October 4, 2007 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The authors of Forces for Good say they hope their book shakes up the status quo not just at charities, but at foundations as well.
The book’s main finding — that the best charities often make their greatest impact outside the walls of
their own organizations — suggests that foundations and philanthropists must work harder than ever to uncover charities that deserve support. The work that charities do apart from their own programs can be expensive, and it often doesn’t show up as a concrete “outcome” that can be neatly measured against the charity’s budget.
Forces for Good offers City Year, which provides yearlong service opportunities through its youth-service corps, as an example of a charity that may be worthy of investment even though its program costs appear high. This year, City Year’s budget is $49.5-million, and it is working with roughly 1,500 corps members. That works out to an average cost per corps member of $33,000.
But the book notes that City Year played a key role in getting legislation through Congress to create the AmeriCorps national-service program in 1993, and a decade later, led a coalition to save the program when it was threatened with serious budget cuts.
“If you only looked at overhead costs and used that as a metric, you’d view their model as expensive,” says Heather McLeod Grant, one of the two authors of Forces for Good. “But if you think about City Year as also helping sustain a movement and advocating for broader national service, then it’s a pretty big bang for the buck.”
A Screening Tool
Forces for Good outlines six principles that characterize high-achieving nonprofit organizations. At least one foundation, the Goldhirsch Foundation, in Boston, has vowed to use those six principles as a guide for selecting groups that make the initial cut in its search for charities to support.
The Goldhirsch Foundation hired Leslie R. Crutchfield, the other author of Forces for Good, as a consultant two years ago, when the foundation was just beginning to expand its grant-making focus from brain-cancer research to also supporting social-entrepreneurial ventures. This year, the foundation, which has $150-million in assets, expects to split its grant making more or less equally between the two causes.
Philip D. Cutter, a retired psychiatrist and the chairman of the foundation’s board, says the foundation, which does not accept unsolicited proposals, wants to invest in “change makers.”
“The authors have set out criteria by which we’re able to look at an organization and figure out, ‘Is this the one that is going to make a real difference in the world?’” Dr. Cutter says.
Working with Ms. Crutchfield, the Goldhirsch Foundation identified Kaboom, which builds local playgrounds, as a charity that embraces several of the practices outlined in the book. Kaboom has a loyal band of volunteers, works closely with corporate sponsors like Home Depot, and has expanded rapidly, in part by freely sharing its processes so that parents and others can build playgrounds on their own.
But Kaboom did not appear to be doing much in the way of advocacy or public-policy work, so Goldhirsch approached the charity in 2006 and offered to make a grant to support such efforts.
“We found a niche where we thought we could expand the value of what Kaboom was doing,” Mr. Cutter says.
The foundation gave Kaboom $250,000, payable over two years. Kaboom is using the money to mobilize its volunteers to help secure funds from local and state governments, and to develop a plan for lobbying efforts by its national office at the federal level.
Darell Hammond, Kaboom’s co-founder, thinks Congress should consider requiring an outdoor play space to be built during the construction of schools, day-care centers, and low-cost housing, much as accommodations for disabled people are now required under the Americans With Disabilities Act. “Frankly, public-policy work was on our radar screen, but it was further downstream until the Goldhirsch Foundation gave us the capital to do something about it,” he says.
Ms. Crutchfield believes foundations should use the practices outlined in the book not only to screen charities, but also to re-evaluate themselves. Are they collaborating with other grant makers, and supporting advocacy work in addition to programs?
“Foundations are a part of the sector, too,” Ms. Crutchfield says. “They can do a lot more than just give away grants.”
