Big Thinking on Small Grants

Using Small Grants to Get It Going

2013-05-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

I was so excited this week when I spotted info about the City of St. Louis' Sustainable Neighborhood Small Grant Competition and can't wait to tell you why.

The City of St. Louis adopted its first Sustainability Plan in January of 2013 - with 50 specific objectives and 317 detailed strategies. This plan includes more than 1,000 ideas for what can be done at the individual, neighborhood, city, and regional level to make St. Louis a more livable and sustainable place to live, work and play.

I am sure that the work that went into the developing this plan was huge and probably even exhausting to both staff and community participants. And so many plans that I've seen like this - maybe because the work that is required is so huge and exhausting - get to be ends in themselves as the classic plan that sits on the shelf.

I have been asked over the years about next steps for plans like this in a question that goes like this: "We have had hundreds of people participating in this planning process, and we have done our best to incorporate all of the amazing ideas that people have put forward into this plan - but now that the community convenings and planning sessions have wrapped up, what do we do?"

Hooray for St. Louis! You have the perfect answer to that question. I'm sure the Neighborhood Small Grant Competition isn't the only "what next" that's on your list now that the plan is completed, but my hunch it will be one of the most fun, most rewarding, and most important things that is on that list.

Here's what I love about this particular "what next":

It's a competition! I think this is a great way to frame a 1-time opportunity that uses good small grants program basics but is designed for a particular 1-time purpose. And, what a great way to invite people into the action in a way that feels safe, fun, and not as a commitment for life.
It's open but specific! This is a competition that is especially for the types of groups that I talked about in my last post.
There will be more than 1 winner! Instead of setting this up so that there is a super grand prize winner and a mostly losers. This competition will have 7 winners and hopefully, lots of gold star runners up who get their good ideas acknowledged by being included in the bank of ideas that will be generated.
There are 3 pre-deadline help sessions in community settings! Not 1 but 3. Love it. We know from the years of experience that members of Grassroots Grantmakers have with small grants programs that what you do before the deadline - specifically getting out there in community settings with information, and positioning the opportunity to apply as an invitation - is essential to getting good energy in the applications that come in.
There is an expectation that projects will be different! While examples are shared about projects that jive with sustainability plan, there is recognition that different neighborhoods are different - via their strengths, character and history, and needs. My hope is that what the City of St. Louis is really saying is that they hope to be wowed by the creativity of the ideas that come in, and that they will use these ideas to grow the list of 1000 ideas that are already included in the plan.
I love that the application begins with questions about why the project is important to the neighborhood, how it engages the people who live there and what team members bring to the project. These questions are SO appropriate for resourcing grassroots groups, aren't they?

I could put a few things on my wish list (like wishing that groups were not required to have a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor as a group member or that the application could skip over some of the long-term impact and evaluation lingo that almost automatically ends up in every grant application) - but I'm just being picky here. Overall, I just love this. Can you tell?

Who else out there followed a planning process with a customized small grants opportunity? If this is you, let us hear about your experience by posting a comment.

Funding Grassroots Groups: The Square Pegs and Round Holes Challenge

2013-05-08T15:57:00.000-05:00

Some things are clearly one thing or another, and others are hard or even impossible to classify. One of the challenges I spot in the big thinking on small grants world is that grassroots groups fall into the hard or impossible category. And that classifying, whether intentional or unintentional, gets to be a challenge for both the funder and the group.

The Grassroots Group Spectrum:

From what I see, some grassroots groups wouldn't event recognize themselves as a group at all - no name, no regular meeting time, no clear leaders, nothing but people together doing something at this moment in time with no plan about stretching this one time into ongoing. Other groups have all the boxes checked - name, by-laws, regular meeting time, continuity over time, and possibly even 501(c)(3) status with some money in the bank and someone that is paid to help facilitate the work of the group.

Some groups are in-between, with just enough of a structure so that they can activate quickly when there is a desire or move in and out of a dormant state on a regular basis. I'm thinking about groups like the one here in my town that comes together every year to plan the Relay for Life - hyper-active at Relay for Life time with some people from previous years and some new ones added in each year, but mostly dormant otherwise.

John McKnight describes most of the groups along this spectrum as associations. Others describe these groups as networks. Still others use community-based organizations. I see these names as important steps towards creating understanding and differentiating these citizen's groups from business-oriented groups.

What grassroots groups have in common - no matter where they fall on the informal/more formal spectrum - is that they are vehicles that allow people to move their shared agenda forward that depends on their collective commitment, energy, passion and skills. Most of the work is done not only for the people involved by also by them, with little or not paid staff, often without credentialed expertise, and usually without big budgets or other large resource reservoirs. They provide the mechanism for individuals to discover and bring forth their individual gifts to their community.

The Square Peg/Round Hole Challenge:

Grassroots Grantmakers, the network that I staff as Executive Director, is organized to grow a field of citizen sector investors - and by that we mean creating some identity around investing in the grassroots groups side of the organizational spectrum and growing the number of investors who see value in hanging out there, at least part of the time. The first and most important investors are the people who are forming and fueling grassroots groups - and we want these first investors to claim their unique niche in the community well-being and change world instead of feeling that they need to model themselves after professionally staffed non-profit organizations. The next set of investors are those that provide money and other things that grassroots groups can use to advance their work.

For even the most savvy big thinkers on small grants, how we do what we do - and most importantly, how we measure what we do - can plane off the corners of grassroots groups to make them fit into to the round holes that work for more typical non-profit organization grantees. (For a fun reminder of what that's a problem, remember the blobs and squares video). Planing corners off comes with how we size up the organization and it's capacity to deliver on the grant, and how we think about what comes next. We look at their operations from a business perspective - have they done their market research, are they employing best practices, and do they have the qualified staff and systems in place to deliver, to be stable and to attract resources they need to maintain and grow their services?

For grassroots groups, I think that those are round hole-square peg questions. At this risk of sounding like I'm advising to never to ask those questions, here are some I think are a better fit with grassroots groups, especially those on the more informal end of the organizational spectrum:

How does this idea use the commitment, passion, energy and skills of the people in the group and others in their immediate community?
What experience do people in the group have with moving an idea into action that they can bring to this project (regardless of whether it is with this group or another)?
How is the group reaching beyond their inner circle to make room for the involvement and ideas of more people?
How will the group share the story of their work together so that it can inspire others to move their idea into action?
What support does the group need to be successful with their idea and to maximize their learning together about organizing to move an idea into action?
And - adding one that I've heard members of Neighborhood Connections grantmaking committee ask - Who is driving this bus? Who has ownership of this idea?

I could add more that I've learned about this challenge through my experience with Grassroots Grantmakers, but invite you to share your perspectives on this. How do you spot when you're trying to get a square peg into a round hole - and what questions have you learned to ask when you're talking with grassroots groups? You can share your comment here or contact me directly.

Find and Replace: Muscle Memory for Sustainability

2013-04-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

Jargon is a fact of life. I think it can be handy as a verbal short-hand when we're talking shop with insiders. But I also think that it's a good idea to step back now and then to ask if our jargon words have become so comfortable that they are masking some assumptions that might deserve a second look.

Sustainable and sustainability are twin brother jargon words that deserve a second look. I heard sustainable and sustainability so often at a recent philanthropic conference that they became distracting. I began to listen for them and keep score of how many times I had heard them, and became so preoccupied with listening and scoring that I zoned out on the presentation. I wondered if it was just me. But when I checked out the Communications Network's Jargon Finder, there it was, with an interesting discussion of the journey of sustainable from the domain of environmentalists and economists to the philanthropic jargon world.

Suddenly, no one wanted a sturdy or durable program any more, they wanted a sustainable one. Expenditures could no longer merely be affordable, they had to be sustainable. Skills taught in school couldn’t just be lasting, they had to be sustainable. Anything, in short, that made it past autumn’s first frost was now sustainable.

As I was listening and keeping score, I was thinking about the implications of sustainable for the big thinking on small grants world. Each time sustainable or its twin showed up, what I heard was something about "permanence". And often "permanence" was about something that was fixed and was expected to stay fixed - or about an organization that was good at fixing and was expected to keep fixing, whenever fixing is needed.

I do indeed appreciate the question behind the question that is being asked when people ask about sustainability. What is the investment that we are making setting up that will continue into the future - in a way that at least maintains the change that has been achieved with the investment? And, I also appreciate the critical role that a staffed presence - a backbone organization - can play. But what I don't get is how these interpretations of sustainability jive with my experience of community and the energy that I see at the community level when I am looking through my big thinking on small grants lens..

When I think about community and the places I've lived over my lifetime, I think about ebbs and flows, comings and goings. People moving in and out, people more present and less present because of family obligations, job demands or personal burdens such as addictions or depression. I think of a dynamic environment where change is the norm. I also think about ways that communities welcome people, what the new people who are entering bring, and how community traditions make their way into community culture - that invisible "way of doing" that people learn from each other.

When I think about the big thinking on small grants world - investing in groups that people form to move an idea into action in their own community - I don't think about the anything as steady or permanent except the "way of doing" that involves people who feel powerful and have the experience of acting together. I don't think of the same people always acting together or the same groups always in the forefront. I think about people being invited into the action by friends and neighbors, learning what to do and seeing what is possible in themselves and with others. I think about people who have experience with one group taking that experience to another, new or existing - inspiring action and leading the way. I think about my own experience, comparing how things work in my personal-life world versus the world I imagine when I'm around tables with professionals.

I want to suggest that instead of striving for sustainable, we should think about helping people and communities build muscle memory for working together so that when the opportunity arises, people know how to surface ideas, form groups and move the best ideas into action using the resources that they have and can find. Our friends at Wikipedia say that muscle memory involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition, and that when a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems. Imagine a community where people have strong active citizen muscle memory and value it enough as part of their "way of doing" that they keep it strong. That's a community where I want to be. It's a place where I can live my life with the peace of mind that we can handle the ebbs and flow, that there are built-in ways for new people to grab on and feel that they belong, where we understand that we need everyone - especially those who are often invisible - and where we understand the power that we have to challenge injustice and have a voice.

If we scan our language and do a search and replace - replacing sustainability with building community muscle memory, what does that really mean for how we think about our work? What do people, groups and communities need to build their active citizen muscle memory? Here's the beginning of a list of ideas with an invitation for you to add your ideas:

Opportunities to work out - moving ideas into action together. Small grants programs that are designed with a patient money, long-distance running approach rather than a time-limited quick spring approach, are great tools for expanding opportunities for people to work out in a way that builds community muscle memory. For those who poo-poo those first small grants that support a group of neighbors with their first project - asking about the impact of this micro-investment in the big world - you might think about the importance of making the commitment to go to the gym, and actually going. That's huge.
Some personal trainers who inspire people to work harder by exposing them to real life stories of what is possible with a little more exercise, and provide some tip for building muscle. These trainers could be known as friend, neighbor, teacher, young person, pastor, grassroots leader, technical assistance provider, and even program officer.
Storytellers who come in many shapes and sizes who provide regular reminders of who we are, how we do things, and how powerful we are when we are together so that people don't forget and that new people can learn. Storytellers might be artists, historians, photographers, poets, and journalists also known as neighbors, friends, young people, the strangers among us and people who work at powerful, permanent institutions who do their work in a way that uses stories to strengthen community muscle memory.

Join in with a comment and more ideas to add to this list. Heading to the gym.....

Friending in the Big Thinking World

2013-03-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

One thing that I have noticed in the big thinking on small grants world is how we sanitize the language of community. We talk about building community, various types of social capital, individual, organizational and community capacity, social networks, associational groups, grassroots leadership, and community change. The word we don't use very often is "friend" or anything related like "friendships" or "friendly".

I am experimenting with podcasting as a way to share the conversations with amazing people that I get to have as Executive Director of Grassroots Grantmakers, and am now quite fascinated with how often that word - friend - has been showing up. Especially when I'm not talking with funders. I'm actually getting a bit obsessed with this. So much so that when I was listening to NPR this morning about the post-Katrina New Orleans, I began to talk back to the radio when the commentator mentioned the importance of social networks: "Why don't you just say that people with friends are doing better than people who are isolated?"

Mark Hopkins believes so much in the power of friends that he has invited people over to his apartment in Calgary every other Sunday afternoon for FIVE YEARS - just so they can get to know each other. His "We Should Know Each Other" campaign began with the realization that people in his various social circles didn't know each other, and a curiosity about what would happen if he could help people make connections. A simple invitation, a few swipes of the dust rag, and some simple refreshments is all is all it took to get this started - and the ripple effect has been tremendous. So tremendous, that it extends way past Mark at this point. Friendships, dating relationships, job connections, people helping people out - all that stuff that comes with more social capital - is growing from Mark's simple idea and gift for connecting people.

De'Amon Harges, Broadway United Methodist Church's "Roving Listener", spends his time in Indianapolis listening, watching and appreciating what is already there in the neighborhood around his church, building and nurturing friendships that bring economy, community and mutual delight - weaving together the strands of community that are there waiting for someone with an eye for connecting.

Dave Runyon, co-author of The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door, works from a faith-based perspective, trying to make "love your neighbor as yourself" real in a day to day world. Dave acknowledges how hard it is to get to know neighbors as people. He talks about the importance of learning (and remembering people's names, and has developed the most ingenious tool - a refrigerator magnet that looks like a tic-tac-toe board with "my house" in the middle" - that he hands out for people to use to help people learn and remember the names of the people who live around them. Reminding people about the continuum - stranger > acquaintance > friend - he encourages people to be intentional about turning strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends.

Eric Jacobson, Executive Director of The Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, is challenging conventional approaches to helping people with developmental disabilities have better lives through his agency's Real Communities work - investing in ideas involve people who have developmental disabilities WITH others in their local community. The simple genius of the Real Communities approach is that people - and not disabilities - are the focus, with a recognition that people to people relationships are always about the mutuality of friendship.

Jan Thrope, photo-journalist, author of Inner Visions: Grassroots Stories of Truth and Hope (here's my earlier post about her work), founder of Inner Visions of Cleveland, and wonderful imaginer and possibility thinker, talks about "friending" as a way of investing in people in Cleveland. When I was talking with Jan, she mentioned times when she and others on the giving side of the equation learned about something that was going on with someone on the receiving side of the equation - something that crossed the line between "business" and "personal" - and jumped in the way friends would do to lend a hand. She also talked about "friending" coming the other way, and times that people shared their gifts with her - like creating a play around her book and using the play as a platform to share an amazing array of community talents that had previously been invisible.

My conversation with Jan made me think about friending in the big thinking on small grants world. I thought about the importance of structuring grant processes so that they are friendly - designing out the intimidation factor as much as possible. Tom O'Brien with Cleveland's Neighborhood Connections puts "friendly" at the top of his list for how he wants the small grants experience there to feel for people, and goes so far as to coach grantmaking committee members on how to bring "friendly" into the picture. This is so important. I love that he does this.

My point of sharing these random stories is to say that it is really powerful if we allow ourselves to connect our personal and professional brains - our right and left brains in the big thinking on small grants world - and remember that when we are using the professional, sanitized words for community connectivity we are talking about what happens when people move down the path from strangers to acquaintances to friends. We are talking about the "doing together" that generates community gardens, more things for kids to do after school and expressions of local culture like festivals and murals - but most of all, works to help the people who find each other through that idea move along the path from stranger to acquaintance to friend. We are talking about people around and with people who will provide the moral support needed for people to take on new roles, exercise their personal power and take the risk to get their personal skin in the game. We are talking about growing friends.

If you have a story that involves intentional "friending" - as a community member or as a funder - I would love to hear about it! You can share it hear or email me to set a time to talk.

Building a Strategy for Resident Engagement

2013-01-21T12:35:00.002-06:00

I had the opportunity to hang out with some of the best thinkers in the community foundation world last week, and the topic of the day was resident engagement. How it is thrilling that more place-based funders, with community foundations in the lead, are seeing resident engagement as central to their work!

As our discussion moved from resident engagement in the ideal world to resident engagement in the real world, someone told a story about some bumps in the resident engagement world they encountered when their organization was asked by local government to expand community engagement on a topic that was rapidly becoming divisive - providing the safe space that was needed for people to work together to develop a solution that could work for everyone. Perfect so far. They brought a group together, only to discover that they had a room full of leaders who did not have any followers - people who were better at gate-keeping than gate opening. You can probably fill in the next part of the story. I bet you have lived through that story in your own community. I have. It's so common - even when people are acting with the best of intentions and the belief that the extra time and messiness that inviting more people into a process requires is always worth it.

So for the place-based funders - especially community foundations - who are thinking more about resident engagement, here's one thing I think you can do to avoid going down this very common road: anticipate the opportunity and get ready. If you think about resident engagement in the same way that you think about donor engagement, and develop a strategy to build relationships with residents that you take as seriously as you do expanding your donor base, you will be ready when the phone rings or when you want to expand perspectives on your own work. Just as you think about who knows who and how to get know people you want to know, with the hope that one day they will become donors, think about who you know and how you can get to know more people in more places - especially those who are the strangers in your community.

There are a lot of things you can do to get to know people. Make a list. And be sure that you have being a big thinker about small grants on your list. Small grants programs, at their heart, are about resident engagement - residents actively engaging with each other, and, if staffed appropriately and hosted by organizations that really value resident engagement, funders expanding the real relationships that they have with more people in their community.

It's that second part that is really important here - staffed appropriately and hosted by organizations who really value resident engagement. By staffed appropriately, I mean enough of the right people - people who can see a way to use the mechanics of the small grants process to build relationships and understands that their work is only beginning when the grant checks go out. People who really believe in people - and not just the idea of people - and who know in their hearts that everyone is important with something to offer. People who are as comfortable in a church basement as they are in a foundation board room, and who are natural translators and connectors.

Those special people, however, are just part of the picture. They need to be planted in resident engagement friendly soil - in an organization whose culture values people over programs, and where timelines, workloads, and internal reward systems are geared to encourage and support listening, learning, relationship building and connecting. When planted in organizational soil that is resident engagement friendly, the best small grants program staffers have the internal cover to be out of the office as much as they are in, and the permission to bring the relationships and perspectives that are gaining into internal conversations, planning and strategy development. In organizations who see small grants programs as core to their resident engagement strategy, planning tables, committees and yes, even boards, look different - with people beyond the usual suspects there, comfortable in their relationship with the funder and confident that they have something to contribute that is valued. And when the call comes to bring people together around a tough issue, you are beginning at a very different place - with relationships you already have and with people who, by virtue of their relationships, can help expand the circle.

It's about relationships. And the good news is that for those community foundations who think they don't have much experience with resident engagement, this is a reminder that you do. If you do the same thing on the community side that you are doing on the donor side of your business - build a strategy for continuously expanding and building relationships you have with residents - and embrace a time-tested, affordable tool as part of your resident engagement strategy that is well known to the community foundation field - small grants programs - you will be on your way.

If you need some pointers or a sounding board, get in touch and I'll do 3 things. I'll listen as carefully as I can and share all that I know, I'll point you to info on Grassroots Grantmakers website (and send you and advance copy of the soon to be released, "Short Course on Grassroots Grantmaking"), and, perhaps most importantly, I'll connect you to someone else who is a little further down the road that you want to travel. And, make a note to stay in touch so I can share what you are learning and how you are making resident engagement real here on this blog in the future.

Changing Personal Narratives as an Outcome

2013-01-09T16:17:00.001-06:00

What is more important? Process or products and outcomes. This is a question I'm frequently asked by people who are curious about citizen sector investing, with the expectation that I'm going to say process - and the assumption that in the small grants world, there can't be much "there there" when it comes to tangible products or outcomes.

Here's how I think about this question:

Ultimately, the product or ultimate outcome that we are looking for in the big thinking on small grants world of citizen sector investing is vibrant, resilient and just communities. But on the way to that destination - because of the process part of the equation - there's another outcome. It's people who see themselves and their neighbors through different eyes - as powerful, resourceful, and joyful. And people who know how to get things done, have experience initiating and acting, and are confident that most if not all of what they need is already right in the room - especially when the room is full of people just like them. It's a stronger citizen sector with people who see themselves as powerful - not because they are told that they are powerful, but because they have experienced themselves as powerful.

And here's what comes to mind when I think about the change in how people see themselves - changing their personal narratives - as an outcome:

I remember feeling initially horrified when a young woman from a community I was visiting stood up and said to the group of funders in the room, "I am an outcome". She was standing with a nonprofit staff member who was beaming with pride - pride that I interpreted as pride in her agency's ability to successfully fix this young woman. I couldn't imagine embracing the idea that I am an outcome - that I went into an agency's door broken and came out fixed because of the skilled mechanics inside, like a bum car that went into the shop and came out working.

But as I thought about this more, I realized that I - yes me, personally - am an outcome - the type of outcome that is sometimes invisible in the funding world but is absolutely essential to the community outcome that we're really after. How I think of myself has been profoundly changed by the experiences that I have had others in my community through the years. I have discovered personal gifts that I never suspected were there and were only revealed when I was in relationship with other people who valued what I had to offer and was in a situation that required me to give and grow that gift. Yes, required. Possibly because I was the one in the room with a missing piece of a bigger puzzle, and that doing something I cared about meant that I needed to move to the edge of my comfort zone and do something that I didn't think I could do. The imagining, planning, organizing and leading up to the product part - what some would describe as the process part - was where a lot of the growth happened for me, with the importance of the product - the cleaned up park, the community event, the neighborhood newspaper, the success at the City Council meeting - as fuel the reward at the end.

I have also been changed because I have seen people reveal amazing gifts that I never suspected were there because I was not aware of the judgements about who they were or what they could do that were clouding my vision. Again, more learning about myself as I was learning more about others.

And, I have been changed by the joy that has helped manage the growing pains of becoming who I am supposed to be - joy that was only there because I was in relationship with others.

I don't think of myself as a confident person, perhaps because confident, to me, comes close to cocky. But I know - only because of my experiences with my neighbors - that I have something to offer in spite of my flaws, that I don't have to have all of the answers, and that any moment might be the moment when I will discover something thrilling about the people around me. I know how to get something going and how to join in when something is already going - and, using my grassroots grantmaking jargon, see myself as an active citizen and someone who has power that is magnified when I connect with others who share the space that I call community.

As I think more about the young woman who announced herself as an outcome, I can say "yes - you go girl!" instead of "oh no". Even though she might have gone in one door to have something fixed, she came out with something else - a fire inside that ignited her courage to be in that room with us and stand up to proclaim that she is powerful in words that she thought we would appreciate and understand - "I am an outcome". She was on another path but we ended in at a similar destination.

So when you ask me about product or process, let me ask you:

Are we starting from the same place, with the shared belief that the ultimate product that we are after is community vibrancy, resiliency and justice?
How do you think about yourself as an outcome? And what experiences (or processes) along the way have been really important for shaping how you think about yourself?
If you're a funder, are you thinking about the learning by doing part of what you are funding as product-generating, or looking for what you consider to be shorter routes to your desired end?
If you are investing in fixing people doors, how are you also looking out for changing people's narrative opportunities that may also be inside those doors but are hidden away - just because people think that you're not interested in that type of product?

And, as always, I welcome your comments both on and offline. Weigh in here or connect with me directly via email.

Hey, Giving Circles

2012-09-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

Hey, giving circles, this post is for you. I love what you're about, and what is happening along side you in the fascinating and very promising new giving world. I'm looking forward to swimming in some very exciting giving circles water next month in Birmingham at the Community Investment Network's 2012 conference. If you're with a giving circle and you'll be there, please say hello!

While my work in philanthropy began as a staffer with a community foundation, my community work goes back to circles of neighbors, connecting around shared interests and getting the job done with time, talent and treasure resources that we contributed ourselves. We grew our circle through connections with people around their time, talent or treasure. And we kept a constant eye out for people who had gifts to give (even if they didn't see themselves that way). We also had welcome mats and on-ramps out everywhere to help people find us and make a connection that was about contribution.

You might not work exactly like that, but my hunch is that you are working with that same spirit in your giving circle. My hunch is also that the energy you feel when you come together around giving together is the same energy that we felt that kept us going, tackling big issues that others thought were too big for us to tackle. And, this is the same energy that fuels the citizen space groups that the big thinking on small grants world is all about. We may have on different jerseys, but my hunch is that we're all on the same team - the team that is about the possibilities that open up when everyday people connect around a shared interest and get something going together.

Here's a question and a proposition for you, giving circles.

When you meet with money on the table to give, are you finding and funding groups of everyday people that are not on the more typical funding radar screen? When you are making decisions about where to invest your giving circle dollars, are you looking for groups that are operating with the same time, talent and treasure spirit that gives you energy? I'm asking for 3 reasons:

1) I know that it is hard to find these groups - even for foundations with paid staff. These are groups that aren't seasoned grantseekers or show up on Guidestar or even in a phone book. Hard to find - yes. But findable and worth finding - also yes.

2) I've been surprised the power of money to change the conversation - even when neighborhood residents are making decisions about funding that is specifically designed for community projects, specifically in their neighborhood (with their neighbors as the do-ers). I'm fascinated at the moment with how easy it is for people to embrace, with the most noble "do good with this money" impulses, a hard-line approach about who should be trusted with money or who can deliver on a project. It's almost as if people become different people when they put on a funders hat. I'm not saying that this is you. I'm just saying that I've seen this happen so often that I'm really curious now about what people would do if they didn't have a preconceived notion of what to do to be a good funder. Would the conversations be more like neighbor to neighbor conversation "time, talent, treasure conversations" than the bottom-line bank finance officer to customer trying to take out a loan conversation?

3) I'm intrigued by the new possibilities that you are creating, giving circles, and the change you could create as part of the big thinking on small grants movement. And, I can imagine how much fun it would be for you if you could see and feel your role in building bridges between the funding world and the energy and efforts of everyday people who are connecting for mutual aid and collective action right on their own block in their home communities.

Here's my proposition:

I am inspired by what I hear of the relationship that one giving circle - Cleveland Colectivo - has developed with Neighborhood Connections, one of the grassroots grantmaking funders in our network. Cleveland Colectivo has gotten to know Neighborhood Connections in easy ways that help them spot the types of groups and projects that they might not find otherwise - and as a result of these easy connections, have funded some of these groups and projects. Just easy connections - opening up the list of possibilities for Cleveland Colectivo to consider for their giving circle conversations.

I'm interested in what Grassroots Grantmakers might be able to do to help create or nurture other easy connections so that other giving circles can also have citizen space groups on their list of possibilities. We're happy to share some quick "what to look for" tips to giving circles who are curious about supporting groups of everyday people who are pooling their time, talent and treasure to make a difference on their own blocks. We're also happy to see what we can do to help you create some easy connections like Cleveland Colectivo has made with Neighborhood Connections.

I'm mostly interested in hearing if there is anything we can do to provide an easy on-ramp for you to the big thinking on small grants world of resourcing citizen space. I have an eager ear to the ground on this question and am looking for people to join me as on-ramp co-creators. Connect with me via a comment here or an email. Or if you're in Birmingham, say hello and let's see what we can cook up.

Citizen Space is Relationship Space

2012-08-17T12:44:00.000-05:00

I was in Syracuse last week for Grassroots Grantmakers' 2012 On the Ground learning exchange, working now with batteries recharged by the amazing people and wonderful work that I had a chance to experience.

There is so much to stay, but I want to start by sharing something that connects to a common theme in this "big thinking" blog - the challenge of language when it comes to describing the "what" and "why" of work in citizen space that is about what people do together in their own communities in a spirit of mutual aid and collective action. The default language that we're skilled at using is about programs or projects that are conceptualized and managed by people associated with an organization. It's the language of business. A challenge that I face, and I bet many of you face, is how to distinguish work that is intentional and strategic, has some sort of organizational home, but grows from and is fueled more by community relationships that are based on mutuality than business oriented organizational structures and processes.

That's why I was really intrigued to hear how Nicole Watts, Founder and Executive Director of Hopeprint, described her work. Nicole shared her story - a story that began with connecting as friends with refugees and "having people over for dinner" and led to Nicole moving from the suburbs into Syracuse's Northside neighborhood, connecting with four others to establish the first Hopeprint home. Nicole described her work as relationship-based and talked about the opportunities that working this way open up - opportunities that would not be there if they viewed their work as programs or projects. If you take a look at the Hopeprint website and peruse the menu of things that are described there and the stories that are shared, you will see relationships everywhere and see what she means. You will also spot some things that could easily show up in a more traditional social service organization. But my hunch is that if you could be a fly on the wall in the tutoring, life skills training or youth activities that happen here, you would know you are in a very special place where relationships are driving the activities.

When I think about situations when I've needed help (or most recently, when I've found myself in institutional settings with my sweet mother), I can only dream about finding myself in a place where people approach their work as relationship-based, personal in ways that could actually lead to being invited over for dinner. The promise of work that we describe as grassroots grantmaking - focused on helping to resource and support what people do together as citizens - is that it is inherently relationship-based. The work that people do together is about who is there, what everyone can contribute, and the relationship bonds that they have and grow through working together. Effective "resourcing" of these groups also requires funders to work in a relationship-based way, letting down their professional guard and opening up new ways for their institutions to foster community engagement. What is frustrating to me is that when we look for outcomes, we only count programmatic outcomes and overlook the relationship-based outcomes - or often ignore how important the relationship-based orientation is to achieving the outcomes that we desire.

I want us to get over that hurdle, and get as comfortable with and trusting of relationship-based approaches as we are with programmatic approaches. Join me for thinking about what we can do together to make that happen.

The Two World Views of Squares & Blobs

2012-07-02T15:24:00.003-05:00

It is so easy to make things so hard - and so hard to make things easy. That's what I love the video that I'm sharing here today, No More Throw Away People, by Edward Cahn (author of the book, No More Throw Away People: The Co-Production Imperative). This ingenious video uses cartoon-like blobs and squares to illustrate the different contributions that institutions and people can make in solving problems, and - most interesting to me - paints a good picture of the relationship that I see most frequently when institutions try to solve problems through the most typical paths of community engagement.

In my experience, community engagement for most institutions (governments, foundations, established non-profits) involves people in institutions (squares) talking to people (blobs) to understand a problem and get their advice on how they should solve the problem. Institutions talk to people individually (surveys) or collectively (focus groups or forums or via other community engagement processes. They sometimes ask the most enlighted people they find to serve on a committee or even their board so that they can get a continuous stream of problem-interpretation or advice. And sometimes, they might even give grants to community groups so that they can work on the problems directly. Too often, when they give grants to community groups, they do that without understanding what they are doing to them by forcing them into a non-profit organization mold by their requirements or expectations.

It also shows what happens to the grassroots groups that people in a community form for mutual aid and collective action become more like squares than blobs - most often, when they are trying to gain legitimacy or find resources in their quest to get something done about a big problem in their community. They gain something (capacity to do things that squares are good at doing) but they lose something (capacity to do what blobs are good at doing).

This video, like Cahn's book, calls for co-production - a way of working together that allows squares to do what they do well and blobs to bring their unique gifts, perspectives and talents to the table. This is one of those things that sounds easy but apparently (because it happens so rarely) is really hard. I think that one of the things that makes it hard is that we - all of us - have a love-affair with squares and a dismissive attitude about blobs. Our love affair with squares has made us forget that we all are also blobs in some hours of our day or that the world of blobs even exists.

Check out this video, but do more than that. Begin your love-affair with blobs by using this video to launch a conversation that includes both squares and blobs about how people and institutions connect to get things done in your community. And let me know how it goes.

The Parable of the Blobs and Squares from James Mackie on Vimeo.

Yes! Democracy is for Amateurs

2012-05-16T13:47:00.001-05:00

I'm sharing a recent article by Eric Liu, co-author of The Gardens of Democracy and creator of the Guiding Lights Weekend, a conference on creative citizenship that appeared in The Atlantic. Eric was formerly a speechwriter and deputy domestic policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. Please read and pass on. I feel and see what Eric is talking about, and know that vibrant communities and effective local democracy will happen if more people agreed that democracy is for amateurs and saw themselves as citizen citizens.

Check out the four forces that Eric says need to be activated to revive a spirit of citizenship - and let's share thinking on these via comments.
Janis

Democracy is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens

by Eric Liu

This year I'll wrap up a decade as a trustee of the Seattle Public Library. Our board of five citizens has unusual authority. Appointed by the mayor, we are an independent operating body. The city council gives us a line in the budget, but how we spend those funds, on what programs, in what allocations across which neighborhoods, with what kinds of popular input, and under what policies -- all such decisions rest in the hands of our citizen board.

There's something very American about such a volunteer body. We celebrate the "citizen scientist" or "citizen diplomat" or "citizen soldier" on the idea that while the job -- scientist, diplomat, soldier -- requires professional expertise, amateurs who care can also step in and contribute. Indeed, this is something of a golden age for amateurs. With big data and social media amplifying their wisdom, crowds of amateurs are remaking astronomy, finance, biochemistry and other fields.

But not so much the field called democracy. The work of democratic life -- solving shared problems, shaping plans, pushing for change, making grievances heard -- has become ever more professionalized over the last generation. Money has gained outsize and self-compounding power in elections. A welter of lobbyists, regulators, consultants, bankrollers, wonks-for-hire, and "smart-ALECs" has crowded amateurs out of the daily work of self-government at every level. Bodies like the library board are the exception.

What we need today are more citizen citizens. Both the left and the right are coming to see this. It is the thread that connects the anti-elite 99 percent movement with the anti-elite Tea Party. It also animates an emerging web of civic-minded techies who want to "hack" citizenship and government.

Why is government in America so hack-worthy now? There is a giant literature on how interest groups have captured our politics, with touchstones texts by Mancur Olson, Jonathan Rauch, and Francis Fukuyama. The message of these studies is depressingly simple: democratic institutions tend toward what Rauch calls "demosclerosis" -- encrustation by a million little constituencies who clog the arteries of government and make it impossible for the state to move or adapt.

This tendency operates in an accelerating feedback loop. When self-government is dominated by professionals representing various interests, a vicious cycle of citizen detachment ensues. Regular people come to treat civic problems as something outside themselves, something done to them, rather than something they have a hand in making and could have a hand in unmaking. They anticipate that engagement is futile, and their prediction fulfills itself.

So how do we replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous one? What does it take to revive a spirit of citizenship as something undertaken by amateurs and volunteers with a stake in their own lives? There are four forces to activate, and they cut across the usual left-right lines.

First, we have to develop what filmmaker Annie Leonard calls our "citizen muscle." As Americans we have hugely overdeveloped consumer muscles and atrophied citizen muscles. When we are consumers first, our elected leaders sell us exactly what we want: lower taxes, more spending, special rules for every subgroup.

Having a citizen muscle means thinking about the future and not just immediate gratification. It means asking what helps the community thrive, not just oneself. It means observing social change like a naturalist, and responding to it like a gardener. It means learning and teaching a curriculum of power -- in schools, and in settings for all ages -- so that we can practice power, even as amateurs.

Second, we need to radically refocus on the local. When the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson launched the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, he broke down that city's many paralyzing problems into human-scale chunks of action -- turning an empty lot into a park, say, or organizing faith communities -- and then linked up the people active in each chunk. Localism gives citizens autonomy to solve problems; networked localism enables them to spread and scale those solutions.

Third, think in terms of challenges rather than orders. One of the best ways to tap collective smarts is to set great goals and let diverse solutions emerge -- to be big on the what and small on the how. This is a lesson ecologist Rafe Sagarin emphasizes in his work: challenge grants like the X Prize motivate people to participate and innovate far more than top-down directives do. How can government behave more this way?

Fourth, create platforms where citizen citizens can actively serve. Code for America plugs software developers into city halls for a year so they can help government work better and spark decentralized citizen problem-solving. It's a great program -- and a template for other kinds of talent-tapping for the common good. How about Write for America, or Design, or Build?

So what are the obstacles to the cultivation of "citizen citizenship"? One is the assumption that only the privileged can afford the time to participate. There's of course truth to that. But the rising immigrant rights movement and the emergence of domestic workers as a civic force, to name but two recent examples, suggest that where there is will to make time there's a way.

A cynic might also say that the well educated and well connected will always have an edge in the game of civic participation. Maybe. This is the benefit of a robust ecosystem of nonprofit citizen organizations that can circulate that expertise and the power of those contacts to people with fewer advantages. Think of it as progressive taxation of social capital: the more connected you are, the more obligated to pay that social wealth forward.

A final fear is that when amateurs get organized they can get coopted by the powers of the status quo. But if so, reconstitute: Mark Meckler, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots as a political amateur and an independent, found that his original network was hardening into a rigid GOP interest group. So he left and started Citizens for Self-Governance, which has a conservative bent but is dedicated to getting people from left and right to address issues like criminal justice in more creative, orthogonal ways than our politics typically allows.

Recently I came upon a billboard by a congested highway. "You're not stuck in traffic," it said. You are traffic." We aren't stuck in sclerotic government and extractive politics. We are these things. Our actions and omissions contribute to the conditions we decry. Or, to put it in positive terms: if we make the little shifts in mindset and habit to reclaim civic life, they will compound into contagion. We are the renewal of self-government we yearn for. That may sound like Obama '08 -- but it's also Reagan '80.

Citizenship, in the end, is too important to be left to professionals. It's time for us all to be trustees, of our libraries and every other part of public life. It's time to democratize democracy again.

Now Trending: Resident-Led Grantmaking

2012-05-10T07:00:00.003-05:00

I'm in Cleveland, wrapping up two days with teams from 7 organizations who are plowing new ground in the grassroots grantmaking world on resident-led grantmaking. I've been watching resident-led grantmaking take root over the past few years and am ready to say with certainty that this approach is now trending, with a growing number of funders now heading in the resident-led grantmaking direction.

When I say resident-led grantmaking, I mean grassroots grantmaking - funding that is designed to support work that happens in the citizen sector via groups that everyday people form as vehicles for mutual aid and collective action - where everyday people are making funding and program design decisions vs. funding professionals or posiitonal leaders. In the grassroots grantmaking universe, resident-led grantmaking is just one of the five decision-making approaches that funders are using (look here a chart that shows all 5 options with pros and cons). Each approach has value and can be the right approach. But resident-led grantmaking is the one approach that transforms the grantmaking process itself into a powerful and authentic vehicle for activating and elevating citizen engagement.

Grassroots Grantmakers will be generating and sharing information and tools on resident-led grantmaking over the next few months, but I want to quickly share some "what we've learned so far" insights from the people who were together in Cleveland this week - all everyday people who have deep experience as grantmakers via resident-led grantmaking commimttees in their communities.

The question posed was "what is the most valuable thing you've learned so far" insight about grassroots grantmaking. Here is a sampling of what was shared:

This work is simple but not easy.
Advancing citizen-led work is a marathon and not a sprint. It requires you to be patient but to work with a sense of urgency.
Sustainability is not about sustained money. Sustainability is about more people in the action - but not necessarily always the same people. It's about creating a sustainable culture of participation and citizen action.
Established non-profits can see this work as threatening. It challenges their good-intentioned work by saying in tangible ways that non-profits are not the ones to lead community change and community building. It's challenging because it's about a shift in the traditional power structure - especially when it comes to who gets funded.
This work isn't about the money - it's about citizen voice and action. But then again it is about the money, because having money can elevate citizen voice and action. It's just that the money is the vehicle, not the focus.
Getting the word out is especially important in this type of grantmaking, and it's relationships and personal contact rather than more traditional marketing processes that are needed to reach the people and groups that you want to be in the mix for this type of grantmaking.
Who sits on the grantmaking committee matters. This work needs people who have credibility in their community and strong belief in people.
There is a difference between an idea and a plan. People come forward with an idea, but often need help developing the idea into a plan.
It's important to remember that we are hearing about dreams and passion - about an idea that is as important to people as their own baby. The grantmaking process should be respectful of those babies.

This is an amazingly insightful list, isn't it? Watch for more to come on resident-led grantmaking in the coming months, and please be in touch if you are involved in resident-led grantmaking or want to get involved - I would love to connect and help get you connected into this fascinating conversation.

Signing On with Copernicus

2012-04-30T14:36:00.000-05:00

Do you remember Copernicus? He was the Renaissance era scientist/revolutionary who shook up conventional thinking by demoting Earth from center of the universe status to one of many planets rotating around the Sun. I'm signing on with him now, rearranging things in my big thinking on small grants universe - moving funders from the center of my universe and moving everyday people and the groups they form for mutual aid and collective action into the center. My telescope might still be focused on "Planet Funder" as it makes its way around my citizen sector sun, but it will also be focused on the other planets in my new universe - planets representing the people, places and non-monetary resources that citizen groups find helpful for moving their ideas into action and contributing to the vibrancy of their local communities.

This is not such a big deal in one way, since the big thinking on small grants world that I have been describing for several years is a world where funders strive to work from a "we begin with residents" point of view - leading from behind or by stepping back, investing in what everyday people identify as important and are willing to get behind with their own time, talents and resources. But it is a big deal in other ways.

For one, this new Copernian universe puts the role of funders, and especially the grants that they make, in the right place - secondary not primary, in the back seat and not the front seat. It also has the heat and energy to get things done originating from the right place - the citizen sector - instead of a foundation board room. It's about a core set of assumptions about how change happens and what contributes to community vitality, with people connecting and moving plans into action around things that matter to them more important than a carefully detailed theory of change or a blue ribbon panel meeting of 30 people who have prestigious positions. For those who believe that strengthening the nonprofit sector is the answer to addressing the challenges that our communities are facing, it is indeed as revolutionary as Copernicus' suggestion that the accepted picture of the universe at the time (earth in the center) just might be wrong.

What this means for this blog is that some changes are in the works. I'm waiting for inspiration for a new name that is not so grant or funder-centric (and appreciate all suggestions!) and better reflects post-Copernian thinking, and will be moving to a new blogging platform that more easily allows others to join in this conversation with me. In the meantime, I will be opening up the aperture on my blogging lens to catch and share thinking about questions such as:

What new language will help advance understanding about citizen space and what goes on there, and free us from using using inappropriate nonprofit language and models to describe and interpret a world that is fundamentally different from the nonprofit world?
How are citizen groups immunizing themselves from being hypnotized by visitors from Planet Funder and others who arrive with the better way or today's new tool? And once immunized, what are they learning about building working relationships that make sense for everyone?
What are other "joining with Copernicus" people doing to build constructive bridges between the institutions and organizations where they work - funding organizations, schools, libraries, hospitals, governmental entities, businesses, non-profits - and citizen space. And what are these inventors learning about resource sharing between citizen groups and their organizations?
What new pathways are opening up that are or have the potential to change the relationship dynamic between Planet Funder and those on the other planets in this new universe and citizen space?

I hope you will join with me in this exploration by adding on to the questions that might be worth exploring together. Comments from co-explorers are welcome.

On Target Commentary: Philanthropy's Responsibility to Democracy

2012-03-30T13:45:00.008-05:00

I'm sharing this on commentary on philanthropy's responsibility to democracy, offered by William Schambra as the closing plenary of the recent Grant Manager's Network Conference in San Antonio. I'll offer my thoughts on Schambra's speech in a follow up post.

Philanthropy's Responsibility to Democracy
by William Schambra

My marching orders from the conference organizers went something like this: be provocative, but try not to be offensive. I’ll certainly aim for the former, but I suspect, for some of you, I’m going to be the latter, and for that I apologize in advance.

Your conference theme for this year is, I see, “The Sky’s the Limit.” And your opening plenary, featuring John Colborn from the Ford Foundation, promised that he would tell you why – and I’m quoting here — “grant managers are central to philanthropic effectiveness and (perhaps) the future of civilization.”

I’m going to talk a bit this morning about the role philanthropy might play in the future of American democracy – I’m not quite sure I can quite reach all the way up to the civilizational level. And – fair warning, for those of you who are thinking you might want to slip out early to catch your flights — I’m going to be a bit less optimistic than Mr. Colborn about philanthropy’s role in that future. So your conference began on a theme of “the sky’s the limit,” and I’m afraid it may end on the theme of “this guy’s the limit.”

To ease into this rather large theme — the role that philanthropy can play in preserving American democracy — I’m going to describe an experience I had about twelve years ago, while I was a program officer at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee.

One very cold, wet, dismal, blustery spring evening in Milwaukee — those of you who have been in the upper Midwest in early spring know that there’s a lot of redundancy in that description — I was invited by a community organizer to join him and a group of a dozen or so parents and teachers in a cold, dismal, unheated field house in a park on the city’s south side. They were parents and teachers who had just learned that the school superintendent had targeted their school for significant changes in curriculum, and they were very unhappy about it.

In most American school districts, that would have been the end of the story — the parents would have had to just sigh and take what was dished out. But Milwaukee has a pretty expansive choice and charter school law. And with the help of the organizer, these parents were going to do something unthinkable and outrageous. They weren’t going to just take what was coming down at them from on high. They were going to start their own school.

For four hours that evening, these citizens discussed every aspect of what they wanted out of their own school — what was to be taught, how it was to be taught, who they were going to hire to teach it. At first, they were pretty timid and shy about it — as if they were trespassing on forbidden ground. After all, they had been told all their lives that education is an incredibly difficult and demanding thing, requiring all sorts of credentialed teachers and principals with PhDs and professional curriculum specialists.

They didn’t have any of that. They didn’t even know who to contact to turn on the heat in the field house.

But slowly, as the evening went on, they became less reserved and timorous, more engaged and vigorous, more expansive about what sort of school they wanted their own children to attend — and what sort of school they were even at that very moment designing for their children. By the end of the evening, they had established the outlines of what came to be known as the IDEAL school — IDEAL standing for Individualized Developmental Approaches to Learning. A dozen years later, it’s still going strong and enjoys a productive partnership with the YMCA in Milwaukee, with upwards of 200 students and a waiting list.

But even today, on their website, they recount the story of their humble and unpromising origins. As they say, “We started with no building, no students, and no name. What we did have was a vision.”

I came away from this evening feeling incredibly energized and excited, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and I’ve come to realize that it inspired me so deeply because I had been fortunate to witness the great and central act of American democracy. It was the act of everyday citizens coming together around a shared vision and forging their own community to embody that vision.

From nothing except a shared purpose — and in the face of all sorts of obstacles, ranging from the bureaucratic charter application process to the hostility of the teachers unions to the scorn of the education professionals telling them that parents know nothing about teaching children — they nonetheless created a nonprofit organization to solve their own problems their own way.

Now, I knew about this particular American quality in theory because I, like many of you here today, had read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. We learn therein that Americans are particularly gifted at establishing their own local organizations to solve their own problems, unlike Tocqueville’s French compatriots, who, as he puts it, tend to fold their arms and wait for government to show up to solve problems for them.

But he warns us that getting citizens to pay attention to the larger affairs of the community is very difficult, even in America. The science of association or of community-building, he warns us, is rare and difficult to sustain. First, because we democratic individuals tend to be selfish and materialistic and prone to pursue our own immediate self-interest without regard for others. Second, because narrowly self-centered individuals are all too willing to surrender to others the fuss and bother of governing. The experts in governing, in turn, would just as soon do without all those independent and obstreperous civic associations that only clutter up the orderly, top-down delivery of services.

Well, all that I knew by way of theory. But it didn’t prepare me for how awe-inspiring it would be to witness first-hand the essential Tocquevillian act of citizens gathered in a community to take back the power from centralized bureaucracy and become masters of their own future once again.

Don’t mistake this for “volunteering” or “service.” This was not nicey-nice giving blood at the Red Cross. On the issue of utmost importance to these parents — the future of their children — they were able to act, for the first time in their lives, as genuine citizens of the great American democracy.

A friend of mine who’s a labor organizer described it well: in this field, there is nothing quite like seeing citizens coming into the first realization of their own agency, and living into their ability to control their own lives.

American civil society has over the centuries been the arena within which everyday citizens come to realize their own democratic agency, no matter how marginal, neglected, or oppressed they may otherwise have been in this imperfect democracy of ours. By forming associations within civil society — what we would later call nonprofits — despised religious sects organized their own self-supporting communities. Abolitionists organized against the slave trade.

Freed and self-liberated slaves established their own churches, lodges, and burial societies. Powerless and voteless women came together in powerful reform movements to reshape the workplace for women and children, and earn for themselves the right to vote. Fraternal and ethnic associations formed among poor laborers to insure provision for their own widows and orphans. The African-American church worked to undermine and finally to topple Jim Crow.

When we in philanthropy make grants to nonprofits, it’s essential for us to remember that we hold within our grasp — we play a part in the fates of — the groups that Americans have formed over two centuries to give form and substance to the precious and rare act of self-governance. This is an awesome responsibility indeed.

Now, we don’t often think of our grant-making that way, because the nonprofits we typically see in our everyday work don’t look like passionate, self-governing democratic communities. Or rather, they don’t look that way, given the way we look at them.

What we tend to see, no matter the specific subject area, are organizations designed to deliver professional services to clients — health care to patients, jobs to applicants, artistic performances to audiences, and so forth. And when it comes to service delivery, we tend to have certain very firm notions of what’s good. Delivery should be efficient, effective, best-practice, up-to-date, professional, comprehensive, systematic, streamlined. These are all adjectives, incidentally, that I gleaned just from the first few pages of your conference program.

Now, this is hardly a new state of affairs. It was inaugurated by the first large American foundations — Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Russell Sage — at the turn of the twentieth century. In the view of these donors, we needed to get away from the piecemeal, partial, parochial approach of mere charity, which just sought to put Band-Aids on problems, and turn instead to the systematic, efficient, wholesale solution of public problems once and for all, by getting at their root causes. The way to do that was to take our public affairs out of the hands of everyday citizens, and put them instead into the hands of professional experts. They were being trained in the new natural and social sciences, which would allegedly enable them to reach and alter root causes. Our problems would now be addressed not by citizens clumsily working out superficial remedies with each other in local association, but rather by credentialed experts, smoothly delivering therapeutic services to passive, grateful clients. In other words, our first major foundations seemed to encourage precisely the short-circuiting of democracy so much feared by Tocqueville — the displacement of the everyday citizen from democratic self-governance by centralized bureaucratic service providers.

In recent years, this displacement has been further encouraged by the nonprofit sector’s enthrallment to the corporate model. You’re all familiar with this powerful urge to make nonprofits more business-like. We say that a nonprofit needs a business plan; it should consider contributions “investments;” it needs to be more entrepreneurial; it needs to focus on generating fees for service; it needs to describe outcomes with clear, concise measurements, just like the profit and loss statements of the business world.

This approach to philanthropy has only been reinforced over the past few years by the entry of so many newly wealthy entrepreneurs into the world of philanthropy.

Consider this comment by Charles Bronfman and Jeffrey Solomon in their recent book The Art of Giving, which captures perfectly this new philanthropic attitude. As they put it:

[These new] donors . . . are ready to make use of the sophisticated management instruments they have developed in their business life to achieve greater performance in this new, more challenging arena. . . . . .[T]hey give purposefully, think strategically, rely on measurements and regular monitoring.

Nonprofits should be run just as crisply as for-profits. Meetings should start on time and end on time too. They should not be social gatherings that drag on endlessly for no purpose.

I particularly like that last comment — about the crisp conduct of nonprofit meetings — because it captures perfectly the two contrasting ways to look at a nonprofit. Are nonprofit meetings just obligatory calendar entries, occasions to clip through an agenda briskly and efficiently, glancing at the performance dashboard, digesting data, and peering at PowerPoints? Or are they not in fact sometimes precisely social gatherings — leisurely opportunities for citizens to come together and socialize, to form deeper personal bonds of friendship and trust, to create a community, as well as to conduct business? Is a nonprofit just another business, or is it not also often an instrument of democratic self-governance?

Beginning with Robert Putnam’s monumental volume of research, entitled Bowling Alone, published a decade ago, philanthropy has been concerned about the issue of civic disengagement in America — the fact that citizens are becoming far less involved with each other in the sort of social and political undertakings that Tocqueville once described as the very essence of the American character.

Indeed, there’s even a thoughtful foundation affinity group, Philanthropy for Active Civil Engagement, or PACE, the purpose of which is to attempt to reverse that trend.

But the irony is that philanthropy itself may be contributing to that very disengagement from civic life. That is precisely the cost of regarding nonprofits primarily as efficient and effective service-providers, rather than as instruments of democratic self-governance.

When citizens undertake to do something for themselves, it can of course be amateurish, time-consuming, sloppy, contentious, and clumsy. But in the final analysis, what they’ve achieved is likely to endure and to succeed, because it’s rooted in the opinions and values of the citizens themselves, those whom the programs are meant to serve.

More important, as Tocqueville told us, no matter how awkward the outcomes, this approach also serves to draw people out of the isolated, individualistic shells into which they’re likely to retreat in materialistic times. It engages them in the always messy and tumultuous processes of self-government. It may be frustrating and exasperating to those who prefer crisp, business-like meetings. But this grittiness and tumult are ultimately essential ingredients of the humanizing and democratizing process of self-government.

If we’re only interested in efficiency, then indeed it may be better to resort to professional experts, who have a neatly organized menu of standard operating procedures to deliver services smoothly and quickly. But all too often, without the engagement of the citizens affected, those services come to be resented and resisted as outside impositions, rather than native-grown products of self-government.

Furthermore, and more important, by employing experts to undertake the tasks of democratic government, we’ve relieved citizens of the need to engage with each other and to work out their differences in their own messy and amateurish ways. That can only spell the end of democratic self-governance.

Now, consider all the standards and practices that philanthropy increasingly demands of the nonprofit world:

Ever longer and more elaborate application processes;
Ever more burdensome reporting requirements;
Ever more complicated ways of describing goals through logic models and theories of change;
Ever more sophisticated modes of measuring outcomes;
Ever more elaborate ways to evaluate results.

All of these foundation demands flow naturally from the view that nonprofits should be more businesslike. And they flow naturally from the view that foundations aren’t there just to assist nonprofits in putting Band-Aids on problems, but are rather driving scientifically toward root cause solutions of those problems. And these demands are perfectly amenable to the large, sophisticated nonprofits whose primary purpose is indeed to deliver professional services to passive clients. We’ll hear no complaint from them about this state of affairs. As part of their elaborate expert apparatus, they employ professionals whose entire purpose it is to address the needs and desires of other professionals employed by foundations.

But for the smaller nonprofit launched by everyday citizens who urgently need to solve some immediate problem in their own backyard — for the organization that would serve to convert passive clients into active citizens — all of these requirements put out of reach any hope for a grant, thereby ruling out philanthropy as a solution to the problem of civic disengagement.

So the nonprofits that we foundations see do indeed all tend to look like efficient service-deliverers, because that’s precisely what our own requirements and procedures encourage or even demand. At the same time, they serve to discourage or even filter out altogether non-professional, amateur, self-governing democratic associations.

Now, the sad thing is that all of this is so unnecessary, in the world of philanthropy. For government, of course there must be strict requirements for soliciting and reporting on grants, because it’s the taxpayers’ money. If a nonprofit runs a business or sells its services, of course we expect certain corporate-like practices, to avoid fatal mismanagement. But for the foundation, there are no such strictures.

Philanthropy has extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, freedom to do with its resources whatever it wishes, within some legal boundaries that are pretty generous and undemanding. It would be entirely possible for a foundation to announce today that it was not going to fund delivery of professional services anymore, with all the burdensome requirements that entails. Instead the foundation could announce as its purpose the cultivation of self-government among democratic citizens. It would not put out RFPs or delineate narrow program areas or create its own nonprofit subsidiaries to carry out its own programs. It would rather announce that funding is available for whatever efforts citizens come up with in the give and take of immediate civic deliberation.

The application process would be brief; the reporting requirements kept to the legal minimum; and the grant would be for general operating support, renewable for as many years as the foundation and the nonprofit see fit to cooperate. As I say, foundations have the freedom to undertake this sort of radically free-form and democratic grant-making.

But as with Steve Martin in the old “Saturday Night Live” sketches, at the end of this exuberant thought experiment, I’m afraid the answer of philanthropy will be — “nah.”

Short of that, I ask all of you, as you leave this conference armed with lots of new information and skills in grant management, to remember this: the organizations you deal with every day once were, and potentially still can be, the vessels by which Americans have tried to govern themselves for more than two centuries.

As Tocqueville argued, democratic self-governance is a rare and precious thing, all too readily surrendered by citizens to professional experts who are only too happy to take charge. Given the institutional requirements of government and business, they aren’t likely to care too much about, or to tend to the preservation of, the democratic heart of the nonprofit sector. Only philanthropy has the freedom and the mandate to do so. In that sense, you may very well hold within your hands the future of American democracy, if not civilization itself.I particularly like that last comment — about the crisp conduct of nonprofit meetings — because it captures perfectly the two contrasting ways to look at a nonprofit. Are nonprofit meetings just obligatory calendar entries, occasions to clip through an agenda briskly and efficiently, glancing at the performance dashboard, digesting data, and peering at PowerPoints? Or are they not in fact sometimes precisely social gatherings — leisurely opportunities for citizens to come together and socialize, to form deeper personal bonds of friendship and trust, to create a community, as well as to conduct business? Is a nonprofit just another business, or is it not also often an instrument of democratic self-governance?

Grace Lee Boggs On "Becoming Detroit"

2012-03-20T14:06:00.001-05:00

Here's a powerful way to spend an hour. Tune into "Becoming Detroit", a recent episode of Krista Tippet's On Being podcast. Krista's interviews with civic rights legend Grace Lee Boggs and others who are reinventing Detroit are inspiring. They also get to the heart of why it's so important for funders to think big about small grants and invest in everyday people who are re-discovering, re-imaging and re-spiriting their communities - without using the awkward, often de-humanizing language that we use in philanthropy.

I've been thinking about language alot recently - reminded again recently about the limitations of the language that we're using to describe grassroots grantmaking. I find it discouraging that the language that is most easily digestible by philanthropy is about professionalized solutions delivered by organizations and not about people. It was thus so refreshing to listen to the conversations shared in this podcast - so refreshing that I jotted down some of the phrases that caught my attention.

You have to make a way out of "no way".

Activism is often more about rights when we need to be talking about advancing humanity.

There's something about people who are doing something for themselves - creating the world anew.

People have been seduced by size - by the idea of the mass media. They haven't realized that by creating solutions to everyday problems, they are creating movements.

The disintegration of neighborhood and community makes it difficult for us to know how to care for each other; we are now relearning how to do that.

What does it mean to be a human being? In America, you can't be successful unless you can consume or produce - but you still have value as a human being.

It's not just a warm and fuzzy garden; its about people becoming part of an ecological system.

Progress comes about via something new or rediscovering something old - and reinventing what you discover for today's world.

It's important for change-agents to know the difference between "necessary" and "possible"; it's possibility that demands the most of us.

Detroit as the City of Hope - where people are creating hope for themselves.

Our right and our duty is to shape the world with a new dream, and to rebuild, redefine and respirit our city.

Check it out, and join me in working on this gnarly problem of language by sharing what this sparked for you or another resource that you have spotted that brings humanity into the center of the discussion about big thinking on small grants.

Finding a Grassroots Grantmaker

2012-03-01T12:54:00.003-06:00

I had a conversation with a small group of great people earlier this week I've had way too often. I was wrapping up a short talk on grassroots grantmaking and the network, Grassroots Grantmakers, when a young man raised his hand to share his story about trying to find someone - anyone - who is interested in what he and his neighbors are doing and could help them get connected to the modest resources they need to work on their next idea. He really identified with my "big thinking on small grants" perspective and was surprised to learn that there are funders out there who actually open their doors to people like her. He asked where he could go in his community to find one of those funders and what he needed to say or do to open the door. I answered him with the what I have to say way too often. In terms of funders who thing big about small grants and are interested in ideas like yours, there's no one at home in your community.

I was thinking about this and the disconnect I see between people with energy, passion and the will do work that could be described as the work of active citizens and place-based funders who have connections, resources and mandate to acknowledge and strengthen the contribution of such work to community vitality and viability when I spotted Rich Harwood's recent blog post about the importance of community anchor institutions. I was thinking about how many people would read Rich's blog and then identify a funding organization as a community anchor institution that felt welcoming, and a place that had the confidence of everyday people to help to spark and lead change, convene and connect others, and focus on the community (rather than programs alone).

My hunch is in most places, funding organizations are thought of as mysterious places - where money is stacked up and given out in mysterious ways. And I've seen funding organizations that seem to actually cultivate that impression. But the good news is that I have also seen funding organizations that work really hard to be accessible, transparent community anchor instituions. And I'm with Rich - when that happens, the moon and stars line up to open up a new environment of possibilities.

What I would add, however, is that when it's funding organizations we're talking about as community anchor institutions, grassroots grantmaking is almost always there - increasing the funding organization's reach, legitimacy and breadth of intellectual capital that changes the equation from mysterious community institution to powerful community anchor institution.

While I try to keep my focus on the full part of the glass and the possibilities that the entrepreneurial funders that I know about are creating, I must say that I'm more than a bit perplexed by the few places that grassroots grantmaking is showing up - especially considering that in the United States alone, there are:

650 community foundations (and these are defined as tax-exempt, nonprofit, autonomous, publicly supported, nonsectarian philanthropic institutions with a long term goal of building permanent, named component funds established by many separate donors to carry out their charitable interests and for the broad-based charitable interest of and for the benefit of residents of a defined geographic area, typically no larger than a state);
89,000 private foundations - with at least some specifically focused on the vitality of a local community;
more than 1200 local United Ways;
and countless community-focused public-sector and non-profit organizations.

And, considering that grassroots grantmaking is a low cost/high return proposition, I just have to ask why more funders are not including grassroots grantmaking in their portfolio of grantmaking strategies. I've been poking around on that question recently, and have some hunches that range from big boulder obstacles to things that should be easily swept aside - many that I've written about from time to time on this blog and others that I'm still exploring.

Nevertheless, if I had my way, I would be able to say "call here" whenever I'm asked about what funding organization in a particular community is the go-to, big thinking place for groups of everyday people who have skin in the game when it comes to their community. And when people showed up at the door of that funding organization, they would find places where what Rich Hardwood is describing is happening, but they would also find places that feel good - like places of possibility.

So now I'm asking you. Do you know of a funding organization that meets the criteria that Rich describes as a community anchor institution and, for everyday people, feels like a place of possibility? If so, please share a story about that place or some thoughts about what makes it stand out for you. We need more real-live examples of a boulder-breaking funders - an important step in making it easier for all of us to find a grassroots grantmakers in every community.

Inner Visions and the Power of One

2012-02-16T16:05:00.000-06:00

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with the bigness of the problems that you are trying to address and wonder what difference you can possibly make? I do. Often. That's why I find so much inspiration in people who find a way to make a difference, one step at a time, in the most surprising ways. And I'm inspired now.

Imagine that you are living in a city that was just awarded the dubious honor of "Poorest City in the United States" and you are just one person, volunteering with a transitional housing program and tutoring a young boy from one of those neighborhoods that always show up on lists that include words like "poor" or the more politically correct "challenged" in their title. What more than you are doing could you do?

I talked with a woman who was in exactly that position this morning. I first met Jan Thrope last winter when Grassroots Grantmakers organized a special training for delegations from Cleveland and Denver in Lawrence, MA with Lawrence Community Works. I saw Jan again this fall in Atlanta as Grassroots Grantmakers' most recent On the Ground learning gathering. But this morning was the first time that we really talked. I contacted Jan because I had heard about the Good News Tours that she is now doing and was curious. As Jan shared her story, I quickly went from curious to inspired.

Jan talked about the discouragement she felt when Cleveland was named Poorest City a few years ago and the new determination she felt to be part of something that made a difference. She isn't a native of Cleveland but has lived there long enough to have deep roots and the ability to see a different side of Cleveland than that distinction suggested. A man who spoke at a poverty summit that she was attending brought the conversation about big plans and big programs back to the ground for her - saying that what he really needed most was some underwear. Who in that room was thinking about real people like him, in very real situations like his?

Jan had that in mind as she was working with the young boy she was tutoring, and began to listen to this young boy in new ways - hearing what he thought about his neighborhood and then taking pictures of what places he described. She also heard dreams in what he was telling her - not just despair. These conversations and these photos resulted in an amazing book - Inner Visions: Grassroots Stories of Truth and Hope - on sale now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and, hopefully, your local bookseller, with all profits going to support community work in Cleveland.

So that's Chapter 1 - and Chapters 2 and 3 get even better. Jan has now established Inner Visions of Cleveland, an organization that is dedicated to transforming Cleveland and East Cleveland neighborhoods into thriving communities by supporting community improvement projects that are initiated and led by residents. Jan describes Inner Visions as a non-profit but then goes on to say that she was intentional about not seeking non-profit status for the organization, saying that the red-tape in obtaining that status and the responsibilities that go along with having the status felt more like a barrier to doing what she had in mind. She wondered if there was another way, and is indeed finding that way. Working with a commitment to using all donations and proceeds from books sales to fund community projects, and a belief that "small bucks can bring about big change when neighbors work towards shared goals and contribute their talents to projects", Jan is focused on getting things done by creating connections between people who are on journeys from pain to passion to purpose - a journey she says all people share, regardless of their economic situations.

As one way to do this, Jan has been experimenting with Good News Tours - relationship-building excursions that are designed to challenge the perception that poor neighborhoods are devoid of hope and possibilities and plant relationship seeds that can grow into purpose-driven connections. This weekend she will taking 15 people - including an 11 year boy who wants to get other kids excited about giving back to their community, people of wealth who are open to a new way of giving, and people from a church in a neighborhood they will be visiting - on a Good News Tour. And good news is abundant on this tour, with these stops along the way:

Breakfast prepared by a woman who offers healthy cooking classes for community residents, using organic, locally grown food;
A visit with a powerful woman who has been at the forefront of responding to the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland and is now working on creative ideas to put vacant houses back to good use for community purposes;
Another woman who is establishing a new business, making organic beauty products;
A visit with an entrepreneur who has a green dry cleaning business (and teaches a class on entrepreneurship to neighborhood youth) and dreams of using the heat generated from the dryers to warm a greenhouse that can house a new youth-led business, growing and selling produce and flowers;
A visit with a printer and bookmaker who is creating journals of hand-made paper produced from the fibers from military uniforms for returning veterans to use to share their stories.

So think about it. Imagine the connections that are about to happen, the stereotypes that are about to be challenged, the possibilities that are about to turn into realities. Now imagine what would be lost if this all had to happen within non-profit organizations on both the giving and receiving side of the equations. And think about - and be inspired by - the power of one. Kudos to you, Jan!

The Gray Zone

2012-02-14T10:56:00.000-06:00

Grassroots Grantmakers is digging into a new project in 2012 with the help of Rachel Oscar. Rachel is working with Grassroots Grantmakers as an AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer, focused on helping our network learn more about resident-led grantmaking.

We could also call resident-led grantmaking constituent-led grantmaking - at its most basic, grantmaking that is designed in a way that positions people who have "skin in the game" as grant proposal reviewers, evaluators and decision-makers. In most cases in our network, that means people who live together in a neighborhood are making decisions about grants that benefit their neighborhood.

We have spotted resident-led grantmaking as an exciting trend within our network, and have asked Rachel to help us see the resident-led grantmaking experience through the eyes of the residents who are serving on resident-led grantmaking committees and to help us develop tools that will help funder who are either currently using the resident-led grantmaking approach or want to move in that direction. We hope that what we learn will help funders spot and avoid avoid the pitfalls of this approach and pave the way for a better, more powerful experience for grantmaking committee members. If you want more specifics about this project, check out this short article on our website.

With that background, I am sharing an insightful reflection that Rachel wrote after sitting in on a discussion with people who work with The Cleveland Foundations' Neighborhood Connections' resident-led grantmaking committee in Cleveland. I will be sharing reflections from Rachel from time to time on this blog. You can also check out Rachel's Reflections on Grassroots Grantmakers' website.

The Gray Zone
by Rachel Oscar

The tricky thing about grassroots grantmaking is that it operates in the nebulous gray space of the funding world. Behind the foundation walls are dollars and cents that add up very neatly, accounts receivable records coming through humming fax machines, and proof of non-profit status reports in piles across cubicle desks. On the streets of Cleveland City’s neighborhoods the papers don’t stack up quite as nicely and in many cases there aren’t even papers to stack. There are grassroots groups that operate out of community centers and homes, there are neighbors and friends that clean up their local parks, and there are teachers and students whose projects are only just ideas on paper. Community projects are widespread and diverse and, as you can imagine, difficult to hold to a set of grantmaking rules. But in the grantmaking world where clear expectations and rules are essential parts of doing business, how do you accommodate small, neighborhood grants?

Enter: The Gray Zone. As I mentioned grassroots grantmaking functions in the gray zone of the funding world. But here is the kicker, grassroots grantmaking programs do this intentionally. While it may seem far easier to build a set of all-encompassing rules that will quality and disqualify groups for funding, the truth is that in order to have a successful program the rules have to be relatively loose. I was at a lunch meeting a couple days ago with a group of people who provide support and technical assistance to Neighborhood Connections grantees. In the Neighborhood Connection circles these technical assistance providers are called Connectors. The group was sharing successes and problems they faced when conducting their site visits. People raised concerns about how tempting it is for non-profits that act as fiscal agents to to present their own projects as resident-led projects and about residents who apply for multiple grants for the same project in an attempt to get more money. The Connectors started brainstorming about rules that could be put in place to deal with these challenges – more rules for fiscal agents and more rules for residents.

As I reflected on the suggestions, it became clearer and clearer that there couldn’t really be any one hard rule put in place to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Because, as members of the grantmaking committee will tell you, some of the most unlikely characters have seen some of the greatest successes and some projects that have been set up for success have seen failure. Neighborhood grantmaking seems clunky because it’s as much about people and relationships as it is about good planning and experience. As I continue to observe it, it becomes clear just how crucial the skills and talents of the grantmaking committees are—specifically resident-led grantmaking committees. They are the champions of The Gray Zone. Their observations and discussions help navigate this nebulous space and identify which applicants are working to achieve the goals of Neighborhood Connections: strengthening neighborhood relationships, building community capacity, and empowering grassroots community groups.

What has been your experience with the contribution that everyday people can make in the gray zone? Or do you have thoughts about resident-led grantmaking to share? We're all ears. Post a comment here or connect with us via email.

The Big Three for Grassroots Grantmaking

2012-02-08T10:21:00.000-06:00

Grassroots Grantmakers kicked off its 2012 webinar series recently with a conversation about grassroots grantmaking through an environmental lens. Three leading grassroots environmental funders - Cheryl King Fischer from the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund, Tim Little from the Rose Foundation's Northern California Grassroots Environmental Fund, and Kelly Purdy from Global Greengrants Fund - shared insights on these questions:

Issue-specific grassroots grantmaking - how it is alike or different from the more generic grassroots grantmaking that is used for broad civic engagement and community building purposes?
What can issue focused grassroots grantmaking do beyond giving voice to residents?
What are you already doing that might be considered environmental grantmaking - and how can you be more intentional and effective in that work?
How can you employ grassroots grantmaking to position you to effectively do place-based funding in multiple places?

There was a lot of funding wisdom shared on this webinar. When I asked Cheryl, Tim and Kelly to sum up their remarks with their top three list for funders who are approaching environmental work through a grassroots grantmaking lens, here's what they said - stellar recommendations for big thinkers on small grants everywhere, regardless of the issue:

Remember that even if you are not a place-based funder, grassroots grantmaking is a place-based proposition - requiring funders to go the extra mile to understand the local context. For Cheryl, that means understanding the nuanced contextual differences between the hundreds of communities in New England where NEGEF has funding relationships. For Tim, that means never assuming that one community in California works like another - and remaining curious about the differences. And for Kelly and her colleagues at the Global Greengrants Fund, that means investing in the relationships they need to work authentically and appropriately in 140 different countries with 13 regional advisory boards representing areas from Brazil to Russia to West Africa.
Work with a spirit of co-creation and the belief that people coming together can find the answers. When I asked about balancing a commitment to working from a grassroots perspective - focusing on what everyday people can do - and a desire to have impact on pressing environmental concerns, all three of my guests spoke about traveling down the road with everyday people to get from here to there. I was impressed that they did not describe themselves as leaders - leading new people down the road - but instead as fellow-travelers. While there was experience to share, it was clear that the sharing is multi-dimensional, with funders, those with specific issue-oriented expertise, and the grassroots groups that they are funding all sharing and learning. People coming together can find the answers.
Trust the community. Trusting gets back to the "we begin with residents" position that the best big thinkers on small grants utilize - fully understanding how important it is to involve grantees in setting the objectives that they will be expected to achieve. This is true no matter what - even if you're interested in those issues where you can also call on a full array of experienced professionals on such livelihood, transportation, health, environment, education - issues that directly impact the people that you are engaging with grassroots grantmaking.

So smart. Thanks, Cheryl, Tim and Kelly for reminding us of the big three for grassroots grantmaking.

If you missed this webinar but would like to check it out, the recording and associated materials are available on Grassroots Grantmakers' website. Also check out and register for the upcoming webinar - Community Network Building (February 21, 3:00 ET), featuring Bill Traynor and Frankie Blackburn sharing insights from a recent convening of a group of highly innovative community network builders. Hope to see you there.

Lessons from Hamilton about Balancing Strategy and "We Begin with Residents" Grantmaking

2012-01-11T14:24:00.000-06:00

I am back from a holiday hiatus, looking forward to another year of thinking big about small grants and connecting with big thinkers everywhere via this blog. I can't think of a better way to begin the year than to share the thoughtful work of The Hamilton Community Foundation, one of the funders affiliated with Grassroots Grantmakers, the network that I lead as Executive Director. I have followed the work of The Hamilton Community Foundation for almost ten years and have huge respect for their work. If I could point to one funder and say "look here for patient money in action", I would be pointing toward Hamilton.

You can learn more about The Hamilton Community Foundation's approach to grassroots grantmaking by checking out the profile that we just updated on Grassroots Grantmakers' website or watching the wonderful video below.

As I read their profile and looked at their video, I remembered how nervous I was when I learned that they were moving their "Growing Roots" grassroots grantmaking out into the community, fearful that this move was really more about putting the program "out to pasture" so it could fade into the sunset. I heard what they were saying about the strategic decision that is described in the video, but was worried because of what I have seen happen with other grassroots grantmaking programs, when moving out really means "done with you" from the funder's point of view. How wrong I was to be worried.

The hub concept that they are utilizing, with hubs designed to be authentic community spaces (vs. institutional spaces that where community residents feel more like guests or clients) and the approach that they are taking to balancing community planning and priority setting and the more nuanced, day to day work that strengthens people to people connections and supports neighbors coming together in a spirt of mutual aid, has a lot to teach us about balancing funding priorities (in their case, alleviating poverty) while working from a "we begin with residents" perspective.

Take a look - you'll see what I mean.

Thanks to the team at The Hamilton Community Foundation for your generosity in sharing your work and your learning with our big thinking community!

Opening Up New Possibilities with Personal Stories

2011-12-05T21:07:00.000-06:00

I've been on the road throughout the fall, connecting with the amazing funders across Grassroots Grantmakers' network in a variety of ways - itching to share what I've been spotting on this blog but only now having the back-home time to sort through ideas and see what how they add up.

What is coming to mind first is my time in Indianapolis earlier this fall with members of Grassroots Grantmakers' EngAGEment Learning Circle - teams from Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, Denver, Ohio's Mahoning Valley, rural Minnesota and Indianapolis who began a two-year exploration of the intersection of grassroots grantmaking and aging last summer as part of our partnership with Grantmakers in Aging’s EngAGEment Initiative. Over the next two years, we’ll be using the lens of grassroots grantmaking – with its focus on people as active citizens, its asset-based community development orientation, its emphasis on skillfully adapting community building and community organizing practice to elevate the role of community residents, and its artful way of using grants as an invitation instead of a destination – to explore two questions: 1) how to work as grassroots grantmakers with more intentionality about bringing older adults more fully into community in the places where we’re funding, and 2) what insights grassroots grantmaking can bring to the broader field of aging-related funding.

Since this was the first in-person meeting of this learning circle and we were laying groundwork for two years of work together, we put a high premium on getting acquainted and establishing a culture of learning at the Indy meeting. We began our first day together with the map exercise that is part of Lawrence Community Works' NeighborCircle process – using this exercise to share our personal journeys, specifically those experiences that have shaped our perceptions of aging. I knew that this exercise would be a powerful team-building vehicle, but what I didn’t expect was the thread that ran through all of our stories - the important role that older people - grandparents or surrogate grandparents - had played in our lives. These stories provided a powerful reminder of how much younger people need older people in their lives – even when society suggests that it is older people who are the needy ones.

This experience and others over those two days really resonated with me. When I was very young, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents – fortunate to have four grandparents living in the same town with me. My memories of time with them are so very special, and I've wondered in my adult years if they knew how much I learned from them - or ever imagined that decades later, I would still be thinking about them with love in my heart. When I was a new mother, thinking about the environment that I wanted for my children, one of the most important things on my list was a multi-generational neighborhood. Knowing that our realities included grandparents who lived far away, I wanted to find older people who could be in my children's day to day lives - and lucked out with a neighborhood that included wonderful elderly neighbors in the houses to the right, to the left, and across the street. And now that I'm of an age where I am a grandmother myself, struggling with ambivalence about my grey hair and AARP card, the realities of “aging” and “older adult” are becoming even more personal on a day to day basis.

The thing about aging is that, unlike other issues that we can work on from a distance, we all have personal stories about this issue.

When I think back to the work that learning circle members did together over our two days in Indy, what strikes me is how important it was for us to connect in with our personal stories on aging. When we make that connection, it’s almost impossible to draw a box around aging – taking the older people in our community out of a community context and setting them down in a world that is mainly about services instead of real give-get relationships.

I want to encourage big thinkers everywhere to join our learning circle members in thinking about how your personal stories have shaped the way you think about (and work on) issues that are so often de-personalized – aging in particular, but also immigration, poverty, education, the environment, health. And to think about how you can use your personal stories to open up opportunities for your colleagues, your grantees, and people in the communities where you are working to think in new ways about the work that they are doing – specifically about how that work resonates with their experiences as a family member, a neighbor and a friend. My experience is that when I share something unexpected – a personal story – others find the freedom to share something that just might change the conversation.

Relationships First, Results Later

2011-11-13T15:48:00.004-06:00

I was in Atlanta recently with a fantastic group of big thinkers, attending Grassroots Grantmakers most recent On the Ground learning gathering. We were hosted by the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta and Atlanta's Place-Based Funders, and had the privilege of hearing stories of community change and transformation associated with the work of these funders over the past two decades. Thank you, Atlanta, for rolling out the red carpet and making us feel at home!

As so often happens at On the Grounds, a theme emerged. As we heard about work in Atlanta from both the funders' point of view and the community residents' point of view, and as those stories triggered conversations about our "back home experiences", we kept coming back to one thing. I could call it a common denominator rather than a theme, because a commitment to this one thing seemed to make the difference between projects that worked and those that didn't. It was "relationships first, results later".

I can spot some eyes rolling out there. What? I need to blindly invest in relationships without putting those results outcomes on the table, with timelines and clear expectations? Is this more about the importance of the "soft work", when I have to justify putting this money on the table to people who are all about results?

Yes, you need to invest in relationship, but there's nothing blind about it. It's the first investment you make on the path to results.

When I think about the twenty year evolution of Grassroots Grantmakers, the network, and grassroots grantmaking, the practice, I think about sparks of "relationships first, results later" insight, based on solid community experience, trying to light a fight in a "results first" world. I also think about well-intentioned community interventions over those same twenty years - well-orchestrated, professionally-engineered, well-funded initiatives with logic models, benchmarks, and tight timelines that attracted a lot of attention, ramped up expectations, but failed to deliver the community change they promised. It seems that where grassroots grantmaking shines - in using a relationship-oriented grantmaking approach to invite people - people in relationship with others in their community - into action, is where the big box community change approaches falter. And where grassroots grantmaking programs often falter - thinking big enough about what groups of active citizens can do - is where the big box approaches get it right.

I heard a story in Atlanta that I've heard dozens of times: Enthusiastic investor with a specific idea, money on the table, and a neighborhood in mind. The problem is that the investor's understanding of the neighborhood came from data, driving around and a few conversations. The idea may be a good idea - one that worked somewhere else and maybe even was designed by community residents somewhere else. So the assumption is that it can be picked up and planted here with the same results.

The other side to this story is the local funder, pulled in as partner because of their community knowledge and proven track record. They know that they are skating on thin ice because their relationships are thin in this particular neighborhood, but give it everything they've got to make this work, hoping that they can make up some relationship building ground in the drive to the results finish line. And you can guess what happens.

I also heard another story that I've heard before - but want to hear again and again. I heard about the Zeist Foundation's deep and long-term commitment to the Edgewood neighborhood and was impressed by their patient money investments in both things (clinics, housing) and relationships and the understanding of the connection. I also heard about the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta's history of adeptly using small grants as a mechanism to build and continually expand their relationships with people beyond the usual suspects in their 23 county region – and using these relationships as the basis for some significant results-generating work with a range of results-oriented partners. I was moved by the stories that the residents from the Adamsville neighborhood told of their work – how it changed each of them and their community; it was obvious that the value that the residents placed on their relationships with each other was indeed the secret sauce in the results that they achieved.

When you see it, it seems so obvious. So why do we keep trying to do it the other way? I’d love some help with this question: If we can embrace a vision of communities where people are initiators rather than by-standers, where everyone is connected to at least someone, where mutual aid supplants at least some of the services that are now delivered by paid professionals, and people understand how to use their collective voice to make change, how can we miss the importance of investing in relationships as an essential step in achieving the results we want?

Comments, anyone?

"What If" Spices Up The Gifford Foundation's Work in Syracuse

2011-10-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

Travels took me to upstate New York last week, presenting at the New York State Funders Conference in Ithaca at the invitation of the Grantmakers Forum of New York, and then trekking over to Syracuse to spend a day with the amazing big thinkers at the Rosamond Gifford Foundation. Sheena Solomon, the Gifford Foundation's Director of Neighborhood Initiatives, was my partner for the NYS Funders Conference, bringing my presentation on grassroots grantmaking to life with her remarks on how grassroots grantmaking is showing up in Syracuse and what she has learned about the difference between a small grants as a funding transaction and small grants as a vehicle for powerful resident engagement.

Of all the great things I could share about the Gifford Foundation's work in Syracuse, it's "What If" that's on my mind. Gifford introduced their "What If" mini-grant program earlier this year after working very deeply in two Syracuse neighborhoods for over six years. Resident-led groups from all Syracuse neighborhoods can tap into What if mini-grants of $5,000 or less.

Here's what I love about The Gifford Foundation's What If mini-grant program:

Rolling application deadlines, a simple application, and a solid pre-application workshop, all contributing to a program that is more about inviting community groups in than using the grant application period to screen applicants out.
A clear statement about who the Gifford Foundation had in mind for What If mini-grants - groups, associations, and neighbors with not one mention of non-profit organizations.
Just as much clarity about the type of capacity building projects that What If mini-grants are designed to fund, with almost no funder jargon sprinkled in. Check out what they have to say and you'll see what I mean.
The link that has already been established, even in the first year of the mini-grant program, with the Community Foundation for Central York's Leadership Classroom to connect some big thinking What If grantees with additional capacity building opportunities.
The What If Film Series - a fun way to use documentaries that share stories of people coming to together to make a difference in their communities to spark ideas and inspire action.
And of course I love this.....that the networking that Sheena did with Grassroots Grantmakers planted the seed and provided the fertilizer for the What If mini-grant program.

Way to go, Gifford Foundation. Keep asking "what if" and spicing it up in Syracuse!

The Spice in Your Civic Engagement Salsa

2011-10-17T20:10:00.006-05:00

Have some salsa, without the spices. That's like supporting civic engagement without small grants.

I'm talking specifically about grassroots grantmaking today, and by that I mean the work that funders do to support everyday people coming together for mutual aid or collective action. Truth is, every time I talk about big thinking on small grants, I'm talking about grassroots grantmaking, and here's why.

Many if not most funders say that they care about resident engagement. Many of these funders do really good jobs of engaging residents without grassroots grantmaking - using everything that comes with the grassroots grantmaking package except small grants. And that's fine. So much more fine than funders or other powerful institutional players who speed past residents because engagement is too messy, too time consuming, too this or too that.

But what I would like to tell these funders who are doing really good jobs of engaging residents without grassroots grantmaking is that their work can come alive in new ways, their investments can do so much more to tip the scale towards community vitality and resilience, if they bring small grants into the picture - in a big thinking way, of course.

The big thinking way of small grants means that we're talking about a lot more than a funding transaction. But we are indeed talking about a funding transaction – a deal that a funder makes with a group that says we believe in your idea, you have something to offer to this picture, and we have confidence that you can deliver. It's also about something that comes with a plan, a timeline, an end-point that signals "take stock (were you able to do what you were trying to do) and reflect (what have we all learned from what happened or didn't happen), and a budget that lays out what money can do and suggests what only people can do that money can't do.

The spice the small grants bring to a funder's civic engagement picture is the spice that most directly propels people with good ideas into action with some intentionality and built-in accountability that keeps them going when life intervenes and sets the stage for the power of learning through doing. That's kind of learning is so much more powerful than learning through just thinking, talking or advising others who are the do-ers. It's like the difference between thinking about the type of parent you will be, how you would handle that unruly child four seats up in the airplane and being in that seat with your child. It's about the difference between issues that other people take on, and the issues that are so personally important, exciting or personal that you're compelled to take them on yourself. It's about moving from supporting actor to center stage as an essential member of the cast.

If you're a funder who is serving up civic engagement salsa without some grassroots grantmaking spiciness, here are some suggestions for a new recipe with some ingredients that are probably already in your cupboard:

Incorporate small grant opportunities in your dialogue processes as a way to help the people around dialogue tables who "click" with a hot idea move that idea into action.
If you've been convening around a certain issue or engaging community residents in a planning process, invite even more people into the action by inviting community residents to present an idea for how they would address that issue or move forward on a goal via a small grant. I can guarantee that the ideas (and people) you will see will expand on the ideas that even the most expertly facilitated community process will surface – with a promise that community residents are not going to suggest another literacy program if you issue an invitation for creative thinking on how to encourage more people in the community to read with a small grants program rfp.
Invite one of your well-connected community partners to expand their repertoire and move into the role of funder world by managing a small grants fund – and, after being clear about the most minimalist list that you can come up with of "do's and don'ts", ask them to be as creative as they can be in setting it up so that it will invite in more than the usual suspects. This will be good for you, good for your community partner and good for the community.
Put the question out there – how could some small grants help get some things done in this community in a way that involves the people we're not seeing now – and listen carefully for some good ideas.

I've had it both ways, but I want some spice with my salsa. And you?

The Big Grant Part of the Small Grants Landscape

2011-10-09T12:52:00.002-05:00

I recently returned from two days with directors of state agencies working in the developmental disabilities world, making some introductions about grassroots grantmaking as a tool that could be really useful in opening up new relationships and possibilities that focus more on people and less on disabilities. Loved the group, loved the conversation, loved the ideas that began percolating.

As we were talking about the small grants work that is core to grassroots grantmaking, I could sense the discomfort of some in the room about getting into the small grants business. As people began listing the "why nots" of small grants - transaction costs, staff time required when your goal is to use grants to build relationships at the local level, the different type of outreach strategy needed when you are trying to reach new people and groups, the challenge that comes with geographic distance when you're working statewide but want to have impact at the local level - I found myself nodding yes, yes, yes, you're right. Big thinking about small grants is mostly about building relationships and only partly about funding transactions, and the relationships that you want to build as a funder are face to face relationships with people and groups that normally don't show up at your funder door on their own. Grassroots grantmaking is also about building relationships between groups - creating the connective tissue between associational groups in a community that is so often missing but so very powerful. These relationships are the conduits for learning, inspiration, and the discovery of shared interests and agendas.

This is work that requires enough time from the right person - a person who can live with one foot in the funding world and the other foot in the community world, someone who likes people (and not just the idea of people), sees gifts and possibilities in every person and situation, and is a natural connector. This is work that is also about the connection between people, place and community - quintessentially local in nature. So it's not surprising, is it, that this is work that would be really hard to do long distance?

So what do you do if you're a national, state or regional big thinking about small grants funder? How do you put your big thinking about small grants into practice? Can you be a grassroots grantmaker if your feet aren't planted squarely and deeply in a specific community? What does past experience tell us about what works and doesn't work if you're across the region, across the state or even across the nation from the people you want to invite to move into action with small grants delivered in a grassroots grantmaking way?

Here's my take on those questions.

Yes, you can invest in grassroots grantmaking, yes you can derive the benefits that funders get when they invest in grassroots grantmaking, and yes, you can think of yourelf as a grassroots grantmaker.

But, your approach is a different approach because of the very local nature of this work. You can't do it directly, but you can do it in a very powerful way with with the right local partner or set of local partners. That's where bigger grants come into the big thinking about small grants picture.

You can do what The Vancouver Foundation is doing, and partner with a set of deeply rooted community-based institutions - neighbourhood/settlements houses in this case - in your community to be your grassroots grantmaking partners. Or you can do what The Skillman Foundation is doing with their Good Neighborhoods Initiative and partner with a local non-profit who has experience as a small grant maker and a willingness to bring on another person to their team who has what it takes to effectively staff a grassroots grantmaking program. You can do what Indianapolis LISC did with the Great Indy Neighborhoods Initiative and partner with an entity like the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center for Imagine Grants, the small grants component of the initiative. Or, you can follow the lead of the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities' Real Communities Initiative and partner with local governments and community based organizations to bring grassroots grantmaking to communities across your state.

Sounds easy enough and it is, in many ways, especially if you find the right local partner. But, if you are a regional, state or national funder - or even a funder who doesn't have the staff, time or relationships yourself to do this work in-house - and want to work this way, making a bigger grant to a credible partner organization who has what it takes to do the day to day work of grassroots grantmaking, here are some tips to help you stay on the road and out of the ditch or at a disappointing dead-end.

While there are some logical places to look for local partners, there's no one right place. Starting your query with a community foundation is smart, but that doesn't mean that your community foundation is your ideal partner. Similarly, while settlement houses are serving as ideal partners for The Vancouver Foundation, that doesn't mean that the neighbourhood house in your world will be the right partner. The smartest way to search for the right partner is focus more on how the organization approaches its relationship with community residents and less on the nature of the organization - placing more stock on experience the organization has with connecting with and supporting active citizens and less stock on what their name or even mission statement suggests. It also means keeping a special eye for the right person - wherever they are housed - your secret ingredient for some wonderful grassroots grantmaking

Even though the bigger grant that you're making is essentially for regranting, if you want to get all the juice you can from your grassroots grantmaking investment - and by "juice" I mean access to the insights, perspectives and powerful people and groups that always surface with grassroots grantmaking - you need to think about big thinking on small grants regranting as a "staying in the relationship-business" way instead of a "we're your funder" way. This means being intentional about staying in touch with your on the ground buddies and being in the room with their grantees often enough to get to know people and organizations face to face instead of only on paper.

Go out, but also bring people in. Invite your local partners and their grantees in to meet with and speak to others on your team so that they too have a better picture of what big thinking on small grants means. Use these new relationships to inform your future work or work in other areas of your funding organization by inviting people from the small grants side of the fence to join those planning committees include community notables and experts. You'll be doing yourself a big favor, but also giving your local partners and their active citizen grantees to see the funding world from the inside out - an experience that can have important capacity building possibilities.

Anyone want to add some additional tips to this list for arms-length funders who want to get into the grassroots grantmaking business? Or, does your experience suggest another approach for regional, state or national funders who want to be part of the big thinking on small grants world? Look for the "comment" link and join in!

So Obvious It's Not Obvious

2011-09-22T18:15:00.001-05:00

Have you ever had the experience of spotting something and then suddenly seeing it everywhere? That's what's happened to me recently.

In my work with Grassroots Grantmakers, I have found myself becoming more and more tuned in to how "issues" show up in the grassroots grantmaking world, and what happens when grassroots grantmaking and issue-specific funding - funding focused on education, health, environment, aging, arts, housing, economic development, disabilities, etc - are occupying the same space. What I have noticed is that many times, funders are doing excellent grassroots grantmaking/resident engagement work on one side of the fence, and very thoughtful issue-specific work on the other side of the fence, with very little visiting between staff, much less grantees, across the fence.

Here's the even more fascinating part of this picture. The people on the grassroots grantmaking side of the fence are searching for ways to demonstrate the importance of their relatively small but very strategic investments in connecting people for mutual support and action, searching for data that can convince the "prove it" skeptics in their world. The people on the issue-oriented funding side of the fence are searching for ways to engage the community in their work, sensing that the solutions that are developed by professionals for the people who are most directly experiencing the problems are falling short.

The opportunity is so obvious, isn't it? The problem is that it's so obvious, it's not obvious. The work that we describe as grassroots grantmaking is really good at deep resident engagement and, because it typically isn't issue specific, provides an open ground for residents to step forward on issues that they identify as most important, with solutions that they design and believe will make a difference. Issue-specific work is typically well informed by trend-information, demographics, and the policy environment impacting the issue, and is focused on moving the needle on something measurable. Two sides to the same thing, in my opinion.

We're now intentionally delving into the all-too-common divide between grassroots grantmaking and issue-oriented work via a learning circle has just launched, with seven organizations joining over two years, each exploring the intersection of grassroots grantmaking and aging. We're doing this in partnership with Grantmakers in Aging, a colleague philanthropic affinity group, and are thus in an exploration of our own with our issue-oriented partner. We've had our first group conference call, first round of one-on-one check in calls, and are planning our first in-person learning circle gathering, and teams from all seven organizations are busy working on the angle they want to take in this exploration and a project they will pursue down the road.

What I'm noticing in my own thinking and in the conversations we've had so far as learning circle members is how tempting it is to begin believing that all of the answers are down the road that is paved with professional problem solvers and issue expertise - that we can't begin working on the intersection of grassroots grantmaking and aging until we get fully briefed by aging experts and immersed in aging research.

While I was talking with one learning circle member about possible first steps, it hit me that we were all overlooking the obvious - the issue experts that were already in our midst. So obvious it wasn't obvious.

Where to start quickly began to shift from going to school with the professional experts in the aging arena to looking at the grassroots grants that had been made in the past with new eyes, identifying those that had something to do with aging - those that focused on creating inter-generational connections, decreasing the isolation that so many older people experience, making community spaces more suitable for aging in place, tapping into the wisdom and leadership abilities of older adults and similar activities. We began to talk about how many "aging" grants we had already made, and to think of the residents associated with these grants as aging experts in their own right - experts who had developed and tested ideas that might not have ever occurred to their counterparts in the professionalized helper/research world. What new possibilities might open up in the intersection of grassroots grantmaking and aging if we began with bringing together our partners in this work - the resident-led groups that had requested and received small grants for aging-related work - to share their experience and what they had learned, and to think together about what else they/we could do. What other possibilities might open if we then connected with the agencies and researchers in our area who are focused on aging-related issues - and who are often wishing for the community insights and energy on aging-related topics - for some intentional cross-pollination and possibly even some creative collaboration?

Community wisdom, community energy, people who have already stepped forward in a concrete way to say "this is my interest" - grassroots grantmaking's biggest asset and ace in the hole, so obvious it wasn't obvious.

Have you had a similar experience - blinded by the "shoulds" associated with issue-oriented work, only to see how far ahead the resident-led groups you fund are when you look at the grants you have made with new eyes and created opportunities for a new type of conversation, with grantees as the experts teaching you/the funder about the issue? Or have you been on the other side of the equation - on the resident side of this equation, frustrated when your funder doesn't recognize you as an issue expert, or energized when you have been invited to show up as an issue expert? Please share your experience here. This is an important "big thinking" aspect of the small grants world that deserves more exploration.