Cultural Competence in Site Visits and Life

May 2, 2013
guglielmoher

Rudy Guglielmo, Jr., of Youthprise and Lue Her of Otto Bremer Foundation

As part its ongoing Effective Grantmaking Series, MCF hosted Effective, Culturally Competent Site Visits.

Site visits are an excellent opportunity for foundations to connect with potential grantees and get a clearer picture of what applicants do and whom they serve. They are also a way to develop relationships, beyond the typical grantmaker/grantee dynamic.

Lissa Jones, MCF’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, shared “Three Giant Steps to Cultural Competence.”

  1. Build your own awareness. Bias is often transferred unconsciously, so check in with yourself about your cultural biases. What, for example, did your grandfather say about the value of immigrants?  As we become aware of our biases, we can work to make more culturally-informed grantmaking decisions.
  2. Develop a way of knowing. Go to cultural events, read a community paper, check out opportunities in your neighborhood to learn about other cultures. It’s all around if you look for it!
  3. Practice, practice, practice. Develop relationships, engage in the community and realize this is a lifelong endeavor. You’ll never say, “OK, I’m done. I’ve learned it all, and now I’m culturally competent!”

Panelists for the session were program officers Rudy Guglielmo, Jr., Youthprise, and Lue Her, Otto Bremer Foundation.

youthprise

Youthprise Site Visits: Guglielmo gave examples of how to look at the sector, organizational capacity and program effectiveness with a cultural lens (put yourself in the applicant’s shoes), rather than a traditional foundation lens (develop a rationale for an investment).

A traditional lens values information veracity, research accuracy, alignment of the grantee with foundation guidelines and may involve less transparent decision-making.

A cultural lens puts cultural identity at the center of the conversation and allows for an asset-based approach with an open-ended conversation between foundation and applicant. Use of a cultural lens is not a substitute for due diligence, but it is a way to learn about an applicant in a community context. It can be an effective way to evaluate requests in areas that are traditionally hard to quantify (leadership, community organizing, youth development) and provide an opportunity to establish an ongoing relationship with a potential grantee.

Guglielmo closed with a list of learning strategies: accompany an experienced funder into the field, commit to regular visits to an organization and use the foundation’s capacity to convene and allow for peer learning. The biggest barrier to culturally competent site visits is the need to build relationships.

obf

Otto Bremer Foundation Site Visits: Her says site visits are the backbone of the Otto Bremer Foundation and a principle tenant of its work. Each visit is important in establishing or maintaining a relationship, learning about community and doing due diligence.

On Her’s first site visit with Bremer, he accompanied another program officer to “learn the ropes.” During the visit, proposal-related questions were not asked, instead the conversation focused on what was going on in the community. Trust was established and the relationship grew from there.

Culturally competent site visits are not done in isolation; they are one piece of the puzzle. Before a visit, research is done, conversations held and trust established. You have to make time to build relationships, as there is no crash course in culture.

Her ended by saying the road to cultural competence starts with one relationship, and you’re becoming culturally competent when you don’t have to think about it so much.

- Megan Sullivan, MCF operations and publications coordinator

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Moving Beyond Racial Equity Programs

April 24, 2013
Julie Nelson of the Seattle Office for Civil Rightsd

Julie Nelson of the Seattle Office for Civil Rightsd

In Minnesota we talk a lot (a lot!) about the racial equity gaps in education, the workforce, health and other measures of well-being. But talking is not enough. When will we take intentional, strategic actions to address the institutional and structural racism at the root of these problems?

At a convening last week entitled “Cross-Sector Learning on Racial Equity,” Julie Nelson, director of the Seattle Office for Civil Rights, and Glenn Harris, manager of the City of Seattle Race and Social Justice Initiative, offered a well-defined path to action.

Speaking to representatives of philanthropy, the nonprofit sector and local government, they challenged Minnesotans to move beyond simply designing and funding programs. Instead, they advocated shifting focus from program development to changing policies and creating productive partnerships.

For example, to solve the day care crisis, a city can create a program of childcare vouchers, but there will never be enough money for enough vouchers. Instead, a universal child care policy can be created that relies on a partnership between government, businesses, child care providers, parents and other community members committed to quality care.

Systematic and Systemic Institutional Change
Fundamental to policy change is systems change.  Maintaining current institutional cultures and practices will lead to the same outcomes, said Harris and Nelson. To “interrupt the process that generates the same thinking over and over again,” they introduced Seattle’s Racial Equity Toolkit.

Use of the toolkit begins with a six-step analysis:

  • Set outcomes
  • Involve stakeholders (be inclusive!) and analyze data
  • Determine benefit and/or burden
  • Advance opportunity or minimize harm
  • Evaluate, raise racial awareness, and be accountable
  • Report back (the work is iterative!)

Nelson and Harris reported that the toolkit process is used in the development and implementation of every city policy, program and budget in Seattle. They cited concrete examples of resulting equity improvements. And they reported that by using a “big squeeze” strategy – top officials pushing for change from above and community members pushing up from the grassroots – they’ve achieved record levels of city government employee engagement.

Bringing All Parties to the Table
Harris and Nelson also emphasized that achieving organizational and community equity requires “a multi-layered collaborative approach for a collective impact.” To change the conversation and achieve progress, efforts to build racial equity into city policies and initiatives must be married with partnerships with other institutions and the community.

In forming these partnerships, it’s essential to create space for productive conversations about race. This includes, said Nelson, “working with white people to understand white privilege and increase understanding of racism’s impact on all of us.”

Is this possible in the Twin Cities? The visitors from Seattle expressed their confidence that Minneapolis and St. Paul are poised for a breakthrough. They encouraged philanthropists to serve as conveners and to not be discouraged if some people initially walk away. By being intentional and strategic, the core group can attract more than enough people to fill those empty seats, creating momentum and progress that cannot be turned back.

The Minnesota attendees relished the encouragement for action. They recognized the need for rigorously applying a racial equity lens to every aspect of their work. Representatives of Greater Twin Cities United Way and MCF, the convening’s hosts, pledged to continue the conversation. We’ll report back on the outcomes.

- Wendy Wehr, MCF vice president of communications and information services

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Member Post: Expanding the Way We Look at Health

April 8, 2013
Carolyn Link of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation

Carolyn Link of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation

Grantmakers often must look beyond a narrow reading of their missions and collaborate across sectors to maximize their impact. Carolyn Link, executive director of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, shares here what that means for the Blue Cross Foundation as it seeks to improve health in Minnesota.

In 2006, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation introduced Growing Up Healthy: Kids and Communities, a statewide grantmaking initiative to improve the health of Minnesota’s children in low-income communities through a focus on social and environmental determinants of health. At times, we were met with puzzled looks when we explained that there’s a community component to good health beyond the responsibility of the individual — that housing, indeed, has something to do with health. And that early care and learning experiences affect health for life. Even the idea of collaborating across these sectors — creating partnerships and working together on a community condition toward a common goal — was new to some.

The goal of the initiative is to build strong and connected communities where children can thrive and grow up healthy by working at the intersection of health and two or more of the following key health determinants:

  • Early childhood development
  • Stable, affordable housing
  • The environment

To date, the foundation has invested $4.4 million across 30 grantees and spent $1.1 million on evaluation, convenings and other consulting. Commitments to current grantees extend through 2014 and total $1 million.

The initiative uses a two-pronged approach to the grantmaking, through planning grants followed by implementation grants. While working in collaboration sounds like a great idea, we all know that it isn’t always easy. Because it takes time to develop relationships, we offer a $25,000, one-year planning grant to one organization to lead community partners in developing place-based projects that address health and at least two of the three determinants: early childhood education, housing and the environment.

At the end of the planning period, grantees develop a community supported by a written implementation plan for three additional years of funding of up to $150,000.

Next Steps

The initiative was designed to roll out in three phases. The first phase is complete, with a summary report available including lessons learned. In the second phase of the initiative, we added a collaborative leadership training program to assist grantees with skills and tools to develop and implement action plans that are grounded in the needs of the community, have broad-based support and can lead to sustainable change for children. This included grantee site visits, three two-day residential retreats and individual technical assistance through face-to-face visits at grantee sites and by telephone and email.

Currently, we are reviewing the lessons learned during the first two phases. We’ve been encouraged by the progress of these projects and are planning for 2014 and beyond.

Interested in seeing more of the Blue Cross Foundation’s work in Minnesota? Check out Twin Cities Public Television’s program on Growing Up Healthy here.

A longer version of this post originally was published in the Health and Environmental Funders Network blog, Giving InSight.

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Collective Impact: Let Solutions Emerge

February 11, 2013
ci2

Read more about the five conditions of collective impact on SSIR’s website

A few weeks ago, my colleague Susan Stehling detailed some key principles Minnesota grantmakers have learned about the collective impact model of problem solving. As Susan outlined, using collective impact to solve social problems can be a long and challenging process.

A new study by John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG indicates that the challenges of collective impact initiatives can be very fruitful: at its best, a collective approach to solving challenging problems allows opportunities for greater impact to emerge.

Decision-makers and funders in the nonprofit sector often favor pre-determined solutions to large-scale social problems. The idea is that communities can find programs or approaches that work well, test them in a pilot phase, and then roll them out across the sector. But large-scale social problems like poverty, education, and the environment are, by their nature, complex; no single solution to these problems exists, and if it did, no single organization or individual could implement such a solution.

In contrast, emergent solutions may find more success in addressing complex problems. “Emergence” describes events that are unpredictable, which seem to result from the interactions between elements, and which no one organization or individual can control. While pre-determined solutions derive outcomes by adhering to preconceived strategies, emergent solutions come when collective impact participants identify and follow effective rules for interaction. These rules ensure alignment among participants. This alignment increases the likelihood that emergent solutions will lead to the intended goal.

Kania and Kramer identify three types of emergent opportunities that collective impact efforts can often surface:

  • A previously unnoticed evidence-based practice, movement, or resource from outside the community is identified and applied locally
  • Local individuals or organizations begin to work together differently than before and therefore find and adopt new solutions
  • A successful strategy that is already working locally, but is not systematically or broadly practiced, is identified and spread more widely

They also highlight the importance of the goal-setting process as providing a unified voice for policy change. The effort to establish a common agenda, while challenging and time-consuming, can often produce clear policy recommendations that coalition members can support as a group.

Read the full article on the Stanford Social Innovation Review website for a deeper exploration of these themes.

Join the Conversation: Have you seen solutions emerge from your collective impact work? Or do you find measuring against pre-determined solutions to be more effective?

- Anne Bauers, MCF research manager

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Nobody Said It Was Going To Be Easy

January 31, 2013

difficultpathCollective impact is often held up as the method to use to solve wicked problems — complex, entrenched, systems-level issues on which we haven’t been able to move the needle with other techniques.

Last summer, MCF’s Giving Forum publication (which I edit) focused on using collaboration and collective impact to accomplish more together than we could working alone, so I was glad to attend last week’s Learning Forum on Collective Impact. The program, sponsored by The Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation and co-hosted by MCF and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, offered another look at collective impact to see how it is working.

The morning’s speakers and panelists included:

Despite different approaches to the model, there was agreement.

Determine that collective impact is required.

If the problem can be broken down into smaller, more easily solvable issues, that will be an inherently easier way to tackle it. By their very nature, these problems are complex, over-arching and ever-changing. They have many interacting, unpredictable parts, and an improvement in one area may inadvertently spawn wicked problems elsewhere.

It’s not easy.

If you decide that collective impact is the way to go, realize that you’re in for the long haul. It’s not easy and it’s not fast. According to the speakers, it’s not unusual for agreement on a common agenda (an initial step) to take many months of work.

It’s frustrating – there are new people at the table every time you meet. Forsberg said, “You have to have patience with having conversations you feel like you’ve had at least a dozen times before.”

Ensure the community’s voice is heard.

Getting it right – from the start – is important, and including disenfranchised groups’ voices is essential to doing so. If this all-important step is overlooked, eventual solutions will feel imposed and aren’t likely to succeed.

To keep teams on track and accountable, measures should be made public. A well-publicized web site is one way to do this. Cincinnati-based Strive was mentioned as a model.

Have a clearly defined issue and targeted goals.

This was repeated by all speakers, but they also each acknowledged that it’s tricky in practice. The problems are large and entangled. They don’t have a logical beginning or end, so it’s important to get agreement among all players about where the group’s work will start and stop.

According to Borton, this is critical. With MN Girls Are Not for Sale, the foundation has committed to a $5 million effort over five years, and they have been clear about their entry and their exit. She said this can run contrary to what is sometimes typical in the field, “We tend to say, let’s work for world peace and fund it with $1 million.”

Acknowledge a different skill set is required. 

The skills that are necessary to lead these efforts are different, they must be learned and they can run contrary to getting things done efficiently. Constant communication is required.

Forsberg said, “There must be a high level of trust and we have to keep talking to each other. In our case it’s actually getting more complicated as we move forward because we keep adding partners.”

Peterson added, “Some of the necessary skills aren’t rocket science, but some of the skills are rocket science.”

Suggestions for learning included: Tamarack, Art of Hosting as taught by Bush Foundation and tools from other fields of study including dialogue mapping.

It’s here to stay.

So, while I don’t think anyone in the room would’ve said collective impact is easy, I think most would agree that using it as a model to solve wicked problems is here to stay.

Bielefeld said, “It’s exciting to see these real efforts playing out and scary to see the challenges. But it’s a very serious attempt to do things differently.”

Are you involved in a serious effort to do something differently? How’s it working? What are your challenges?

- Susan Stehling, MCF communications associate

Photo cc Doug Bradley Photography

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Member Post: Community Partnership Makes Reading Rock!

November 30, 2012

Partnering with local businesses and education organizations, grantmakers can make a positive impact on children in their communities. In this blog post, we hear a success story from MCF member Tim Penny, president and CEO of Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. 

Earlier this month, I visited Rosa Parks Elementary School’s preschool classroom in Mankato for a Reading Rocks! day. Reading Rocks! is a Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) program providing books to children attending SMIF’s AmeriCorps LEAP early childhood partner sites.

Through a partnership with Mankato-based ABDO Publishing, SMIF’s AmeriCorps members are using a series of books about farm animals to engage children in the fun of stories and promote routine reading at home. Members work with teachers to connect to classroom themes, and they include field trips to farms when possible.

At the end of the day, each child receives a copy of the book to take home to keep and read with their parents. Members continue to stay connected with parents through activities and notes that support developing the reading habit to build bonding and literacy skills for school readiness.

ABDO’s grant of 5,184 books (with a total value of $103,922) allows each of the 820 students in SMIF’s 24 AmeriCorps classrooms to take home six books through the year. For many of these students, these are the only books they personally own.

When I and ABDO representatives attended the event, we watched the children react to the new book during the class circle time. Since it was close to Thanksgiving, the book was about all turkeys. As soon as AmeriCorps member Lauren Kross pulled out the new book, the children’s eyes lit up, as they instantly recognized that it was similar to “the buffalo book” — the first ABDO book they read in class and were able to take home.

I am excited about the work of our AmeriCorps LEAP members in making the Reading Rocks! program so special for these children. We know that their efforts are making a difference to many at-risk children across our region.

During this season of thankfulness and giving, we are especially thankful to SMIF’s donor partners, like ABDO Publishing, who make these programs possible. We also appreciate our many individual donors whose gifts allow SMIF to invest in our region’s early learners.

If you believe as strongly as we do in our work around early childhood, we invite you to learn more at www.smifoundation.org.

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Integrity and Respect in Grantmaking Relationships

November 15, 2012

In the fall issue of Giving Forum, Vickie Benson, arts program director at The McKnight Foundation, shares her views on the importance of establishing and constantly renegotiating crucially important and necessarily imbalanced grantmaking relationships.

In Giving Forum, Benson recalls a 2001 Foundation News & Commentary article about Anna Faith Jones, then president of The Boston Foundation, that resonated with her and continues to inform her grantmaking.

Benson addresses the importance of staying mindful of the power differential inherit in the funder/fundee relationship and consistently acting to minimize it. She also acknowledges that doing so is “easier said than done.”

But Benson believes that money isn’t the only currency in the relationship, saying, “Foundations require partners.”

She says, “When everyone realizes that, the power shifts almost immediately and a relationship that truly cultivates constructive dialogue and engagement can begin.”

Don’t miss the full article where Benson goes in-depth and shares additional wisdom. Giving Forum is online and in your mailboxes now.

- Susan Stehling, MCF communications associate

Photo: cc glsims99

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Honoring Innovation in Technology

November 8, 2012

Last week, the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA) presented the 2012 Tekne Awards to honor those who play a significant role in discovering new technologies that educate and improve the lives and futures of people living in Minnesota and beyond.

An MCF member and a nonprofit changing the way Minnesota gives online were among the recipients:

Blandin Foundation (on behalf of the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities Coalition) won the Innovative Collaboration of the Year Award.

Blandin Foundation aims to ensure that its rural Minnesota partner communities have access to broadband Internet capabilities.

The latest in a series of broadband projects led by Blandin Foundation, MIRC was built on the lessons learned and the success of its predecessor broadband-focused programming. It supports a broadband vision for Minnesota, developed by the project’s guiding strategy: to ensure a high quality of life and a globally competitive future for its citizens, businesses and communities.

MIRC partners are numerous and the impact the collaboration has had on broadband adoption is significant. In fact, the adoption rate is 29.8% faster in MIRC partner communities when compared to the rest of rural Minnesota.

GiveMN (an affiliate of Minnesota Philanthropy Partners) won the Technology Excellence in a Nonprofit Organization Award.

GiveMN aims to transform philanthropy in Minnesota by growing overall giving and moving more of it online.

Since its launch in 2009, GiveMN has helped raise $50 million, for over 6,600 non-profits. GiveMN’s new model for e-philanthropy, combined with its relationships with local partners, lends credibility to the organization’s mission. In addition, GiveMN provides training to help non-profits and individuals become more digitally savvy fundraisers.

GiveMN’s fourth annual Give to the Max Day is one week from today, on Thursday, November 15.

Congratulations to all fifteen of this year’s Tekne Award winners!

- Susan Stehling, MCF communications associate

Photo cc mrsdkrebs

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