26, 2009 | Read Time: 7 minutes
The Rose, a Houston charity that helps prevent and treat cancer in low-income women, used to try to do everything.
In addition to providing screening, diagnostic, and follow-up procedures, such as mammography, ultrasounds, and bone-density screening, the Rose also attempted to do things for which the charity wasn’t as well-equipped, like educating women about breast cancer and getting them in the door of the clinic, or reaching out to Asian-American women, says Dorothy Gibbons, the group’s chief executive.
Now, because of the three-year-old Breast Health Collaborative of Texas, a group of about 100 people from more than 50 organizations throughout the state that serve women with or at risk of breast cancer, Ms. Gibbons says her charity focuses on doing — and raising money for — what it does best: screening women for the disease.
While the collaborative grew out of a 2005 meeting in Houston aimed at improving access to breast health care, particularly for low-income and uninsured women, Ms. Gibbons says, it also has improved members’ cooperation in raising money for a shared cause. In quarterly meetings and through frequent conversations, members of the collaborative identify ways they can work together (instead of duplicating services) and discuss grants they can apply for as partners, she says.
At a time of shrinking nonprofit budgets and cutbacks by grant makers, such partnerships are essential, Ms. Gibbons and other members of the collaborative say.
“The problems we have are so large that no one group is going to solve them by themselves,” says Heather Patrick, a member of the collaborative and director of operations for the Houston affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, in Dallas, one of the country’s largest supporters of breast-cancer causes.
Shared Efforts
As part of its membership in the collaborative, the Rose has lent its mobile mammography van to education groups like the Texas Gulf Coast affiliate of the Breast Cancer Network of Strength, a Chicago charity.
“I stopped doing education and stopped getting funding for it, so there’s more money” for charities that focus on education efforts, says Ms. Gibbons, who became chair of the collaborative in January. And, she says, collaborating with groups that focus on education “allows us to use the resources we have to do follow-up with all these women. I can employ more of my dollars there instead of doing education and outreach.”
While collaborating to provide services seems like common sense, working together to raise money requires setting aside the competitive mind-set that often accompanies grant seeking, says Andrea Caracostis, chief executive of the Hope Clinic, a Houston community health center that largely serves Asian-Americans. “Writing grants is a lot of work, so if I’m going to compete with an organization that’s going to do the job better than I am, it’s better not to compete with them,” she says. “It’s better to support them.”
When members of the Texas collaborative seek grants, groups might form a partnership with one another, then one of them applies for money and pays the others for services. “As a collaborative, we’re not going out and seeking dollars,” says Melissa Lofton, who chaired the collaborative last year. “Our organizations are seeking dollars, and we’re helping them spend them effectively.”
In such proposals, members include memorandums of understanding, signed by the collaborating organizations and outlining what each will do and how they will share the money, Ms. Gibbons says.
Or, they write letters of support for each others’ organizations, explaining, for instance, that each charity will screen 200 women for breast cancer, Ms. Lofton says. “We can together say we screened 400 women,” she says. “It doesn’t just look better — it is better. It’s better to screen and follow up 400 women than to just screen 200 women.”
Ms. Caracostis says her grant proposals related to specific diseases, including breast cancer, are written in collaboration with other health-care organizations that specialize in treating those ailments. “Fund-raising collaboration really is about being able to write a grant and share those resources with whoever has the expertise you need,” she says.
The key to collaborative fund raising is for it to flow from a shared sense of mission, says Ms. Lofton.
“If a collaborative is forming in order to secure funding, they won’t be successful,” she says. “A collaborative must form in order to advance patient needs and member organizations, and the funding will follow.”
A ‘Continuum of Care’
The collaborative’s members include grant makers, like Ms. Patrick, of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, who see it as their job to encourage organizations to collaborate. In fact, Komen and other grant makers require groups they support to show that they can provide a “continuum of care,” she says: “If you educate women, who will you refer them to for screening and diagnostics?”
Attending meetings of the breast-health collaborative has given Ms. Patrick insight, she says, into the challenges charities are facing, both individually and as a group.
For instance, she says, since changes in Texas’ Medicaid-paid breast and cervical cancer program went into effect in September 2007, more women qualify for the services, which has meant health-care providers have to follow more patients as they go through the system.
“The collaborative made it easier to understand the issue and the problems and be able to address it” when Komen got more and more requests to support efforts to navigate breast-cancer patients through the Texas health-care system, she says.
The collaborative also makes it easier for Komen’s beneficiaries to approach her when they are facing difficulties, Ms. Patrick says.
Usually, she says, “grantees don’t go to their funders until it’s too late. They’re afraid to tell them that they have challenges.”
Far-Flung Members
The Texas collaborative has brought about financial partnerships in Houston, where it originated, but organizations in other parts of the state have found it difficult to make connections that translate into dollar-sharing.
“Most of the collaborative members are in Houston,” says Terry Wilson-Gray, executive director of the Bridge Breast Network, a Dallas charity that diagnoses and treats women with no insurance. “Our collaboration with them is not necessarily on grants.”
“When I think of collaboration, we’re sharing information that’s needed and we’re both writing grants to Komen but for separate regions,” she says.
Ms. Wilson-Gray also says she works closely with other organizations in her region that haven’t joined the collaborative: “There are tons of organizations that we partner with in North Texas, but they aren’t going to send someone to Houston for two hours.”
Ms. Loften acknowledges the difficulty of collaborating with members located outside the Houston area.
“It’s been a challenge for us to be as inclusive as we would like to be,” she says. “It’s a little bit harder to get to know them better. They’re not here knocking on our door, saying, we need this, we need that.”
Still, the collaborative is planning to hold meetings in other Texas cities this year, Ms. Lofton says, and the group is discussing ways it might help its members in the remote Big Bend area of southwest Texas set up a location for breast-cancer screening. If discussion leads to plans, the collaborative likely would lend a hand with finding money for the project, she says.
And Ms. Wilson-Gray says she may work with the Rose on bringing its mammography van to the borders of counties the Bridge serves, or on applying for money for a research project studying the breast-health needs of low-income women, a population with which both charities work.
Ms. Lofton says she expects the spirit of community to continue as the collaborative expands its reach: “We have been so lucky in Texas that none of our organizations has come with any ego, and we’ve really been focused on helping our patients, and helping each other.”
