Goodbye Fundraising, Hello Resource Development

The Fundraising Tree of Many Hands

We are nearing the financial year end for many nonprofit organizations, and maybe things are going to work out fine and you will make budget.  Perhaps you will even produce one of those modest nonprofit surpluses that will make everyone feel good, with being so much that it would raise any eyebrows in the community. It is unlikely to be enough to enable you to truly reinvest in your mission at the level necessary.

Maybe, though, you are going to have a deficit this year. Is it a one-off freak event or do you sense a gradual softening of your fundraising?

In the world of food banking and emergency food provision we rode a wave of recession-based fundraising from 2008 to 2012 that was based on general recognition that doubling down on core services was a necessity that had to take priority over funding the opera or saving the snowy plovers.

Line Dancing Without The Stars

Those days are over. The problem is that the recovery is job-lite, and a growing number of the people who access our services are food insecure families with at least one breadwinner trying to piece together a living from a handful of part-time, low-pay, no-benefit jobs.

Nevertheless, many donors have become bored with the recession, and they want to move on. Now, they could be whistling opera arias while they feed the snowy plovers, rather than tapping their toe to a Woody Guthrie number and making sure that no American goes hungry. Many foundations have already moved on from a posture of feeling obligated to focus their resources on ‘urgent needs’ of a recession.

Snowy: Gimme all your money, honey.

I have touched on the challenges of the current fundraising environment in this column before, typically by encouraging you to ‘sell a new bill of goods’ to your donors (such as nutrition and food literacy; or food banks as preventive health institutions; or as community development engines). These newer ‘cure not band aid’ activities are designed to work symbiotically with the previous singular focus of hunger relief.

However, in this post, I want to encourage you to consider a more permanent shift in how you approach the entirety of your fundraising and development.

The Development Team (Self-Portrait)

Walk down the hall to look at your fundraising person or staff or department. However many, or how wonderful they are, they are NOT going to be able to succeed in providing the level of funding truly needed for you to succeed at your stated mission.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they cannot do it alone.

It requires everyone on the payroll and also everyone with links to your organization to have a ‘resource acquisition’ mentality, which is something different from simple ‘fundraising,’ and I hope to make this distinction clear.

When nonprofit leaders swap notes about fundraising, we usually gravitate to chit-chat about direct mail vs. events vs. online vs. this or that. We get hung up on the tactical tools rather than focusing on the types of shift in strategic approach that will enable us to succeed.

The good news is this strategic approach requires you to focus heavily on only two things:

1. Building and maintaining diverse relationships in the community;

2. Having the technology and dynamic internal communications/culture to assemble and actively disseminate the latest information about those relationships to all staff.

That’s it, folks. Focus all your energies and staff on these two issues and your organization will be sustainable in the long term. (Assuming, of course, you are the right people doing the right thing at the right time for your community)

Today’s washout is tomorrow’s prospect.

So how do you do what I am suggesting? Let’s take a look at a group of people who are doing them already – people who are raising money for institutions of higher education. You’ve seen them at airport hubs in shorts and a suit jacket, modern day bounty hunters, tracking down their prey. These gift officers put incredible focus on steadily building relationships and joining the dots between a complex net of interconnected people. Of course, they start with an advantage, that they have a finite group of ‘prospects’ with a common interest related to a shared past experience of their glorious alma mater. (And even if that experience was plain bad, the fundraiser knows that they can give it a decade or two and rely on the golden glow-generator of memory to make that graduate positively inclined towards the institution. Or maybe just call it Stockholm Syndrome!)

A human services nonprofit needs to build a similar kind of shared experience with its large number of potential supporters in ways both large and small. Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s Impact Group approach to focused service provision is already generating new communities of interest (and communities of resource development) for us, around shared interest areas like nutrition or diabetes care or poverty or through targeting specific geographical areas of highest need in our service area.

We seek to involve people beyond the ‘twanging heart strings’ level of financial support, because we want to directly connect people to an area of their on-going interest:

“The Foodbank are interested in optimum nutrition and exercise? So am I!

The Foodbank is working to provide special support to those with diabetes? I’ve got an aunt with diabetes!

The Foodbank is bringing special focus to build collaboratives to address poverty in a particular part of town? That’s the part of town my family pulled themselves out of, or that’s the part of town that I could make a lot of money long-term by investing in at the ground floor!

The list goes on and on and on. Everyone who supports us is interested in ameliorating hunger, but most are interested in so much more; in things that are ‘stickier’ than solely hunger, the perception of which will ebb and flow with (skewed or otherwise) perceptions of the local situation.

If we can engage people long term in a positive change area, then this is going to garner us far more sustainable resources to help us achieve our mission of building healthy communities through good nutrition.

 

If the CRM jigsaw only had four pieces, life would be so peaceful…

Technology can help us achieve this, because we can source new types of information on people and compare links between large amounts of data. We can utilize a cheap (or theoretically free to nonprofits) CRM (Constituent Relationship Manager) like Salesforce or spend lots of money on Raiser’s Edge or any of the other IT solutions out there. It doesn’t really matter what you use as long as you are aggregating and linking all that data, and taking all of those relationships seriously.

This demands that we bring a high level of sophistication and focus to fundraising efforts over a wider level of dollar donation, whereas before, this was only the purview of the major gift level. I am sensing the need for us to flatten out how we treat small scale and large-scale contributors to our organizations. People want more information, more access. We have to find ways of doing it that don’t suck us dry of time and money.

Clearly, it is not cost effective to spend hour upon hour of staff time to build a relationship with a very chatty $25 donor, which is why social media and utilizing groups of community supporters acting as a conduit, becomes vitally important. You might also be pleasantly surprised to discover that the contractor who gives you $25 at Christmas is one degree of separation away from the wealthy person who favors that contractor for the job of moving the west wing of their house to the east wing or whatever the current priority is.

The new Major Gifts Officer cracks a joke

Perhaps at this stage of the discussion, you might acknowledge the potential benefits of focusing on relationship building and mapping, but how do you make it happen with a staff that is already stretched tighter than Simon Cowell’s face?

It’s not only your patience I’m stretching

I have talked in previous posts of the potential upside of moving, however painfully, towards an employment model where everyone you hire is a leader or potential leader – whether they ride a desk or a forklift. Their job is to inspire, guide and when needed, manage the work of a shifting group of human resources that are paid ‘other than with money.’

This enables everyone in the organization to scale the impact they could achieve on their own. They work with volunteers, community leaders (super volunteers), knowledge philanthropists and interns.

For this to work, processes need to be simplified and automated, online training needs to be provided for tasks, and we need the ability to break down complex tasks into smaller discrete sub-tasks which can be taken on by those with only a modest amount of time to commit to the organization. The upside for employees of this kind of ‘outside-in’ organization is that they will be become better paid.

If this wasn’t confronting and challenging enough by itself, I am further suggesting that you need to up the ante by insisting that all staff be tasked with bringing resources into the organization as well. (And be rewarded for doing so).

However small your staff is, they have between them relationships with the people who have the relationships with the people that are waiting to be inspired and actively engaged in your mission, and which will bring it the sustainability of funding that it needs to succeed. You just need to give staff the confidence, permission and motivation to start to grow and link those relationships.

I’m afraid this involves more of that indigestion-provoking medicine called ‘culture change’ and the kind of cross-functional teams and situations that can get people talking and sharing what and who they know.

This now brings us to considering the distinction that I drew earlier, when I said it was more a question of getting staff, board and volunteers to understand that what we are asking of them is not ‘fundraising,’ but ‘resource acquisition’ which is different. The more introverted members of your team can be reassured that ‘resource acquisition is far less scary and embarrassing than fundraising.

It is not asking your friends for money. REPEAT. It is not asking your friends for money.

Rather it is building a matrix charting the varying resource needs of the organization alongside the different interest/involvement areas that your organization provides, and then to begin to join the dots themselves about who they know who might be interested in what area.

The whole organization pitched in to bring home the bacon (and the wooly mammoth, and the hippo and the python) Where’s Russell Crowe when you need him?

This kind of culture change also involves tasking staff who come to you with great idea for a new initiative with getting involved in generating the resources to put that initiative into action.

To which they reply: Wait, isn’t it the development department’s job to come up with the money to make my initiative a reality? I mean I can work up a budget or something, but the development director needs to schmooze some people and write some begging letters, because that’s their expertise, right?

Development Departmental Mascot

It is their job, however it is also the job of the employee with the lightbulb over their head. Again it is a question of breaking down the elements of this initiative into chunks of people, things and money. We can’t afford to pay for everything ourselves, because that would be hogging all the fun, right? So where are new resources for each of these chunks out there in the community, which are laying in the hands of people who are waiting for the opportunities that their social investment in you will bring them, their employers, families and groups.

I would argue that the required resources for many new initiatives are out there, they just need to be tapped, and who better to do it than the person who within your organization who is excited by what that new initiative can achieve? Of course they are working in tandem with the accepted development team, so that you minimize toe-stepping and mixed messaging, but they can play a key role in helping to drive the process. They can get involved in meeting with people who may be able to play and working their own set of relationships and forging new relationships built on common interest and shared vision.

I don’t know about you, but when I walk into an all-staff meeting, I don’t see a bunch of job titles sitting around, I see everyone as a walking ‘Kickstarter’ campaign ready to inspire the community to deliver on an amazing idea.

Get out there and bring back the resources

This doesn’t mean that the development department is getting off the hook, oh no. They have to utilize the same approach. If they come up with great new fundraising ideas, they also need to come up with the people (who are not paid staff) who want to execute the idea. They also need a logical framework for how this activity is going to get some oversight and accountability from within our organization. This requires us to work with trusted volunteers who can engage with other volunteers or community organizations. We also need to rely on a sharing technology and culture to enable us to mitigate the risk of a crazy or self-serving person doing damage to our good name/brand.

These days, we are all Sherlock Holmes, looking for the clues and connections that are going to close the case or close the campaign, and build an organization that is sustained by the community for generations to come. Your mission deserves nothing less, right?

No More Band Aids – Strategies and Five Tactics for helping your clients long-term by evolving into a health-outcomes based organization

Are you sure this is the cure for food insecurity? Because my symptoms just started again.

Big Data is Coming for YOU

One day not too long from today, funding for organizations like ours will be heavily based on the social impact returns we can bring against the financial investment made. We will have to make our cost benefit pitch over what improvements in health can we bring. Who are the specific groups we will touch and what specific disease areas will we help to mitigate or eradicate? How much money can we save the City, County, State and Nation in healthcare costs? Over what period can we do it?

If we can put forward a persuasive argument, we will receive funding with the remit to deliver on our proposals. Our food and education programs and our demonstrated ability to link to a continuum of community support and empowerment for under-resourced individuals and families will help us make a strong case.

We will then have to evaluate and measure impacts and wrangle and present the kind of data that makes our current activities in this area seem equivalent to counting on our fingers.

It could be like Feeding America’s quadriannual Hunger Study – every day!

Before you wake up screaming in sweat-soaked sheets, we are not there yet. This may be a world that you don’t want to get to. However, it is coming, whether you like it or not and we need to position ourselves by our deeds to demonstrate the hugely beneficial public health impacts of food banks.

Join the crazy food bank health kick!

Sure, I am a nice guy who wants to help people be healthy and feel positive about what they can achieve in life for themselves, their families and their communities. But I also care about the long-term direction and viability of organizations and a network like ours. We need financial resources to do our work, and our march into the future is going to require mastery of juggling dual funding streams (charitable donations for food insecurity and provider service fee payments for health outcomes) to be able to survive over the coming decades.

From my cheap seat in the bleachers, hunger is no longer driving the national discussion in the way it did a few years ago. It is already viewed as a sub-component of poverty, which has morphed into the ‘real issue.’ The perception is now that the country has drifted in a situation where people find it incredibly difficult to improve their circumstances no matter how hard they work, no matter how much they take personal responsibility for their own situation.

Partnership with other organizations nationwide and locally is the only way to begin to take on both situational and generational poverty. Feeding America’s fledgling Collaborating for Clients (C4C) initiative is a great step in this direction. Here is a download for some FAQ’s about this: Collaborating for Clients FAQ_1.27.2014[2]

The vital next step after that is ‘collaborating with clients’ to achieve the kind of sustainable transformations in local communities that will work long-term. The Federal government is not going to gallop in on an ethnically balanced white/brown/black horse and save the day. Those days are done. We have to help micro-communities connect and find their own solutions, and then turn around and use their own power and ability to work together to drive the national agenda from the bottom. I mean, what is the point of all this social networking crap unless we can get it to do something worthwhile, right?

Anyway, it’s clearly time for one of my pink happy pills to calm down, because all that is still a ways off and we want to help people be more nutritionally healthy right now.

And so, there is ‘preventative health’ which can be the second flank of a ‘pincer movement’ that enables us to come at the ingrained and complex problems of poverty from two different sides, utilizing different partners. Fighting poverty through job creation and community development is actually not enough in itself. If you improve people’s financial situation, you can make them food secure, but this doesn’t necessarily improve their health. However, if you work to help people improve their health, you give them skills (food literacy) that will be invaluable to them in times of scarcity or times of plenty.

Another quiet day at the Food Bank

I also think it is possible to steer the issue of poverty away from being a lightning rod for people’s knee-jerk political reactions and deep seated personal fears (oops, same thing) and into a more neutral territory where we treat the ravages of poverty as a public health issue that there can be broad consensus to rally around. That is a ways off, but I think it gives us somewhere to head for that is worth reaching for.

The Tactics

So that is the ‘why.’ What about the how? How can we engage with the current preventative healthcare framework and demonstrate our worth to be part of this fabric.

Below I lay out five different steps you can take. You can’t do all of these things at once (don’t tell my staff that, though), but achieving a win in any of these areas will give you some credibility and provide the foundation to broaden and deepen your health-related activities.

1. Diabetes is a great place to start:

Playing a part in diabetes care is one of the best initial possibilities for demonstrating the vital role we can play in community health. Obesity is much harder for us to prove the specific benefits of our role. (Even for us our food bank with 60% of our distributed product as fresh produce). Diabetes is much easier for us to demonstrate the success of our interventions.

For the last two years, the drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb has been funding pilot programs in diabetes care with three food banks across the country, each pursuing slightly different versions of partnership with local healthcare providers. (Here is some basic information on the project. More detailed data will be released soon.)BMS Diabetes Project 2014 The interim results of these studies provide us with some real data about food banks can play a vital role in screening, helping people control their condition, and also dealing with the huge swathe of ‘borderline diabetics.’ Here is a link to an informational website on this area, which has a lot of helpful info.

We are actively speaking to a number of local health providers in our county about running similar programs. Virtually all of them have been enthusiastic about this. It is a big problem, they can save a lot of money, and they also have funds available for this type of activity. We are still working through how the financial model will work, but we are increasingly looking for fee payments (by healthcare provider, not individuals) for the type of direct service that we are providing in the healthcare space. We can’t be apologetic about asking these organizations to pony up. Yes, people expect charitable hunger relief for $25 bucks and a turkey too big for someone’s oven, but I can assure you that they do not expect to get bona fide health interventions so cheaply.

And now we will open up the stomach to determine that it is indeed empty.

2. Consider providing training in screening for food insecurity for medical staff:

Oregon and its food bank are way ahead on this one. (what was that Ron Burgundy was saying in Anchorman II about only leaving the country once – when he went to Salem, Oregon?). They have a dedicated site with excellent online and written training materials for medical staff centered around utilizing the existing USDA two question survey to gauge food insecurity.

From childhoodhunger.org

Of course, medical staff will have a full-blown panic attack if you attempt to suggest adding anything more to the huge clipboard of paperwork needed to be filled in on patient intake (waivers to waive the right to waive waivers and the like). However, persuasive arguments can be made – continuing education points are available in the Oregon model, for which there are existing requirements for medical staff to obtain. Also, being aware that a patient is in a food insecure household is a pretty useful thing to know when you are looking at strategies to improve the health of that patient.

Prescription program

The other major potential sweetener is the possibility of providing doctors with the ability to ‘write prescriptions’ for fresh produce for some patients. They could then bring these prescriptions to a food pantry (ideally one that would be open at that time) where they could receive some fresh produce. Medical staff like to have something to give patients, and even if they have to pay something to help contribute to the cost of fresh produce, it is still a small cost compared to other interventions they could offer.

The health provider was particularly proud of their new mobile screening van

 

3. Get in on the ‘Community Health Needs Assessments’ wagon train:

This was supposed to be our admittance ticket, our way of building relationships with local hospitals and health authorities. They are now mandated to see what is happening with the health of their communities and devise strategies to deal with these issues. Food insecurity is a significant portion of this reality, as well as the health conditions that optimum nutrition can help alleviate.

We actually contributed to our local plan a few months back in terms of being invited to a stakeholder interview roundtable. We are still at the stage where we were not considered partners, more a case of ‘we better ask a bunch of nonprofits what they think.’ Consequently not much significant has resulted from our modest involvement in this process. In your area, you may be able to insert yourself at a more opportune point in the process and be more involved. From our viewpoint, I figure that we need to get on with the other things we are doing in this area, and then when next time rolls around, things will have shifted significantly.

Here is a download on this issue.Assessing and Addressing Community Health Needs_CHA_2013

 

4. Stop whining that the bigger fish get all the fish food. Puff yourself up bigger to get bigger funding:

I am not talking about increasing the size of your organization, which may not be a good idea even if it is financially possible. What I mean is to link together with other food banks or similar organizations to run health based programs over a broader geographical area. While I may have my visionary moments,  most of the strategies I pursue have a very pragmatic basis. Such is the case with this. Trying to get the Feds to cough up for the dire needs of those in hunger in Santa Barbara County is an uphill struggle. Why, dear reader, even you are smirking now. What do they know about hunger? We always have to deal with the kneejerk reaction of having one rich city in a county with rampant food insecurity and low food stamp uptake. (In the 58 California counties, only 14 have more food insecurity than Santa Barbara). Also, the reality is that if you are looking for health money not USDA food security money, a county of 400,000 is a gnat bite. They want big populaces to make significant impacts on regional numbers.

This is one of the reasons for the formation of the ‘Food Bank Health Alliance of the Central Coast.’ This is an aggregation (currently) of ourselves, Santa Cruz and Ventura Counties. Between us, we have a million and a half people. If we can get San Luis Obispo and Monterey County to join us we will have an unbroken line of sister organizations covering the whole coastal region that separates LA from San Francisco.

Our organizations are linked by MOU committing us to jointly seek for health related federal funding (though we’ll take money from USDA, Department of Defense, Smokey the Bear…). Marriages of convenience without shared values and objectives are a recipe for disaster – as I’m sure you’re all aware from your previous collaborations – however, this more open relationship is based on a shared outlook. This boils down to:

• GOOD NUTRITION – Is the bedrock of our activities, sourcing and distributing as much nutrient dense food as possible. We also have nutrition and wellness policies so we can walk the talk (and help our member agencies do so).
• COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT AND DEVELOPMENT – As well as making a success of ‘feeding the line’ of people who are food insecure, we are also very focused on ‘shortening the line’ of those who will need help in the future. The only way to achieve this is through empowering the community to take control of its own nutritional challenges – on an individual and neighborhood level and upwards. This involves making those who were previously ‘clients’ into partners for healthy lifestyles and environments.
• EVALUATION OF IMPACT – A need to move beyond measurement of outputs to demonstrating the efficacy of our actions on the public health and development of communities. We will additionally work to demonstrate wellness and self-sufficiency.
• A HISTORY OF COOPERATION AND MUTUAL TRUST – We have a long shared history as members or partner distribution members of Feeding America, the national organization of Food Banks as well as the California Association of Food Banks.

There will doubtless be lots of challenges, different organizations used to running their own unique programs in their own idiosyncratic way. However, unless we can make this type of collaboration of very similar organizations work, then none of us have any hope at succeeding in collaborating with the wider groupings that will be necessary to have a true impact on poverty in America.

An ‘alliance’ like this needs large amounts of cash to grease the wheels and make it work, so stay tuned for results on how we’re doing. Or better yet, why wait to see whether we fall flat on our faces and put together your own regional collaborations. If the Feds don’t give you the money, they’ll only spend it on something really dumb, so you might as well go for it!

 

Gladys had waited 50 years, calculating the perfect time to make her move, snaring her hapless target in her macrame web of sin…

5. Lead with Seniors:

Often, funding to feed seniors is treated in a similar way to finding the money to feed homeless people. Besides a few highly motivated donors, these are the programs that it is harder to get broad funding for, so they tend to get paid for out of general operating expenses. It’s a shame, but scruffy dudes with matted beards or finicky grey hairs clipping coupons do not always excite funders. Consequently, it’s so easy to lead with kids and get funding for those kids. (I call it ‘taking candy with a baby’) Individual donors or foundations feel the heartstrings twang and they also think kids might be a better long-term investment. I have always muttered that ‘Kids are just the Seniors of tomorrow,’ but that hasn’t made much difference. I have been waiting for some perspective to shift or something to click for me in this area and I think it just did.

At a recent meeting with a major healthcare provider, he said: “Kids are basically healthy unless you really mess them up, but seniors are a significant expense.” If you think about it, asking the health world to pay up now to ease the problems kids will generate thirty years from now is asking too much. If we can help them keep seniors healthy and independent as long as possible, we can save them some serious cash in the here and now, not after they’ve retired or moved on. That is something that they would be prepared to invest in – and the sums would be a drop in the ocean compared to the increased expenses they face.

In this case I am thinking about a more integrated and expansive range of senior nutrition programs that move beyond the straightforward grocery bags or congregate feeding. These programs would have a nutrition and health element and that mesh more organically with existing health screening.

We are still putting together the right mix of ideas and partners before making a significant investment, but it has to happen and soon. We are seeing an explosion of need amongst seniors and what might be termed ‘pre-seniors’ (those close enough to retirement age that they are finding it very hard to get employed as people don’t want to invest training cash in them). Really, once you are in mid to late 50’s it gets harder and harder (So that’s why those Food Bank ED’s stay so long in their jobs!) To give an example of the type of programs we are looking at in the senior arena:

• A program providing ingredients for seniors to cook a meal together a couple of times a month at a community or senior center. This would give people motivation to keep their cooking skills going and also allows social contact, additional nutritional education and health screening from other healthcare groups.

• In seeking to meet the needs of our large Latino community, we are looking at a program that caters to the large number of grandparents who look after kids while their parents work. This program would also allow for a weekly meal in a community center where both generations would work together to cook a meal. This way, nutritional health and food literacy skills can be the focus for these two age groups, who if they disagree about a lot of things, are united in their belief that mom and dad can’t cook to save their lives, or that they are convinced they don’t have the time to. Again, this situation offers great health screening opportunities for diabetes etc.

• Meal delivery to seniors. In our area (and maybe yours) senior meal delivery has become a hot potato (or a reheated lukewarm potato, more like) with responsibility for the service being passed around. Meals on Wheels may be a large presence in your area or one that is suffering from a volunteer force that is figuratively and literally dying off. The reality in many places is either some kind of vacuum or spotty service at best. We are interested in investigating partnerships in this area. At one extreme, you can be like Feedmore in Virginia and create one big entity of MOW, food bank and community kitchen. At the other is at least more collaboration and integration within the range of services in your area. I know that Greater Chicago Food Depository has been piloting a program where health visitors drop off an ergonomic box of six frozen meals with low-income seniors that they visit. These are to be picked up from various centralized locations, and the frozen element allows delivery before food safety becomes a major issue. For the health visitors it is obviously an inconvenience but also provides something tangible that they can give people and that helps them make their numbers and keep their clients happy. This is a complex strategy and I know that there have been significant challenges with it, though this is clearly a direction worth pursuing and seeking the type of local and state reimbursement funding which would make it more financially viable.

It is up to you how tightly you are able to integrate this type of programming with the health screening and health treatment needs of seniors, but the tighter you do so, the more you guarantee a stream of funding. Food is still the draw to get involved in a program whether you are seven or seventy.

Feeding America recently published a report on Senior Hunger, which may provide some help to you in pushing for funding and partnership in this increasingly vital area of our operation.

Link to executive summary of this report: Spotlight on Senior Health

Are the tactics I have suggested a distraction from your core mission of feeding people? I would argue that they enhance the mission in multiple ways. Take the suggestion around training medical staff to screen for food insecurity. Can you imagine how much your development staff will benefit from the type of new understanding that doctors and health teams will gain of both food insecurity and our work to eradicate it? People want to get involved when the discussion is good nutritional health, and now is the time to start leveraging our credibility and boots on the ground in this area.

Also think about attending the ‘Closing the Hunger Gap’ conference, which has become a key focal point for this and related issues. Closing the Hunger Gap Conference Report 2013 which held its inaugural conference last year in Tucson and will next be held out of the country in Oregon in September 2015.

Live Long and Prosper, and let us know how you’re doing!

Sick of Crunching Gears? How can you restructure your organization around your evolved mission

People are doing new things in the food banking world. In our search to ‘shorten the line,’ we are getting involved in areas that we had not been involved with in the past – educational programs, anti-poverty or pro-community development work – not to mention all manner of strange new alliances and partnerships.

We are discovering that our existing organizational structures are not necessarily the most efficient vehicles for getting us where we want to go. ‘Feed The Line’ and ‘Shorten The Line’ can be like two sticky gears in a truck and if you are constantly crunching between them, your engine (read staff) can become overstressed and your gearbox (read budget) may get worn out with all the upshifting and downshifting.

A standard food bank operation can feel like like tank, rumbling along, and when the situation calls for us to get all nimble and ‘ninja,’ we can find it hard to change direction. We’re brute force powerful, but maybe not so suited for the asymmetrical challenges of tackling poverty or helping clients build social capital. How can we build the nimbleness of being able to deal with both micro and macro interventions within our humble and creaky org chart?

We all hate org charts because they have this way of deadening a living, breathing thing (If you have any doubt, check out the chart of the educational establishment below):

Don’t you feel like you could die in one of these little boxes and it would take them months, maybe years to find your body?

Then of course there is the org chart according to the Executive Director’s view of the world, which is much like Steve Jobs’ view:

Hark! I am the chosen sun and you lesser celestial bodies must revolve around me.

For us to figure out what is the best structure for our organization, we need to start by being clear where we stand in relation to the community around us. [Here you can download a good SSIR article on the ‘Networked nonprofit‘]

When I am explaining to Foodbank supporters about the evolution of our mission, I talk about how we can no longer avoid looking ‘upstream’ of where we are, to try and understand and deal with what is driving so many people to our doors – typically situational or generational poverty.

I then tell them we need to consider what is ‘downstream’ of where we are operating – this means what are the true outcomes of our interaction with clients? It may be that their long-term health has not been affected as beneficially as we hoped. These ideas are summarized in the graphics I developed below:

So, how can we restructure to meet this enlarged understanding of how we are affected by, and in turn affect the world around us?

Let’s look at some ways in which food banks are organized around these elements of the mission.

THE CLASSIC FOOD BANK

Potiphar was proud of his three-tier pallet racks

The first model is the ‘Classic’ food bank. Unreconstructed, proudly focused on the core mission and seeing no need to evolve further. Not only is it structurally unsuited for any expanded mission, it doesn’t even want to consider the possibility of one.

Typically this food bank will be in a high need / low resource area, where the only mindset accepted is ‘running faster and faster to keep in the same place.’ (Yes, I know my food bank is in hoity-toity Santa Barbara, but we serve the whole County, and of the 58 California counties, only 14 have more food insecurity than ours, so I should be at least be allowed an opinion…end of self-justifying whine!)

Another factor is that whatever food bank we are in operates the way it does for a million historical and community reasons – many of which may be hidden under the surface. ‘We’ve always done it this way’ can  be a common refrain. These food banks will probably carry on much as they are, shrinking a little in size as ‘recession sympathy’ dries up further. The lack of desire to face shifting realities may be failure of leadership at the board or ED level or it could be just a lack of strongly voiced desire for anything more from the community.

Lets look at two other structural models that are currently out there in food bank land.

THE REMODEL

‘The Remodel’

The Remodel is basically taking the old structure and trying to add on a few additions. It might be teaching some nutrition education classes or having some involvement in SNAP outreach.

There are many food banks are in this grouping. Whatever gets added might be as a result of ED interest, community stimulus or Feeding America encouragement. The problem here is that because the organization was not structured for this additional mission, then the new initiatives can be like vestigial limbs hanging off the org chart or they shoved in some department that feels like its original remit has become distorted.

This can lead to new initiatives being left to die by staff who feel they are already overworked, or that the program will be starved of resources once it has been there a while and is more noticeable for the problems it is causing the organization as opposed to the ‘new program paint smell’ that was so useful for fundraising in the early stages.

THE SHINING CITY ON THE HILL

How did they afford a facility like that? Must have been selling all those poppies from their community gardens...

Of course the polar opposite of the ‘classic’ approach to food banking is what we might call the ‘We do it all’ or even the ‘Shining City on the Hill’ food bank. They stand out from all around them. They can be like a giant snowball rolling through town, picking up all manner of diverse activities: community gardens, job training, process kitchen etc etc. These activities are typically run by food bank staff. As someone remarked at the recent Feeding America ED forum, you’ve heard of ADD, this is called EDD.

This mode of operation tends to develop in places where the food bank is very much the ‘only game in town’ in terms of dwarfing other nonprofits, or having a large geographical area and considerable financial resources relative to the local nonprofit eco-system.

The general challenge with this approach is that it is expensive, difficult to sustain and challenging to coordinate. Also if you’re throwing a ton of programmatic outreach at the wall hoping some of it sticks, how do you know what element is really moving the needle, and what is well meaning but ultimately ineffectual?

CATALYST FOR CHANGE MODEL

I would like to suggest one additional approach –one that I believe our food bank is evolving into, which is more of a bottom-up ‘redesign’ and which could be called the ‘catalyst for change’ model.

The ‘Catalyst’ model means we create an uber goal – in our case ‘ending hunger in our service area AND transforming the health of the community through good nutrition.’ This goal allows us to partner with a full range of local health and service organizations and hunger relief becomes part of a positive goal that can be measured using public health indicators.

The Vision Thing

In reality, we still have our fingers in a bunch of pies, but the difference from the ‘we do it all model’ – and this is crucial – is that the food bank needs to remain value neutral over whether things are done either by them, by their existing agencies or whether achieving something requires new forms of partnership.

The overriding thing is that your organization commits to making sure that it happens one way or another, will evaluate the results and keep the process moving forward.

We expand what may already have been a long-term role as the encouragers of an ecosystem of community partners working to improve health and food security. The difference is that this time we want results and we want to be able to measure them. It could also mean that everyone’s programs might not be adjudged as wonderful as everyone else’s.

FB’s are perfectly positioned to be the catalysts to make sure that the things that are going to help solve food security and promote health are being done in coherent and interconnected fashion.

• We’re not going anywhere soon, so we have stability.

• We have respect to broker partnerships and coalitions.

• We also have detailed knowledge of the range of programs in our service area and through our existing agency reporting we have some crude idea of the outputs of service.

• More than anything, we have the food. That has always been our ace card, but we’ve never really played it as hard as we could. We really need to leverage every pound of food we distribute to effect lasting change.

This is all based around evolving the role of food within the organization. It is still central (relax…), but now it is not the end in itself. We are not only the food sourcers, storers and distributors – we are the food investors. We are going to leverage every nutritionally dense pound of food to bring significant long-term impact to the good health of our service area.

The price of doing business in the leverage is to provide good service to those who will always need food assistance as a result of challenges of age or faculty – yet even these folks can benefit from involvement in holistic service. Nevertheless, I am putting them lovingly to one side and saying that we will always find a way to source the food needed for these folks.

That leaves people whose lives we can impact significantly – children, families, those with chronic health conditions, those who question their limited voice or power in the community, those who want to share the skills required for good nutritional health with others in their neighborhood.

Being a catalyst sounds easier than doing everything yourself, but really it is just a different kind of difficult.

The below graphic shows the resources that we are providing in our area to stimulate effective nonprofit agency responses to local nutritional health issues:

This is what we are providing to agencies and clients in Santa Barbara. How can we find an org structure that allows these varied opportunities to flourish together?

If we have a traditional org structure then provision of the above services is going to look like the many-headed hydra. It also means that it is only a matter of time before one head or other gets lopped off, because it is not sustainable.

Let’s look at an alternate structure. Enter, if you will, through the doors of perception…

Photo of Don Draper in the final season of Mad Men. His transformation complete…

The doorway is a good metaphor, because people, food and resources can pass through it in both directions. So imagine your Foodbank in the center of the community (because it’s hard to escape from our self-obsessions) and further imagine four doors around you that lead in from and out to that wider community.

I am suggesting that this kind of restructure requires you to shift how you do business to facilitate the most efficient methods of stimulating two-way traffic through these doors. It means you have to inspire and join with and prod and poke your partners in the community (starting / but not ending with your member agencies) into embracing impact and sustainability and rigorous evaluation of their activities. And if you the food bank are going to initiate something new, you need to find a way to make it sustainable long term which means planning from the start of the process how the community will have assumed ownership of the project by the time it reaches maturity.

The four doors are:

1. Partner Organizations

2. Food Bank Programs

3. Development

4. Community Leadership/Volunteers

Let’s look individually at each of these ‘portals’ for food, energy, time and collective will:

Partner Organization Doorway

This is always going to be the biggest door. If we’re going to maximize our impact we need vibrant relationships with other nonprofit organizations. Yet we need to shake things up a lot in terms of how our current partnerships work.

We are already monitoring member agencies, but because our focus has  been about ‘maxing’ poundage, we have not pushed/encouraged agencies to embrace a ‘shorten the line’ agenda. Agency segmentation has been helpful for us in seeing who can be the best partners for ‘shorten the line’ services, but at some point, tough decisions need to be made about what relationships need to be prioritized for the good of the community.

We are in a time when traditional donated food supplies are tight and we are all working hard to find the next ‘wave’ of available product. Consequently this is the perfect time to make every pound count and  leverage existing relationships by expecting more of our partners that turning our inventory for us.

If the relationship with community partners is to become more about impact and not just poundage, then you might find yourself with a different set of partners. Some of our most successful new partnerships are not based around agencies distributing food for us. We are working with American Heart Association, who are providing some educational components to our existing educational structure with our Kid’s Farmers Market Program.

We also are working with a local ‘cradle to career’ school initiative called Thrive, where our educational programs are helping them meet funding-mandated nutrition education requirements. We are in discussion with other potential partners around working together in community building and in food systems reform.

Our educational programs typically include a distribution element, yet in at least half of them, this is really a micro distribution compared to the ‘here’s 20lbs of broccoli, good luck with your life’ approach of the past. You might feel that this is mission drift, but I know that each one of these partnerships will have more long-term impact on increasing food security then setting up another mobile pantry.

Your existing agency relations structure may not be able to work with this expanded set of partners. For us there is already a challenge in how to work with two different types of partner within our existing agency structure. We need to do more to reconcile these types of partnership, so that the ‘non-food distributing’ partner does not become the poor relation (or vice versa). Close links between agency/partner relations and the work of the development and program departments now becomes crucial. The old siloed approach to information of the past can be disastrous in this kind of relationship.

FOODBANK PROGRAM DOORWAY

We are increasingly looking at pushing out our award-winning ‘Feed the Future’ children’s programs through our member agencies as a way of bringing them to scale and thereby meet our vision objectives. The programs are run by ‘super-volunteers’ and therefore are sustainable. Tapping into other agency’s ‘super-volunteers’ will enable this sustainable scale to increase. This represents another big element of the catalyst relationship – we can develop and evaluate programs and then our agencies and partners become the natural conduit for scaling these programs.

Feed the Future Program Cycle

We need to make these programs (which all include both ‘feed the line’ and ‘shorten the line’ elements) so attractive in terms of curriculum, training and food availability and so effective that agencies will want to run the programs. Do agencies pay a license fee? Do we give them away? Do we ask them to provide some shared maintenance for the food element? For us, these issues are still to be decided.

We’re not big brother, but if they want to run a different program that is fine, as long as the evaluation and data connected to their program are broadly comparable so we know they are getting the impact.

“The war on hunger is within sight of achievable victory.”

A food bank running programs and fundraising to deliver them is not really sustainable in the long-term. Yes, you can always find a donor to pay for one nutrition ed program or another, but unless you have found a way to let the community take ownership of the program long-term, it will eventually languish. Which leads us to who should be running the programs.

COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP / VOLUNTEER DOORWAY

I believe the closeness of the relationship of volunteers to non-profit organizations is cyclical. At one end of the cycle, the focus is on an all-paid workforce with an overlay of marginalized volunteers to manual tasks or food sorting or packing. This can lead to disconnection from a large part community – especially professional people who have a lot of other skills to offer. One way of telling whether your use of volunteers is truly able to help you build impact is to imagine if all your volunteers fell away – could you continue fairly easily with your mission? If so then volunteers are really window-dressing for you.

At the other end of the continuum is more of a volunteer-driven organization. Aiming to become this is a major element of the ‘catalyst’ approach for us. We have a special category of volunteer, called a ‘community leader’ who is a super-volunteer that is treated pretty much as a paid employee would be. They are typically there to focus on a particular project, but others may have long-term loyalty to a specific program.

These community leaders are paid – just not with money. This ‘payment’ might be with the provision of written references, or with respect, or with being given leadership responsibilities. These Community Leaders are held to account for what they have committed to do and reassigned or fired if they do not produce. This has helped us scale our programs significantly.

I can’t pretend this has not lead to cultural strains within the organization, which naturally wants to shift back to just having paid staff. Employees find it easier to lead people who are getting paid to listen to them, rather than having to go to the effort of inspiring volunteers  will listen if we communicate effectively the power of our mission and the direct impact that volunteer can have on moving it forward.

We are making significant progress, though. I think there is something empowering for our employees in letting them know that they are all expected to be leaders of multiple volunteers, no matter what their job function is. It is all about multiplying their ability to achieve impact. Yes, we all know it feels so much easier to do something yourself rather than explain to someone else, but that is not sustainable.

The changes that this means to a traditional food bank structure is that you need a lot more ‘relationship manager’ type staff – they might be handling relationships with community leaders, short-term knowledge philanthropists that are working on a specific project, or outside organizations that we are partnering with. These are all people who need more attention / coaching/ focus than just the usual volunteer management skills. You are managing outside talent and it takes tact, organization and a clear understanding of the shared goals. We don’t really have the experience or skills in this area (besides in the fundraising arena) so it is learning a new skill and introducing a new culture, but the expectation is that staff will be managing an increasing number of community resources and so multiplying their impact as an employee.

We can give you a bin of pears, but we can’t give you a small bag for you and your family to try.

As regards impact on the warehouse staff, if you have a rash of small scale educational programs that might require small poundage of high-quality produce or purchased items that are needed to demo a curriculum-specified recipe, these can be extremely difficult for current warehouse structures to deal with. Online ordering by programs staff becomes vital. Skills at staging and coordinating multiple micro distributions have to be developed. Drivers are overwhelmed by the number and complexity of deliveries and pick ups of programmatic materials from sites. In this situation it becomes increasingly important for volunteer drivers with loyalty to specific programs or sites to become involved.

The other side of the community leadership equation for us is the way we can erase the dividing line between ‘benefactors and beneficiaries.’ Our Nutrition Advocates come out of our programs and  are encouraged to work more closely with both the Foodbank and become self-supporting groups. They are trained in food literacy, can be SNAP advocates and we also provide community organizing facilitation to help organize around any local health and community issues.

Community Leaders and Nutrition Advocates represent two powerful and brand new volunteer forces that are having a major impact in how our organization develops.

THE DEVELOPMENT DOOR

These other doorways suddenly open up a lot of other opportunities for the development department. We have community leaders teaching in programs and having direct access to working with clients so we are building the kind of long-term support from motivated professional people that no number of trips to the warehouse can generate.

The mantra in food banking has always been ‘once they go to the warehouse, they get it.’  This is true in terms of comprehending the size of our operations and the fact that we are not a glorified food pantry. However, if you really want to build long-term loyalty, you need to not show them the ‘tool,’  but involve them in what the tool has built. That means involvement in direct service with clients. The old hunger dynamic made this an awkward situation for all concerned. Now that our focus is about health, this is a way that benefactor and beneficiary can communicate as equals – we all care about being healthy, we all have ideas about how good nutrition can help with this. Teaching once a month in one of our programs is a golden way of building a whole new levels of ‘getting it.’

I used to get jealous about ‘Habitat for Humanity’ and their ability to involve supporters directly in their efforts by helping build a house and leaving them with the tangible results of what they have wrought. Community involvement with our programs now brings us ever closer to this model.

The desire to take more leadership in the health arena with local partners is also creating brand new funding opportunities with foundations, businesses and individual major givers who are looking for long term social solutions not short term charitable fixes.

One size does not fit all, and I am not suggesting that your organization should focus on the catalyst approach, like we are. Nevertheless, I  would challenge you to look at your mission and how it has changed and then start asking the tough questions around organizational structure, so that you can be ready to meet the challenges of the next twenty years as we work to achieve the long-term health and food security of our communities.

 

NOTE TO ‘FROM HUNGER TO HEALTH’ READERS:

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Forget the ‘F’ word or the ‘N’ word, what really scares us service providers is the ‘P’ word: Poverty

In the first of an occasional look at how issues of poverty affect our ability to move people from hunger into health, I consider the Bridges Out of Poverty model in an interview with Debora McDermed who teaches and facilitates the ‘Bridges’ work being done through the Northern Nevada Food Bank in Reno. What use is Bridges to us? How does it work? Does it function best as a simple set of language tools or as a community-wide effort? Does this bridge lead us somewhere or is it really just a culturally insensitive set of labels which only helps further stigmatize people? Read on and find out…

First, apologies for the hiatus. This blog took a break for the last couple of months of 2013, partially because it is the crazy season for food banks. The other reason is that this isn’t a blog that features my knee-jerk reactions to the burning issues of the day like gun control (for that go here), but rather a blog with an educational focus on meaty subjects of current concern in the ‘Health into Hunger’ sphere.

Like Poverty.

In our world we love the ‘F’ word (food); there are even fans of calling people the ‘N’ word (needy) – but whatever you do, don’t mention the ‘P’ word (poverty).

I have been in rooms with dedicated, caring management teams from food banks, where mentioning fighting poverty is like waving a silver cross in front of a vampire. The fear level about this issue is huge: ‘that’s not our concern…it’s mission drift…our donors would hate it…let’s just stick to being the good guys saving the day with the big trucks of food.’

This trepidation extends beyond the food bank world. You can see it in the messaging of an organization like ‘Share Our Strength’ that is focusing on child hunger, with the mantra that ‘we may not be able to tackle poverty, but we can at least make sure that no kid goes hungry.’

My own viewpoint is that food banks cannot escape facing up to wider issues of poverty and how they impact our work. Unless we’re in this just to have long-term job security and to look good at Christmas, then we have to say we have had enough of the current status quo – a national state of rampant malnutrition which continues to weaken the health of our communities. That means we are going to have to deal with poverty to some degree or other.

Most service providers would acknowledge that they have to not only ‘feed the line’ but to do something to ‘shorten the line,’ yet addressing poverty rarely figures in these plans. You would think that poverty is the most tangible thing in the world – you can see it and smell it and touch it – yet when we want to do something about it then it becomes some nebulous mist that seems to slip away from the grasp.

There seems little shared agreement about either its causes and its cures. Consequently it joins the increasing number of subjects – such as immigration and gun control that become too uncomfortable to talk about – and therefore must be placed in some ‘no go zone’ of polite national discourse.

How does Bridges Out of Poverty enter into this discussion? It is a series of training modules designed for individuals in poverty (the ‘Getting Ahead’ course) and for communities or organizations (Bridges Strategy and Applying Concepts courses) that seek to create a framework of common understanding about why people get trapped in poverty and which offers some ways in which both individuals and their communities can move out of poverty.

The work springs from the writings and involvement of one individual, Ruby Payne, originally from her book ‘A Framework for Understanding Poverty.’  This has now been largely superseded by the Bridges out of Poverty book as the definitive text.

Now, of course, when you have such a wide-reaching set of social concepts arising from a single person (and one presenting very modest research or epidemiological evidence, and whose trainings are sold through copyrighted trainings and books) two things are going to happen:

The Academic Community Responds.

1. The academic community will go ape shit in their desire to expose and condemn this heretic who has dared skip the years of longitudinal studies and research to say a lot of things which in the end are only backed up by their belief in their own experience and intuition, rather than in a long history of published research. And there are certainly Bridges opponents out there. Here’s a good broadside.  Bridges would argue that a lot of these critiques typically focus only on the framework and not how the framework is actually used and adapted within communities.

2. He/She who is condemned for their theories will also collect adherents– people looking for simple solutions to complex problems. These supporters will say that you need to charge ahead with what your gut tells you and not wait for some kind of historical validation, especially with such a pressing concern as poverty.

So, where does that leave the rest of us? We are not academic snobs but we also want to be sure that a new approach follows the doctor’s oath of ‘Primum no nocere’ or ‘First, do no harm’ and ensure that this will not make the situation worse.

Debora McDermod

I did some research into the Bridges work and met with Food Bank of Northern Nevada CEO, Cherie Jamason (who has spearheaded the uptake of Bridges in Reno) and Debora McDermed of The Vertical Dimension Consulting who runs the programs. Subsequently I invited Debora to present a workshop on Bridges at our annual Agency Leaders Summit.

2012 Agency Conference

Her presentation was a huge hit and seemed to touch a nerve with a lot of people from agencies who felt that this work was communicating something that they had believed at some level but never been able to put into words about the challenges they faced with their clients and that it offered some interesting tools for them to try on.

Deb, tell me about the different elements of the Bridges training.

There’s a two-hour presentation, which is an overview. That’s ideal for CEO’s or business people who just want to get the gist. They don’t necessarily want to come to the training. Then, there is a two-day training. The first day considers what is Bridges and what does it mean and why would you be interested in it? How could you immediately put it to use? Day two looks at the tools and the techniques. The two-day version is designed primarily for service providers who want to interact with the client differently or they want to try some new program designs. This training can also be done from an institutional or community point of view. We have run courses for the healthcare, educational and judicial communities. How can these ideas help you be more effective with the client group you are working with. (Here is the flyer from a recent Bridges training conducted by Santa Cruz Food Bank) Bridges Out of Poverty 2012 Flyer

‘Getting Ahead’ is an intense program for participants who want to transition out of poverty. They meet for about two hours a week or somewhere between 10 and 16 weeks depending on the group. They learn the same thing that Bridges trainers learned in the two-day course, except they’re investigating it much more thoroughly. They look at how does poverty occur for them and their family. What are the societal influences in poverty? What are their personal individual influences? It’s really very rigorous.

As to community, once a number of trainings have taken place with different groups, often someone will say: “We need this in a big way for what we’re trying to do.” And so then the program can have a wider community focus. That’s what happened in Reno.

I think Bridges is a long-term vision but it has some short-term gratification. BridgesModel_HardDifferentiators You’re not going to end the poverty in five years. But there is something you can do immediately which I think gives people on the ground tools and techniques and ideas to implement. The training answers a lot of questions that people have never been able to find answers to around why it is so hard to help people make behavior change. I think people are invigorated by that. Poverty is defined by a lack of resources, and the USA is a country that is has severe income disparity as defined by the GINI index. Countries with this great disparity have real problems with upward mobility, hence the need for approaches like Bridges.

You mentioned about changing people’s behavior. How much of this change has to be down to the individual, and how much does the community or society have to change? Where is the line?

These are hard questions.

Sorry. This is such a thorny area, there aren’t many easy questions.

Individual change begins to happen because the program that we facilitate for people who want to transition out of poverty gives them a voice. It’s not a program that’s designed for them. It’s a program that they designed to build their own resources. That creates more ownership, more autonomy, more buy-in. Systemic change is obviously harder. It looks at the way we organize bureaucratic and administrative things to see if it actually enhances people’s ability to take responsibility or if we’re actually putting processes in place that continue to keep them stuck. The community pieces of our program identifies what the barriers are in each community – and they’re going to be different. Some communities have great public transportation. Some have none.

I checked my watch. The bus is due in like 8 months.

What barriers do we as a community need to tackle that would prevent people moving to sustainability over a period of 18 to 24 months. Can they get a job? Can they get transportation? Can they get childcare? Can they get on their feet in that period of time? Or is the community set up such that it will take much longer than this.  This process shows what the individual needs to change and what the community needs to change to be able to facilitate this.

What about the blame game? Some want to heap all the blame on the individual and some want to heap it all on society. Can Bridges help with this?

I think so, because this training goes down well with those on both the political right and the left. The right likes it because it makes people accountable. The left likes it because it says it’s not all their fault and we need to make changes to bring mobility back to the United States so that people can move from their economic strata like they once could. It’s a very current, hot conversation when I’m talking to those people because I can talk about rebuilding the middle class. But I should stress that Bridges is not about making people ‘middle class,’ it is about people being able to create stability and build resources. And Bridges isn’t a program brought in from the outside, but a set of ideas.  This is why Bridges and Getting Ahead are being used in Australia, Canada, Slovakia, Czech Republic etc and Detroit, Pensacola, Menominee Nation, Appalachia, etc.

Let’s talk in more detail about how the ‘Getting Ahead’ program works.

The first thing participants do is they draw a mental model of what their life looks like right now. (We have them draw because we don’t want to inhibit anyone who doesn’t read or write well.) Then, they identify those factors in their life that are affecting them dramatically. If they’re a single parent; if they are recovering or not yet recovering from substance abuse; are they dealing with the judicial system? These mental models help them build rapport with the facilitator. We call the person who teaches the course the ‘co-investigator.’ It’s not a hierarchical model.

Jose’s mental model sent him straight to the head of the class

We sit at the table with them and say we’re going to investigate the situation, your life and the situation in the community and see what is possible. They start with their own life. The theory of change that Bridges uses says that when you are in poverty, you are in the concrete virtually all the time. We call that the ‘tyranny of the moment.’ Therefore, this makes it much harder to do the abstract thinking which is where all of your planning, and many of your good decisions come from.  This might include thinking such as If I spend this money on a plasma TV, I can’t go to the dentist. People in poverty, particularly generational poverty may have never learned how to do abstract thinking. We teach them how you can live in the concrete and think in the abstract. This helps them begin to step back and look at their life and analyze what’s going on and what to do about it. That’s very powerful for people. It’s also very painful. I had one person say, after they looked at their mental model, they said, “Wow, poverty really sucks.” But they were so busy just trying to eat, have shelter, some kind of job that they didn’t really have time to step back and look at it and go, “What new possibilities could I generate?”

Well, we found that one, anyway…

Then, they have a lot of environmental influences like family members and neighbors who are all in the same boat who might live in ‘invisible communities,’ so they don’t know any people who could provide a different kind of help and assistance. Over a series of time, they also investigate societal change and influences. What are the societal influences that have kept people in poverty? What are the hidden rules of class? What does the middle class know that I don’t know? If I knew that, would I behave differently?

We do a lot of work in language skills, because they might habitually speak in what is called ‘casual register’ which is all about relationships and survival. It doesn’t work very well for job interviews or with a judge, or your kid’s teacher, where ‘formal register’ will be more effective. People can get marginalized because they might seem to speak disrespectfully or inappropriately. They start to learn about all the things they need to do to be able to cross this bridge. The course we run is not the end. When they graduate from it, they’ve developed a list of resources both personal and community that can help them move forward. They can’t magically change everything at once so they might decide to work on finance or emotional health.

Then, we encourage  a community structure that is there to assist you when you have finished the ‘Getting Ahead’ program. Graduates are invited to meet monthly with allies, people that are wanting to understand how to make this a better community for all. We don’t call them mentors. We don’t call them coaches. We call them allies. This meeting is monthly and it is a partly social, partly educational gathering. Graduates can stay in it for 18 to 24 months past the course. They start to lead those sessions over time. They start to talk about their experiences and share with other people that are trying to transition. So, we build a network for them which can take them to the next level. They don’t have to join if they don’t want to. It’s available to them. So far, we haven’t had anybody not want to do it.

Poverty can be a lifelong challenge. For instance, one of the people who came up to me after your agency workshop who has a job and is living in a $2100 a month condo – which I guess is not hard to do in Santa Barbara. He came from poverty, raised in poverty, and even though he is now out of poverty, he said to me, “I’m haunted everyday of my life that I’m going to end up back there.” What comes out of the wider community support is that people start to get to know each other. They start to understand that people in poverty are just like them. Then, they began to form alliances, when people know somebody who has a job going, and they now have someone to call. That’s social capital. We do it all the time. People in poverty don’t have that. The only kind of capital they have is bonding capital with people who are typically in the same situation as they are, perhaps not making healthy choices or good decisions.

Sometimes they’ve had to separate from some of their family members as part of the process because their family may not be supportive of them in moving ahead, getting out of poverty. There are some emotional challenges that happen along the way, and that’s why we do the emotional resiliency piece within the training. When you start to change, not everybody around you likes it. This doesn’t stop people getting hopeful and positive. They know what they can do. They understand how to build and where to start. They understand how hard it’s going to be, and that we are in tough economic times but they have a place to start.

Why do you think that food banks are well-positioned to get involved in something like Bridges?

Food banks serve so many different agencies and clients in communities that they can act as ‘honest brokers’ in the communities. It is also an effective way for them to work to ‘shorten the line’ of clients. It’s also fun to work with people in a resource-based way versus a need-based way. I think we’re excited that we’re helping people build resources for sustainability. We’re not just giving them something to get through the week with.

What about the food banks that are getting very concerned about drifting from their mission or getting into an area where some of their donors or their board are going to freak out at them by being involved in issues of poverty.

A process of education is often required for the food bank board. In Reno, we happen to have a board chair who is a businessman. He doesn’t want to keep raising money to feed the same people every year. He wants to find a way to help people move out of the need for our services. The logic of it then, from a bottom line point of view can be very appealing. It also involves being a leader in the community in a new way.

It is also be a way of making a difference in a measurable way quite quickly. We can count the number of people we’re educating. We can count the number of people graduating our ‘Getting Ahead’ program. We can count what happens to our graduates as they begin to move on. it’s a win-win. You can lower your food procurement dollars, and you can increase sustainability in the community.

I will tell you on that the fundraising side, the funders for our Bridges work are not people that were funding the food bank before. We’re finding a lot of new funders who are interested in capacity building. They were not interested in needs-based money. There’s been no adulteration of the food bank dollars. In some cases, the same people who donate to the food bank now also give to Bridges. Like Wells Fargo Bank and Charles Schwab. They say, “Yes, we’ll still continue to give for a food distribution program, but we’re also really interested in what happens to these people in the community as they began to grow.”

I believe in a previous conversation you talked about the ‘hidden rules’ about food distribution. Would you to clarify what you mean about that?

With people in poverty,  their view of food is all about scarcity and ‘having enough’. People will hoard food. They will take more than they need. This is because of scarcity being the primary focus. It doesn’t have to be good food or be cooked well. It doesn’t have to be nourishing or healthy. But there has to be enough of it. In middle class norms, people may care more about how things taste and look. With food distribution programs, those running them often care most about fairness. So you can see how these two things are going to rub up against each other, because both groups are not necessarily able to compensate for the other’s perspective.

If we have a situation where someone takes more than their allocation, then there is a breakdown in the relationship. There is agitation from the volunteer around fairness and agitation from the client around scarcity. I did a volunteers training at the Reno Food Bank. They were having these type of problems and the volunteers were pretty cranky! After they had the training, they tried some new things that they came up with on their own. There was a much better result meaning people didn’t hoard.

Give me an example of some of the things that they changed.

They changed the order in which they gave out food. People would always get there early, and they would be the same people every week. If you came later and were at the back of the line, sometimes you didn’t get anything. Now sometimes they start at the back of the line or in the middle. The second thing we did was ask the clients how they could improve the situation. The Bridges construct says that you give people in poverty a chance to be a problem-solver. You don’t solve the problem for them. The clients developed a way of trading food at the site. Somebody didn’t want bread. Somebody else wanted two cans of tuna fish, whatever. They figured it out themselves. They were happy with the result. The food bank distribution people were shocked. That’s what happened. There was a little lessening of control, but it worked to everyone’s benefit.

Deb, thanks for sharing some of your work.

THE EPILOGUE…

To move forward the Bridges work, Santa Barbara County Foodbank will be holding a two-day training with member agencies in the first half of this year. We will also look at pairing it with a cultural awareness training component. The Bridges concept of living in the ‘tyranny of the moment’ is fascinating (because we’ve all at least vacationed there…) and so are some of the observations about poverty class vs. middle class thinking in certain areas.

There are so many great things about Bridges. But what of the current challenges I see with Bridges? I would put them in two areas. The first is the ‘class’ labeling that is used extensively, with the intention of moving people from one class outlook to another. I could see that it might be hard to avoid people feeling inferior. There are the potential dangers of what is called ‘classism’, which is prejudice or discrimination based on social class.

Why were people giving him so much trouble about the new Food Bank org chart???

I was brought up in England which had its own obsession with class, which was very clear and on the surface. People opened their mouths and you knew what the deal was. In America, it is more subtle. Money can reveal, but money can also obscure.

I do find the Bridges focus on making everyone middle class a little challenging sometimes as if the middle class has all the answers. I mean if the middle class is so smart why does it seem to be steadily being annihilated through financial genocide…just a thought, folks!

I think Bridges advocates might respond that it is more a process of getting people to look at how the world is working now, to look under the hood at the engine and get a new understanding that will benefit them as they make changes that they feel the need to.

There are some lousy murals of Cesar Chavez, but this is the worst!

The other challenge is culture. Currently, from the small amount I have seen, the program is not very well culturally attenuated. So, within the Latino community for instance, there are many very powerful tools and relationships that help people get by in life through mutual and extended family and community support. A lot of ‘middle class white’ families might give up some of their advantages for grandma living next door to watch the kids. (I know I would!)

There is also more solidity around community development and small scale inter-community investment, both with cash and sweat equity. I have no doubt that as the Bridges program develops further within Latino communities that it will be adapted to better suit a different cultural reality, and that some elements can be accepted and others rejected.

In an upcoming post, we will look at non-profit community development and empowerment programs that use different models – such as the Just Communities program here in Santa Barbara County.

This is an exciting field, because we are getting away from a fixation on scarcity which seems to breed more scarcity, and we are empowering people to generate more. I know I sound like some kind of infomercial dude telling you to ‘generate abundance.’ Or maybe I am. Give me a better tan and a toupee and I would be glad to shill for ‘generating sufficiency’ and ‘generating sustainability.’

I encourage you to investigate the Bridges approach. It is an imperfect tool, but one that is being developed and improved in communities across the country. There is no ‘silver bullet’ (just like with gun control, as Joe Biden said – he does know how to say just the wrong thing at the wrong time, doesn’t he!) At the very least Bridges is an interesting filter for individuals,organizations and agencies to look at the world through and ask: “Does this do anything to help me see more clearly? Or “Can I combine this with some other initiative to provide a culturally and community appropriate set of tools and pathways out of poverty and into a healthy, sustainable community?”

If you were an old timer like me who came of age in the 80’s, but were painfully hip then, you will remember how the musical group ‘Gang of Four’ put it.

“Gang of Four: To Hell With Poverty.” 1981

Are Non-Profits afraid of Competition? How can we tackle the root causes of hunger in America? Tough Questions from a Community Grantmaker – A dialogue with Mari Ellen R. Loijens, CFRE.

Mari Ellen Loijens

Is there a life after food banking? Apparently so. Mari Ellen Loijens worked in development for Second Harvest Foodbank in Santa Clara and San Mateo County from 2000 to 2004, and is now the Chief Philanthropic Development and Information Officer for the Silicon Valley Foundation.

Of course it is every fundraising professional’s secret fantasy to then go on to work at a foundation and give it away rather than have beg for it. (Without appreciating the challenges that go with such a responsibility). So what’s the difference between your time in the food bank looking out, and outside the food bank looking in?

When I was at the food bank, the needs were constantly growing. There was no single year where we had to feed less people than the year before, and I had a strong sense of urgency about the growing need. Now that I’m outside, it seems like it’s endless and I’m more anxious for real solutions to the issue.  It’s sort of like being an emergency room doctor, and your concern is how to bandage all the wounds for those who need immediate assistance. Then when you walk outside the emergency room, you think, “How can we avoid the people going there in the first place?”

That’s a question a lot of food bankers are asking themselves. Like me, they’ve seen the capacity of food banks grow with their success at fund raising and their ability to bring more food in to their service area. This has created more ongoing demand, so it’s kind of a spiral.  How do you think that food banks could get out of this demand spiral and move towards a long-term solution?

We really need to look at some policy changes.  We are a very wealthy nation and the notion that we have so many people who turn to others for such a basic need is troubling.  Clearly there is something wrong with a system in which many children go to school hungry.

Food banks and other nonprofits are always very reluctant about stepping into these waters, because they worry about offending donors whose political slant may lead them to believe that we are just ‘enabling’ people.  How can we navigate these waters?

Want to dip your toe in…

I think that the problem is that we focus too narrowly on just food.  If you only think, “I need to feed people,” and you think, “That’s my only issue,” then we’re back to the doctor in the emergency room who would be saying: “I’m trying to get people to stop bleeding, and it’s so expensive to keep using up all these wound dressings. So the solution is that we need more money for more wound dressings.”  It’s a symptom he’s dealing with, not the cause. In the same way, hunger is the not cause, it is the symptom of a greater problem in our system. This comes down to something like minimum wage.  Do we have a living wage?  Are people able to earn enough where they live in order to take care of something as basic as food and shelter? We have got to move beyond pushing for increased SNAP (food stamp) benefits and into the bigger issues like: How do we make sure people, who are able, can earn enough money to feed themselves and their families?

So, are you saying that hunger is a symptom of the condition of poverty, or of something else?

I think poverty itself is also a symptom. I’m not a socialist or a communist. I don’t believe that everyone should make the same money, but I do believe that Americans, if asked, would say it’s wrong to have a system which forces people to constantly be in abject  poverty and unable to get out of it, even if they are working hard, perhaps at multiple jobs.  At some point, we are going to have to make decisions about how we pay for our beliefs and values. In the same way we are asked to make tough decisions now about taxes and how we want to pay for the things that we believe our country needs, such as roads or to provide the fire and police services that we want. In the same way, we have to ask ourselves the question: if we think it’s wrong for a child in a developing country to make a dollar a day sewing t-shirts, how are we going to provide an adequate minimum wage so that people in America who work a whole day can feed themselves and provide at the most basic level for their families?

And so how do you see the situation in America now?

I think we have an unspoken social contract in this country which prevents people from moving up out of poverty, and much of that is as a result of not have a living wage in most places.  We also do not have systems in place that update the minimum wage as the cost of living modifies in an area.  The systems that we do have reward the wealthy and do not help the poor.  This means we have to really look at our whole social contract as a country and our value system and say, “Have we set in place laws that support the values that we claim are American?”

Bumper sticker seen outside Santa Barbara’s swankest hotel.

This is the point in the conversation where people begin to squabble about the meaning of the ‘American Dream.’ I see an unspoken fear in many donors I talk to. I would preface my comments by pointing out that these donors are caring and generous people who sincerely want to ‘pay it back’ and provide some level of support for those in need within their communities. However, they may have a voice deep within them, that reminds them how hard they had to struggle and sacrifice to get where they are, so why should they make it easy for someone else? They often don’t see the incredible daily sacrifices and struggles of those in poverty who can find no success story on the back of their struggle.

Whatever the sentiment, Uncle Sam gets pressed into service to wag that finger.

This is why food banks have been so successful, because there is a lot of interest in ameliorating the symptoms but a deep fear of taking the plunge to actually deal with the causes. Either donors are concerned that they will be heavily taxed and lose what they worked for, or they fear that the fabric of American society will change and everyone will expect things to be provided for them without working for them. Consequently they see America losing its ‘can do’ spirit of entrepreneurship and resourcefulness. The type of change that is required to actually deal with a problem is too scary. The same thing is true for issues of immigration, health care and the rest of the sad litany. This means we have to stand around with our hands tied or else harken back to some previous time in our country’s history where these problems were better hidden.

I think a new consensus for action needs to arise that returns the much-loved but threadbare teddy bears of left and right political philosophy to the nursery shelf, and for us to admit that we have grown out of them. They’ll always have a fond place in our heart they were both great in key moments at getting us to the point we are now at as a nation, but now they are getting in the way as our nation enters maturity. These security blankets are getting under foot and gridlocking our ability to do what we do best as Americans – which is to fix something in a no-nonsense straight-forward way.

“I’ve been manhandled so much, I don’t remember whether I’m Republican or Democrat.”

I know from over a decade of working to assist either the homeless or the struggling, that the amount of people sitting on their gluteus maximus and freeloading their way from society (amongst poor people, anyway) is absolutely tiny, just as the amount of people defrauding SNAP benefits is a minuscule amount in relation to the total. Are we going to allow an obsession with preventing the enabling of a few who don’t want to help themselves hold us back from making huge achievements as a country for the vast majority of Americans who work so incredibly hard?

Sounds great, we should import that stuff to America! (Cheaply, of course)

Can you imagine what greatness we could achieve as a nation if we weren’t all so consumed with fear about being able to get affordable medical help, or that we will be living in abject poverty as senior citizens? Modern free market economies are driven by so much advertising and marketing, that are showing people all the things they need to have in their lives to be happy. These forces provide a huge encouragement for people to produce more and earn more. If we can provide a counter-balancing support safety net for all Americans, it won’t extinguish this desire for more – which is equally part of the American temperament. The two can complement each other perfectly well. It’s not exactly a shining city on a hill, but it’s a workable system where we can all move forward at our own pace and to our own ability.

Forgive me for that. As a food banker, if you see a pile of pallets, then your natural inclination is to climb on top of them and start spouting off…

That’s quite all right, Erik. Keep breathing. Seriously, though, I think food banks need to get get braver about legislation. You need to move past the daily problem of feeding people, and start to collaborate with others that can focus on solutions and really start to ask the difficult questions of, “What’s the issue?”  Yet for reasons that you mentioned, like when you referred to SNAP fraud, I think food banks are very afraid sometimes of moving in that area, because if you did a survey of people you feed and even one person said, “Well because I don’t feel like working.”  That’s a terrible, terrible fear of food banks. Suddenly, no one might want to fund their food bank, because there is one person whose is working the system. So essentially, we are ready to punish and live in fear of that one person.  Well, there is always going to be someone working the system.  There are people who go to emergency rooms, because they don’t feel like paying for a doctor. We absolutely can’t set up systems to deal with that one person. We look at the big issues in our country like educations reform and how healthcare reform and you hear about those things all the time. I would love to hear our country talk about poverty reform.  How we are going to help make a sweep of changes that would impact the base line of our country and help bring people who are essentially stuck because it’s impossible to move on or move out.

So, who do you think are the right people to lead this movement or does it need to come from a ground swell at a local level?  

I think both. That is how the civil rights movement happened.  You start with that real grass roots movement from people who are experiencing the issues and people who support those people.  Then at some point you get the attention of people in a power position with legislation to be able to move those issues forward.

You mentioned that food banks are timid on the public policy front.  What else do you think food banks could do to make this happen? 

Well, I really like the ideas espoused in your blog about how your food bank is working on regarding entering the preventative healthcare arena. I do think that when you start to see yourself as part of a wider system rather than just an individual issue, then you are able to address bigger issues that have bigger impact. Poverty is not the root cause.  People became poor for a reason. The fact that they are poor is not the issue.  The fact that they became poor and can’t get out of being poor is the issue.

This requires food banks to build broad coalitions with other social service agencies in their service areas, some who may be member agencies and some who may not.

That is a challenge, because there is often reluctance for everyone to sit down and have a substantive dialogue about how do we move things forward?  The subtext from non profit leaders can often be: “I don’t really want to be in a room with them.  I don’t want to compete with them.”

Hey, you’ve been in some of the same rooms as me!

That’s the truth about a lot of nonprofits is they’re just completely uncomfortable with the idea of competition, and if I had the answer to this issue, I’d probably be able to save the world.

Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition.

Well, we’re non profits. Competition is way too business-like and vulgar for us, right?

Yes, you’re very sensitive souls. But, it has to start with non profits admitting it is an issue. Then I think, speaking as a funder, that there is a clear role for funders in facilitating this issue. I think it’s all power dynamics. The one with the power has the obligation. Foundations really have the obligation to reach out to the nonprofits and say, “I really want to know and I really want to understand what’s going on.  Why is this collaboration and conversation not working for you? Where they don’t have to sit in front of their competitor and say what their fears are. We can ask who would you want to collaborate with and how, on what terms?”  I think having an honest dialogue is what moves things forward. This sort of thing needs to occur one on one or in small groups. Large gatherings can neutralize everyone’s desire to make anything happen.

I think what you say about the competition angle is very interesting, because it’s kind of taboo to talk about nonprofits competing. To be a good non profit citizen, you can only talk in the language of shared impact and collaboration. It might be very liberating for people to also have a conversation about competition and to say it is absolutely all right. I presume there is fear that we would be acknowledging duplication of service if we acknowledged competition. Certainly something for people to consider starting a discussion about in their service area.

How do you think food banks and other human services and nonprofit should be thinking about evolving their funding streams over the next few years?

I think if you are looking for systems change, at some point that goes against the grain for sustainability, right?  You want to be working towards your services not being needed anymore. The ideal is that you want to be able to talk about what system changes are you creating, so that you should have to provide fewer and fewer services every year?  That should be the big boast.  “Last year we fed 200,000 people, but this year, thanks to our hard work, we only have to feed 150,000.”

But every nonprofit organization in the world is afraid to do that, because then they assume that the funders will come back and say, “Oh, you need less money this year.”  And so the organization declines.

I think that there is a new generation of funders that have a very different way of thinking, and that what people really want to see are problems solved.  People are tired of the same problems staying around for generations and generations.  You’re right, though. Every nonprofit I know like to boast about how they did even more; served even more. It is a treadmill. But this new generation of funders comes from a very different way of thinking that would say: “No, no, no. The metric I care about is not how many people you serve, but that you made systemic changes so you will have to feed fewer people moving forward.“ It is a way for your organization to evolve to be truer to its mission.

Mari Ellen, thanks so much for your ideas and for your work supporting non profits.

Divided We Stand? Facing the challenges of Collective Impact, Corporate Philanthropy, Earned Income and more – A dialogue with Jan Masaoka, ED of CALNonprofits.

Jan Masaoka

Jan Masaoka is a leading writer and thinker on nonprofit organizations with particular emphasis on boards of directors, business planning, and the role of nonprofits in society. She has recently assumed the mantle of Executive Director of the California Association of Nonprofits. (CalNonprofits).

She is Editor-in-Chief of Blue Avocado, the essential online nonprofit magazine with an amazing 63,000 subscribers. For 14 years she was executive director of CompassPoint Non-profit Services (www.compasspoint.org), a consulting and training firm for nonprofits based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

She is an eight time designee as one of the “Fifty Most Influential People” in the nonprofit sector nationwide. Her recent book with Jeanne Bell and Steve Zimmerman, Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability, (Jossey-Bass, 2010) has quickly become a vital tool for nonprofits to truly assess the financial impact of their range of activities. (I will explore the teachings of the book in another post.) My conversation with her was an opportunity to revel in her rich experience and take-no-prisoners plain talking. This makes everything she says not so much a condemnation of how things are, but an invitation to question, question, question. And we can’t have enough of that.

Jan, you are new in your position at CalNonprofits, yet already you are involving the organization in a major initiative to get nonprofit staff, volunteers and clients signed up to vote (for the recent California elections). I have noticed that some nonprofits shy away from such activities in their direct service programs because they are fearful that some donors might say they are ‘becoming political.’ How can you deal with that?

First of all, this is non-partisan voter registration to get out the vote. We’re not telling people how to vote. We are saying that whatever the ideals and values that brought you into contact with the non-profit sector, vote with those values.

Nonprofits are not outside of communities, they are the ways that a community organizes to take care of itself. But I also think that we don’t just serve people, we represent them. Anybody that’s serving children with disabilities, for instance, is also representing them. There is a lot of heavily lawyer-scrutinized information in the Legal FAQ’s section of CalNonprofit’s website which indicates what nonprofits can and can’t do in this area.

LOOKING UP AND DOWNSTREAM

In my discussion with Jan Poppendieck, she touched on the need for food banks and similar organizations to put more emphasis on looking up and downstream from what their own particular level of involvement was with clients.

This is vital. I can think of an example of a shelter program for runaway kids that used to be funded by the government. They received a fee for service based on a performance outcome basis. The designated outcome was reuniting kids with their families, and they would receive a certain amount of money for every kid they reunified with his or her family. But if you look downstream and think about it for 10 seconds you realize that with some kids, reunification is a good outcome but for many others, it is no. There were a lot of kids being returned to abusive homes or to a home where drugs were being used all the time. The nonprofit realized they needed another goal, of more long-term shelter for those kids who didn’t have good homes to go back to. They received no government money for this, so they had to raise it. And then looking upstream, they realized they had to advocate to get the policy changed that specified unification as the only goal. If they had only thought of themselves as a little factory of unduplicated units of service they might have remained focused on the unification numbers. But because they are representing this part of our community, they had to find the best outcome for them even if it didn’t mean they got any money for it. Standing on the sidelines is easy, but is no longer an option if we want to achieve big things.

 GOVERNMENT, BUSINESS AND NONPROFITS

We hear a lot about the supposed realignment of the roles between government, business and nonprofit organizations. What is your take on this?

I think it’s about smoke and not fire. I just read in today’s paper that some country music star is going on a tour, and in each of 25 cities, he’s going to buy a house mortgage free for a veteran there. That’s wonderful, and great publicity for him. Unfortunately this is not really an example of private dollars helping veterans in a significant way, it is more about winning a lottery, and that is no way to help those around us. We have over a million veterans in the United States and he’s buying houses for 21 of them. So I think that the idea that private money is going to supplant the need for government money will never be true.

I‘m jes’ tryin’ to help best I can. Don’t be dragging me into your whiney little blog.

 So, kind of like with Tom’s shoes concept, which sounds great (and full disclosure, my ten month old, Mia Regina has a ‘metallic tweed’ pair she received at her baby shower) but actually does little to build a sustainable way for people in those countries to create the businesses to help provide shoes for themselves. 

Tom’s Metallic Tweed Shoes for Baby

Yes. I member a California foundation that poured millions and millions into working with the schools and weren’t getting much in the way of results and someone explained that they had really only put in about as much as the lightbulb changing budget for the Los Angeles Unified School District. These problems are too big for most foundations to move the needle on, or for government to excuse themselves from.

What about the ways in which businesses and nonprofits can work together more? Don’t you think that businesses are starting to approach some things like a nonprofit and vice-versa?

Businesses always absorb what is the culture of the day, in order to sell their products. So for example there was a time when paisley prints were radical and wild. So people who wore paisley or had long hair practically saw this as being anti-corporate. Then business took that over and people with long hair were in commercials for cars. I think that right now we have a similar cultural view, which is about doing good in the world and being community-oriented. Don’t get me wrong, it is important and valuable, but I think like every other cultural movement business uses this and when the cultural movement passes, business will pass too.

Maybe if he hadn’t been wearing a paisley hoodie…

But, corporations are run by and made up of people (just ask Mitt Romney) so those people can always express their generosity and concern about the world, despite the business imperative. We’ve come a long way from Johnson and Johnson’s shareholders suing the company when it attempted to divert some dollars to philanthropic activities. Helping the community is always smart business, so I don’t see that changing.

Sure, but when doing good crashes up against consumerism is where things often grind to a halt. So, for example, all the people who are passionate about sustainable agriculture might not want to realize that the most significant thing they could do about reducing the energy cost in agriculture would be to stop eating lettuce. Lettuce uses more energy cost related to the nutrition it provides than any single produce item on the planet. And yet you don’t see environmentalist calling for the end to eating lettuce. So I think that it can become a symbol of how we want to do things and see ourselves, but we don’t really want to make any changes to our consumer lifestyle.

COLLECTIVE IMPACT

COLLECTIVE IMPACT

On a local level, how do you think that nonprofits can collaborate and get some kind of collective impact?

I think the way that food banks work with their member agencies is an excellent example of bona fide collective impact that is generating extra value. For the most part, the smoke around collective impact and collaboration is not about something that genuinely works but creating the appearance of something that’s going to work. Almost all of these efforts are funder-driven and the funders put money into them and when the funders take the money out, it collapses. And that suggests that it’s it’s not a business model that works.

 So what sort of examples can you give where that’s happened?

Foundation after foundation has created local collaborations and they’re around many different areas. Sometimes they are focused around a particular neighborhood and they’ll create a collaboration of different nonprofits and businesses to work on that neighborhood. Sometimes they might be a collaborative of something like domestic violence shelters working across 6 counties or the like. Many of these collaborations have grown organically over time, so they actually work. But others failed, like the Hewlett Foundation’s neighborhood improvement initiative and Annenberg’s initiative in public schools, the San Francisco Foundation’s Lifeline collaborative. They were put together in a way that didn’t make business sense for any of them and so when the outside money disappeared, the collaborations evaporated. So the collaborative initiatives that last are the ones that genuinely make sense for people and almost all of them are started by the nonprofits themselves, not by funders and their consultants.

I think funders have got to build on existing community strengths. And if there is not an organic community strength in that particular community then maybe you can’t fund them successfully.  Maybe you have to look for a different community or maybe you have to take a longer view and say maybe there are 6 or 7 weak organizations in that community but let’s take a longer view of building their strengths. Instead I think what tends to happen is that a foundation that wants to work in a particular community or field and they see 5 or 6 weak organizations, then they figure if they just had a consultant to bring them together for collective impact, then it will all work out. It won’t.

One of the things that keeps nonprofits honest is that we get feedback from the market and we have two markets – a client or patron market and then we also have a funding market, so we have to work in both of them. Whenever you’re in a situation when you don’t have to work with those markets, then things can go wrong and you’ll never know it. That’s kind of like back in the old Soviet Union when the state decided  what a factory should produce. There was no reason for anybody to get any better. Any institution that is not kept in check by some kind of market goes bad and doesn’t know it.

And so how can a foundation avoid getting into that situation then?

They can support community-based efforts as opposed to starting their own initiatives. I visited a foundation recently and they had on the wall a large poster that they had created with a circle. And in the middle of that circle was their logo, very large. And then around the outside of the circle were other foundations and nonprofits. They said to me that this represents our view of how we collaborate with other people and I felt like – No! – this represents your view of how you’re in the center of the universe.

EARNED INCOME

I did a recent post about earned income for nonprofits. What is your take on this area?

A former consulting client of mine, for example, was running an organization they did a lot of psychological counseling for people and families across the spectrum. They received funding to support this work and then when that funding declined, they focused more on earned income. So, they were able to successfully grow their earned income side, and their budget didn’t look any smaller. But if you look closer, they’re now primarily serving people that can afford to pay rather than across the economic spectrum. And I think that this story writ large has been the hidden story of the move toward earned income.

You don’t feel that this can be balanced by having scholarships or sliding scales?

I think it can be mitigated and it’s a partial answer for some organizations but we need to be alert that so far at least many of the earned income gains have come at the cost of helping middle class people rather than economically disadvantaged people.

Many food banks resell purchased food or require a shared maintenance fee of a few cents a pound for some food items that they provide to member agencies. Some food banks don’t do that but we have found that in situations where there is no fee, it leads to inefficiencies with organizations taking more than they need.

So you introduced in a market element, right?

Yes, we’re not charging individuals, we’re asking organizations to take a financial stake in what we’re doing.

You should realize that I’m not trying to sound like I’m anti-earned income. I’m just saying earned income is not a replacement either for charitable dollars or government money.

I read your recent Blue Avocado post “In the Titanic Recession, Which Nonprofits Get the Lifeboats?” and this touches on the ideas you have just expressed about a shift from services to the very poor.

Yes, nonprofits that provide “the most basic anti-poverty for the poor and homeless failed at around twice the rate of more mainstream services.” Also, only about 16% of foundation funding is targeted to low income communities.

Which you lay at the doorstep of the focus on “innovation, social enterprise, outcome metrics and the coolness factor.” Jan, this is hitting me where I live!

It should! But I think food banks are hardly the type of organizations that are in this situation. They are doing some of the most important and pressing human work. And these and other organizations are where the money and focus should go.

Thanks Jan. There is a lot to think about there. Please continue to challenge us.

Earned Income for Nonprofits: Four Dirty Little Words?

What happens to fundraising if we follow the preventative healthcare model that has been expounded on this blog? What if, in a few short years, our programs are demonstrating wonderful health impacts? How is that going to play with our existing donor base?

Would it mean that our direct mail might have to stop looking like this:

Our operators are standing by for your calls.

And start looking like this…

Now we all know that the Ghost of Food Banking Past  (yes, I’m exaggerating to make a point) helps keep those donations flowing in, so that we can get food out to people who can truly benefit from it. Yet once we begin to focus on that same food leading to health outcomes, are we going to be able to pull on the hunger heart strings in the same way?

I don’t think so.

We asked our direct mail company why some recent mailers had brought soft returns, and their response was that our mailers were too positive. The kids looked too happy.

Tricks of the Photographic Model Industry # 234: Hop em up on Mountain Dew and then switch out the Hot Cheetos for fresh fruits and vegetables right before the cameras start clicking.

We all know it.

In the hunger business, negative sells.

Positive is understood by a different type of donor or  foundation, looking beyond immediate the immediate need, towards a long-term solution.

Nevertheless, I guarantee that whatever organization you represent, in the next 3 years you are going to have to come face to face with the need for an increase in …EARNED INCOME.

Much as you want to wear the garlic around your neck and make crosses out of two rolled-up annual reports, you are still going to have find more money from non-charitable sources – there is simply no way around it in the world we find ourselves in.

I attended a workshop with noted nonprofit consultant Andy Robinson last week, that focused on this very area. Andy is the author of Selling Social Change (Without Selling Out) – and the title suggests that he understands a little of the ambivalence in nonprofit organizations around this subject. I’d like to share some of the things that came up in the session.

Nonprofits need to decide what is the best mix of resources that is going to make them sustainable. We all agree that the old borders between non-profit, business and government are eroding. Businesses acting like nonprofits, nonprofits acting like businesses and the government…well that situation has always been fluid.

Let’s consider the pros and cons of generating earned income, starting with the positive:

• Diversified funding base – a key to sustainability

• An expanded prospect pool for individual gifts – doing business can be a great way of meeting people who can be inspired by your mission and give.

• It reduces reliance on grant income and also provides unrestricted funds.

• It provides new publicity and advocacy opportunities.

• It builds new skills and leadership with the organization.

That sounds great, but what about the downside:

• Most obvious is risk – sometimes you are going lose money. Research by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nearly six in ten businesses shut down within the first four years of operation. You could bring your nonprofit down with your business if your comb-over is not as impressive as Donald Trump’s.

• The up front costs – it takes money to earn money, so the lower the start-up costs the better.

• Mission creep. If your commercial empire takes off, you may find the tail wagging the dog.

• You already have enough work to do, so this will need dedicated staff time. Otherwise it’s a hobby and hobbies don’t make money.

• One other concern is the potential tax liability. if you are a charitable organization and are charging for services that are directly connected to mission, you don’t have to pay tax on that income. However, if you set up an unrelated business, you may have to pay UBIT (Unrelated Business Income Tax). Finding that connection can be important. The YMCA used to regularly get sued in different states by other for-profit health clubs saying their charitably subsidized clubs presented unfair competition. However, the Y won every one of those cases because they could clearly point to their actions as a way of delivering on their mission statement. Girl Scout cookies get away with the same thing, because they teach leadership – girls track product, log payments, use merciless sales techniques…

Now get out there and sell, and don’t think about the nutrition issues! Whaddya mean ‘mint thins’ is an oxymoron?

• One key area of concern that I voiced to Andy at the workshop, was the need to educate contributors so they realize that you as a charitable organization still need donations.

It is clear that market research and feasibility studies, no matter how simple, are a vital first stage. As a nonprofit you need to consider what services could you sell? What publications? What cause-related marketing? What goods (wholesale preferably).

There was naturally some pushback from workshop attendees about the notion of charging for services, many of which in one form or another would have been offered free by the organization. Andy referenced a study that looked at vocational training courses that were either free or charged a modest fee. Far better outcomes were identified amongst those who paid something for the service. They valued it more. Whether this is a sad reflection of our society or not, it is a reflection. People value what they pay for and do not value so much what they get free.

This is a stimulating challenge for us in non-profits. Sliding scales, scholarships, are both possible. Andy suggest we do some testing with any charge for services and track the results. From my perspective the difference between a business and a nonprofit charging for services is that the non-profit is not afraid to potentially put itself out of business, by providing a product which can help the recipient move beyond the need for those services, or into a place of new possibility where they can generate more for themselves and their families. That ‘more’ might be money or community or advocacy for improvement in their neighborhood. In contrast, a for-profit wants to keep you endlessly coming back to buy ‘newer, better’ versions of the same thing.

Don’t try this at home, folks.

As a food bank, we are looking very carefully at earned income. We have always been in the earned income business, in that we charge a very modest shared maintenance fee on some food items that we provide (which prevents agencies from just taking more food than they can effectively use, and which goes some small way to defray the costs of running the warehouses). This is a clear case of putting a value on something that would be valued less if it was free. We also do our own attempt at social engineering by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on purchasing fresh produce and making that available with no shared maintenance fee, because we want to drive agencies to provide more fresh produce to their clients.

We are already expanding our resale food selections (where we buy food and resell to agencies), charging a modest 10% mark up, with the stipulation that we will only charge this if we are able to provide the food cheaper than they could source it via a local wholesaler or superstore. We want to expand this to make more food and non-food (cleaning products, paper goods etc) available to the full range of local non-profit organizations. (Member and non-member alike).

This approach is already happening successfully with Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida’s Power Purchase program. The CEO, Dave Krepcho, affirmed this morning that their purchase program has the dual role of providing lower prices to agencies and netting surplus revenue. “If they can get it cheaper somewhere else, we suggest they do so…This year the net revenue number will be approximately $250,000 on close to $3 million in sales. We are designing a Community Kitchen program now so that it will be economically self-sufficient in three years. I affirm your looking into entrepreneurial programs, it’s the direction we must go.” 

I also recently looked at a study done by another urban food bank that examined at the feasibility of undertaking such a resale program and decided it would not be successful for them. There were a concentration of Catholic agencies in their area who were mandated to purchase from a central purchasing agent (no jokes about the Pope getting his cut, please) and that there was a possibility of a similar arrangement being in place with local YMCAs. This negative report, which highlights all of the challenges (many of which would not necessarily apply to us in Santa Barbara) is extremely useful to us. If we move into a business area with a clear understanding of the challenges we would face, as opposed to clutching starry-eyed dreams of flowing streams of golden sustained income, then we will be far more likely to be successful.

The number one challenge identified was the issue of pricing. Most ventures fail by not knowing how to price services effecively. We don’t know how long it will take us to do something, and often the cost of a unit of service remains opaque to us. Andy believed that nonprofits almost  always underprice the value of the services they provide.

When looking at your business proposition, you need to consider whether it represents a ‘market push’ whereby you need to convince the market of the need for your service (like the electric toothbrush vs. the old school manual) or ‘market pull’ whereby there is enough existing demand, that if you provide enough services, you can meet currently existing needs.

The other painful reality is that being a nonprofit is not going to get you any free pass on the customer service side. If you don’t get things right the first time, they won’t be back again, no matter how compelling your mission is.

It is helpful to consider case studies, so we can consider a range of approaches nonprofits are taking to make earned income work. At one end, you can take an organization like Minnnesota Public radio which after 25 years was spun off as a for-profit subsidiary for $175 million dollars, most of which went to their endowment. Another interesting organization is the Okanogan Highlands bottling company, which you can find at www.purewater.org.

It is a fascinating case study, because they had a specific ‘ill’ that they were fighting against, which was a gold mine. It would bring pollution and they provided studies which showed that the value of the water they could bring out of the same site in the form of bottled mineral water would actually be more valuable than if it operated as a gold mine. They did this by commissioning studies that demonstrated how much water was used to extract the gold. You should check out the video they have at their website, because they show how the empty bottles can be repurposed as advocacy tools to send to our representatives at the congressional and senatorial level, to convince them of the efficacy of their course. Perhaps there is a way your agency could incorporate the same approach to get the message across.

Nativeseeds.org is a great website to look for the kind of  nonprofit that recoups 30 to 40 percent of their income through sales of food, crafts and products.

As organizations, we often have fabulous ideas at the programmatic level. How can this be monetized? Check out www.swop.net to look at how they developed their ‘products’ to move from a text book on Chicano studies (which had resulted from a ‘market opportunity’ they identified, because this area was being ignored in traditional history programing). So they created a text book, which then became a DVD, a coloring book, a mural magnet series, a t-shirt etc. This is a pretty politically-minded right-on organization and they’re selling refrigerator magnets? Maybe it’s time we questioned the stereotypes! If the content is solid, the expression of that content can play out across a number of media.

Another example organization is www.globalexchange.org. They are a human rights organization that focuses on tourism. Their proposition – both a value proposition and an advocacy proposition is “What would happen if we brought the people who were interested in an international social cause to the place in the world where that cause is actually playing out. A week in the jungle with the Sandinistas? Not quite. Nevertheless it has resulted in an organization that has 3 million dollars a year in tourist income. Is there a way we can  involve people in the excitement of our day-to-day mission? And then charge them for the pleasure?

A food bank was also considered in our discussion, the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. www.foodbankwma.org. They used a CSA model for a farm they purchased. The plan involves CSA shareholders paying the full cost of $200k per year but only taking half of the food that is generated. The rest goes to the food bank.

One final example was www.pedalpower.org, which was a community bike organization that had a fascinating  business proposition. Rather than upset the existing marketplace, which you could argue something like the CSA proposal might do, they presented themselves to existing business organizations an entity that would build the market. They would focus on the low-end of the market and offer people sliding scales of rates. They could either fix their own bikes with supervision or with Pedalpower stepping in with physical help. They sold this to the other businesses in the market with the explanation that they were drawing people in at the bottom end of the market. Once people entered the market and wanted to find more sophisticated bikes, they would seek out the other businesses in the market. It worked and the other businesses began to offer them free spare parts and other help.

The final example we considered was www.farestart.org in Seattle. Like Catalyst Kitchens and other organizations, they focus on teaching culinary skills and how to hold a job. They also help with job placement. This was an organization that acutually switched from being a for-profit to a nonprofit organization.

We have all been victims of workshops with consultants who want to draw you in with the promise of education, which is really a promotion for their services or their books. I have no reservation in letting you know that Andy’s book is simply essential for any nonprofit hoping to focus energy on new sources of earned income. It will make you think long and hard about how earned income could work for your organization.

Good luck, and let’s start shaking up the old nonprofit/business divide even further. We have much to learn from each other.

Bike Blenders: The Perfect Vehicle for Food Bank Outreach

It’s not refrigerated, it can’t carry ten pallets of food. In fact, it won’t even get you anywhere. No matter how hard you peddle. It is the ‘Fender Blender’, a blender that mounts on the back of an ordinary bicycle, which sits on a simple stand and powers a blender on the back.

We use it at a range of public events promoting our Foodbank, such as today’s Earth Day Celebration in Santa Barbara, as well as at some of our children’s programs, such as Picnic in the Park or Healthy School Pantry.

Used to make healthy smoothies, the bike blender is the perfect demonstration of our message of good food plus exercise equals health.

You could pick up and throw away a flyer about our hunger into health message, or you could experience it, and the bike blender is the perfect way. We use frozen fruit and juice to make a healthier smoothie, and just like with our other programs, kids love to consume what they have been responsible for making.

Too often, a food bank’s display at a public event featured a food drive barrel and someone with a clip board, collecting volunteer sign ups. The bike blender acts as a huge draw at a wide range of events. We offer people the option of making a donation for their smoothie, but we don’t force them.

Climb on board!