Boston is a city historically beset by politics and turf
issues that extend to its large nonprofit sector. With one of the
higher concentrations of 501(c)(3) organizations in the United
States—more than 4,600 in a population of less than 620,000—the pressure to compete for influence and limited funding has
often pitted the city’s nonprofit leaders against one
another. “There has been a great deal of competition, coupled
with not enough resources,” says Celina Miranda, a senior program
officer at the Richard & Susan Smith Family Foundation.
“All of this leads to divide and conquer.”
In 2004 the Barr Foundation, which supports education and the
arts in Boston and diverse climate change initiatives through its $1.1
billion anonymous endowment, began to address these patterns of
competition and mistrust. The first executive director, Marion Kane,
brought a systems thinking perspective to grantmaking. Pat Brandes,
then the foundation’s strategic advisor, was creating a sabbatical
program for seasoned nonprofit executive directors. Together they
hypothesized that by recognizing talented leaders in Boston and
connecting them in meaningful ways, a more collaborative culture
might emerge. The foundation launched the Barr Fellowship in 2005.
That year and every other year since, 12 executive directors have
received a surprise phone call from the foundation. Selected from
among hundreds of talented nonprofit leaders, the fellows are
invited to join a program that includes a three-month sabbatical
(with a flexible $40,000 grant to support the organization during
fellows’ absence), group travel to the global south, executive coaching,
two retreats annually for three years, and the opportunity to
join a diverse network of peers committed to a better Boston.
The foundation set three goals for the Barr Fellows Network.
The immediate and simplest goals were to recognize and rejuvenate
seasoned executive directors and to enhance distributed
leadership at their organizations. Pat Brandes, now the Barr
Foundation’s executive director,
remembers reading the many forecasts
about the impending retirement of the
baby boomer generation of executive
directors. Reports by CompassPoint,
Bridgespan, and the Annie E. Casey
Foundation projected a huge leadership
gap in the sector. For Brandes, what complicated the picture was
the knowledge that most nonprofit executives were neither
inclined nor financially able to retire; they were likely to stay in
their positions even if they were burned out.
At the time, sabbaticals for nonprofit professionals were rare,
although the Durfee Foundation and the California Wellness
Foundation had launched programs with promising results.
Brandes hypothesized that Boston leaders would benefit from the
time and space to rest and rejuvenate—and so would their organizations
and the city. “While many people were talking about the
leadership pipeline or how to recruit executives from the private
sector,” says Brandes, “no one was talking about how to replenish
our elders and harvest their wisdom. These people were my peers. I
knew they would want to keep contributing as activists. The idea
was to honor these leaders and cultivate their next act.”
The more complex goal would be to catalyze a network of place-based
nonprofit leaders. In recent years, the social sector has come
to embrace networks that leverage multiple connections across disciplines,
as an alternative to solutions relying on single institutions
or issue silos. But in 2004, these ideas were just beginning to take
hold. Barr Foundation executives noted, from their own experience
and by studying other collective initiatives, that the greatest barrier
to social impact often resides at the individual level. Leaders who
experience themselves as separate and different from others rather
than interdependent could not collaborate well or engage effectively
in networks. In this way, the Barr Fellowship was designed to
nurture individual relationships.
After eight years, the Barr Fellows Network has been the force
behind an unexpected series of cooperative efforts among leaders
of local nonprofits. It also has confirmed that social change networks
are animated not by organizations, but by people. The foundation
and its partner in this effort, the Interaction Institute for
Social Change (IISC), thus shun centralized goals and top-down
strategies and have encouraged Barr Fellows to identify and solve
problems themselves. The network now numbers 48 fellows. As
personal relationships have evolved within and across the first four
cohorts, turf-bound competition has given way to what The Boston
Globe has called “a web of collaboration rippling through the nonprofit
community with increasing effect.”
Rejuvenate Leaders, Nurture Relationships
In May 2010, 24 leaders from Boston nonprofits formed a circle in
the shade of palm trees at a lodge in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.
Many in this group didn’t know each other, or if they did, relationships
were distant. A few were outright hostile. Yet as they gathered
to reflect on their five days together as Barr Fellows, their words
were full of shared hopes for their city back home.
Chiapas is home to mountainous terrain, perennial rainforests,
and one of Mexico’s largest indigenous populations. The region’s
history of oppression culminated in the Zapatista uprising of 1994
when 3,000 Indians declared war on the government. The rebellion
quickly transformed into a nonviolent movement, capturing worldwide
attention. The Boston group’s itinerary had included meetings
with the Zapatistas and local activists as well as walks through the
city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. In the evenings, there were shared
meals, music, and conversations that ran deep into the night.
On this last day, the discussion centered on the Zapatistas, who
had built schools and clinics and were governing 32 municipalities
with no assistance from the Mexican government and despite
threats from paramilitary groups. “I see their courage for taking
another way, and my intention is to operate from that place of courage,”
said Mariama White-Hammond, executive director of Project
HIP-HOP, which develops youth leadership. The fellows also spoke
of their newfound respect and affection for each other and of how
they might pool their collective resources. As Lyndia Downie, executive
director of the Pine Street Inn, a comprehensive agency for
homeless men and women, reflected, “I’m not sure I buy all this
network theory, but I sure do love the people in this fellowship.”
Like academic sabbaticals, the Barr Fellowship has been
designed to offer respite from institutional routines and responsibilities.
But its key component is a disruptive experience, a learning
journey. The foundation has taken fellows to Haiti, Brazil, rural
Zimbabwe, and Johannesburg. Fellows are often skeptical and
sometimes anxious upon starting their journey. Many do not know
each other or have avoided each other because of ideological or turf
issues. For two weeks, in a foreign and often challenging environment,
they room together and step away from their roles and cell
phones. By doing so, they break from their usual postures and
adopt new perspectives.
The fellows meet with indigenous leaders and activists, learning
about social change in situations of extreme poverty and political
risk, which reframes their own US-based nonprofit experience. This
leads to self-reflection and conversations about their work and why
it matters. These experiences also make possible friendships that
once seemed unimaginable. As IISC facilitator Gibrán Rivera
explains, “Relationships mediated by organizational identities are
often limited to the formal and transactional. The learning journey
breaks through this layer to a deeper, more human connection.”
Following the trip, the fellows spend the remainder of their three-month
sabbaticals as they wish, with one caveat: They may not contact
the office. Before returning to work, they gather for a retreat to
share their learning and prepare to return to work. The foundation
then brings each cohort together for semiannual retreats for three
years, to renew connections and tap into their collective assets.
From the inaugural 2005 cohort, it was clear to Barr Foundation
staff that the simplest goals of the sabbatical program would be
successful. The leaders returned to their organizations with
renewed vigor and vision, ready to maximize their tenure or plan
for orderly leadership succession. The positive effects extended to
their organizations, such as more distributed leadership among
staff and board. The more complex goal of cultivating a place-based
network would require more design. By 2007, the first two cohorts
were tightly knit. Now the foundation needed to build connection
among cohorts.
A Network With No Expectations
Early on, the Barr Foundation partnered with IISC, a Boston-based
nonprofit with international experience in network building and
stakeholder collaborations—from peace agreements in Northern
Ireland to road maps for early education in Springfield, Mass. The
partnership was steeped in a shared interest in testing network theory,
then still nascent in the US nonprofit sector.
The foundation had applied network theory to its own grantmaking
initiatives, applying the ideas and research of Duncan
Watts’s Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, which focuses on
collective dynamics and network structure, and Albert-László
Barabási’s Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and
What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, which
describes a continuous evolution of networks in living organisms,
corporations, and the World Wide Web. For the Fellows Network,
the foundation and IISC drew upon nomenclature developed by
Peter Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor in Net Gains and hypothesized
that the network would be stronger if the fellows could interact as a
connectivity network in a loosely structured environment, without
expectations about what would be accomplished. They would not
be facilitated as an alignment network in which members share a
vision. Nor would they be convened as an action network in which
people mobilize toward common goals and collective action. The
foundation and IISC would support the fellows as a connectivity
network by creating venues for relationship building and learning,
but the entities would not direct the agenda.
The Barr Fellows Network also drew upon a seminal paper by
leading practitioners Valdis Krebs and June Holley, whose Building
Smart Communities Through Network Weaving argues that healthy
networks move from a centralized hub to connected clusters. Krebs
and Holley caution that innovation comes from the periphery. This
is the problem with old boys’ clubs. Though they are recognized as
valuable sources of social capital, the homogeneity of such networks
limits their potential for new ideas. The Barr Fellows
Network would need to be intentional about reaching out to the
margins and reinforcing its diversity, to avoid becoming elitist or
insular. The “new social science of love” described by Michael
Edwards, then a veteran Ford Foundation program officer, also resonated
for strengthening ties among mission-driven leaders.
Starting at the 2005 retreat, when the first fellowship cohort
returned from sabbatical, the goals of the network became the subject
of much debate. Some fellows wanted an organic approach to
collaboration. Others pushed for alignment around one issue—advocacy for a green city or launching a broad-based urban dialogue
about racism. Some argued that without action goals, they were
“wasting the precious resource” represented by the network.
The foundation and IISC listened but pushed back, underscoring
the principles of a connectivity network and trusting that action
would emerge organically. In that early phase, fellows were more
connected to the foundation than to each other. So the foundation
and IISC created conditions during retreats and alumni learning
journeys to deepen relationships. The fellows learned about the
resiliency of networks with distributed leadership vs. the fragility of
centralized organizations, as described by Ori Brafman and Rod
Beckstrom in The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of
Leaderless Organizations. They discussed the
dynamics of their own possible “emergence”
in the context of Steve Johnson’s
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants,
Brains, Cities, and Software, where emergence
is the ability of low-level components
to self-organize into sophisticated,
higher-level systems. Nonetheless, as
Mossik Hacobian, then executive director
of Urban Edge, recalled of those early
debates, “I’m a goal-oriented Mr. Fix-It and wanted to have a specific
focus. We wanted to see quicker results in Boston. I was skeptical
about this grand theory of emergence.”
The network entailed risk for everyone involved. For the nonprofit
leaders, the fellowship propelled them into uncomfortable
relationships across race, class, ethnicity, and politics. For IISC, the
risk was to facilitate a network without clear goals and a sequence of
tangible action steps. For Brandes, supporting emergence required
patience and detachment from the more typical metrics of success.
“We are all acting countercultural to trends in our sector,” says
Brandes. “Control has been replaced by trust. Leaders are crossing
boundaries and self-organizing in ways that are meaningful to them.
This is critical learning for our multiracial, multiethnic society.”
The Margarita Muñiz Academy
Starting in 2006, fellows began to visit each other’s organizations
and neighborhoods and call on one another for advice, eventually
moving into clusters that could collaborate for specific purposes.
One example was the cluster of fellows that formed around the
Margarita Muñiz Academy, Boston’s first bilingual high school.
Margarita Muñiz was a pioneer in dual language education. In
1982, she launched and led for nearly three decades the Rafael
Hernandez School to teach elementary students in both Spanish and
English. For years, Muñiz had been sharing her dream of a bilingual
high school with her friends and colleagues Diana Lam and Meg
Campbell. Both had seen their children flourish at the Hernandez
School and saw the potential for a bilingual high school to serve
English language learners and to promote Latino leadership and culture
for Boston’s fastest growing demographic. But all three women
were running schools of their own and could not imagine how to surmount
the obstacles of creating a new school in Boston.
In 2007, Muñiz was awarded a Barr Fellowship. On her sabbatical
journey to South Africa, she roomed with Linda Nathan, director
of the Boston Arts Academy, with whom she had taught many years
before. Throughout the trip, they talked about Margarita’s plans for
the bilingual high school. The idea remained an abstraction until
2009, when Campbell, executive director and co-founder of
Codman Academy Charter Public School, became a fellow herself
and clicked with her roommate Vanessa Calderón-Rosado on their
journey to Brazil. As CEO of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), a
Latino community-building organization, Calderon-Rosado was
captivated by the idea of a bilingual high school and understood the
important role she could play to affirm its legitimacy. “I jumped at
the chance to be part of it,” she said.
Over the next two years, the women strategized for the nascent
Margarita Muñiz Academy, with Calderon-Rosado chairing the board and IBA serving
as fiscal agent. During the Barr alumni trip
to Chiapas in 2010, other fellows nourished
the vision. Jesse Solomon, then
executive director of the Boston Teacher
Residency, gave advice about curriculum
and collective bargaining. As a member of
the Boston School Committee, Claudio
Martinez, executive director of Hyde
Square Task Force, pledged to help shepherd the school proposal
through the bureaucratic labyrinth. Their work was intensified by
the news that Muñiz had been diagnosed with cancer.
Campbell later said, “The fellowship gave me so much. I felt like
I’d won the lottery. It made complete sense to give back, especially to
honor Margarita’s legacy. But I couldn’t do it alone. If the fellows had
said the school was too hard or not right for the Latino community, I
would not have gone forward. But they encouraged us to keep going.”
One obstacle remained. A highly qualified candidate had been
identified as the school leader, but the district could not fund the
position during the planning process. At this point, the Barr
Foundation agreed to provide the interim salary, in what Brandes
describes as “support of work coming out of small clusters that was
in line with the foundation’s K-12 strategy.”
On Nov. 15, 2011, the Boston School Committee approved the
Margarita Muñiz Academy as Boston’s first two-way bilingual high
school. Two days later, Muñiz succumbed to cancer. In her final
days, fellows Campbell and Nathan were at her bedside. So, too,
was the photograph of her 2007 fellows journey to Africa. A week
earlier, she said, “This is the story of a collaboration based on the
solid rock of friendship, idealism, and respect.” The Margarita
Muñiz Academy opens its doors in fall 2012.
The Boston Promise Initiative
In 2010, another Barr Fellows Network cluster was activated to
develop Boston’s application for a Promise Neighborhood initiative.
The goal of the federal program, modeled on the Harlem Children’s
Zone, was to “significantly improve the educational and developmental
outcomes of children and youth in the nation’s most distressed
communities.” For the first round of planning grants, the
Obama administration invited cities to submit applications linking
families, schools, and nonprofits to promote high achievement for
all children, from birth through college.
John Barros, executive director of the Dudley Square
Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) and a 2007 Barr Fellow, led the
effort for the city of Boston. DSNI is a community-based planning
and organizing nonprofit formed in 1984 by residents of Roxbury
and Dorchester, neighborhoods then devastated by arson, disinvestment,
and neglect. DSNI has since become a collaborative
effort of more than 3,000 residents, businesses, nonprofits, and
faith-based institutions.
To develop the application, Barros needed to build alignment
among scores of stakeholders, including state and city agencies, cultural
and educational institutions, resident-based initiatives, social
service agencies, and philanthropies. Barros reached out to Louis
Casagrande, former director of the Boston Children’s Museum and
his roommate on the 2007 fellowship journey. Could he secure buy-in
from the city’s major cultural institutions? Casagrande immediately
placed the calls. “I could speak to my colleagues about John
from personal experience,” he says. “I had spent quality time at
DSNI and understood its credibility in the community.”
More than a dozen fellows across three fellowship cohorts participated
as key influencers, including Jorge Martinez of Project
R.I.G.H.T., a neighborhood stabilization and economic development
agency, and Sister Margaret Leonard, whose Project Hope moves
families out of poverty. Because of his experience on fellowship journeys
and retreats, Barros brought IISC into the planning process to
facilitate stakeholder engagement and to manage the logistics and
communications. The result was a $500,000 federal planning grant
for the Boston Promise Initiative (BPI). Of 339 applications, 21
grants were awarded, with Boston one of only three to earn a perfect
score. Having catalyzed a network hub, DSNI reached out to a wider
circle of fellows for the next phase of federal grants.
In December 2011, DSNI learned that Boston was not chosen for
the initial round of federal implementation grants. Yet Barros and his
colleagues, within and outside the Barr Fellows Network, are moving
forward with a five-year plan for the Dudley Village Campus, a model
for resident-driven community transformation and student achievement.
Says Barros, “I’ve done organizing all my life, but I’ve come out
of this fellowship with a new understanding of what relationships
really mean. I’m a better organizer for this experience. The power of
this network is a set of deep relationships that will make Boston a
better place.” DSNI is planning to resubmit for a Promise
Neighborhood implementation grant in June 2012. And fellows are
now collaborating on multiple BPI working groups devoted to housing,
parenting, family health, and the environment. As Sister Margaret
remarked of the process, “The support of a multitude of partners has
moved us to another level of neighborhood revitalization.”
Social Network Analysis
Since launching its fellowship program in 2005, the Barr
Foundation has been studying the network’s evolution, with assistance
from its internal and external evaluators. At regular intervals,
fellows have completed online surveys and been interviewed by
evaluators, to elicit information about network behaviors—how fellows
connect with each other and hold each other accountable—and network effects, such as how resources are shared or aligned
for influence at a greater scale. One of the findings is a shift from a
hub-and-spoke network with foundation staff as the main hub, to a
multi-cluster network where people connect ideas and resources,
provide personal support, and take joint action from various hubs
without intensive involvement of foundation staff. (See “Barr
Fellows Network Development.")
The fellows report that they have moved beyond ego, turf, and
ideology to generate collective courage and hold each other
accountable. Jorge Martinez says, “Before we would sit on opposite
sides of the room. The sense now is that we look after each other.”
The fellows also have seen their influence grow. For example, three
fellows—Barros, Campbell, and Claudio Martinez—now serve on
the seven-member Boston School Committee, the governing body
of the city’s public schools. Most recently, 2011 fellow Aaron
Gornstein, executive director of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning
Association, was named undersecretary for the Massachusetts
Department of Housing and Community Development by Gov.
Deval Patrick. This kind of recognition furthers the fellows’ identity
as leaders, especially those who saw themselves at the margins of
influence. Many have said that network membership gives them the
audacity to take risks and move in new leadership directions.
Claudio Martinez, executive director of the Hyde Square Task
Force, which works on youth leadership, is a prime example. Since
2005, when he was named a Barr Fellow, he has expanded his influence.
He now serves as a trustee for the Boston Foundation and the
Nellie Mae Education Foundation, where he advocates for grassroots,
community-based leadership. On the Boston School
Committee, where he recently was reappointed for a second term,
Martinez brings his voice as a Latino leader to champion changes
for English language learners.
Fellows in more traditional or established institutions also have
been emboldened. Since retiring from the Boston Children’s
Museum after his sabbatical, Casagrande has become special assistant
to the CEO at the Bromley-Heath Public Housing Project, far
from Boston’s downtown cultural center. Casagrande credits the
network with motivating him to accept the job and helping him to
secure a $5 million grant from the US Department of Housing and
Urban Development. “The backing of fellows and their communities
allowed me to quarterback that complex grant in a few months,”
says Casagrande. “A former museum director could not do that, but
a Barr Fellow could. It would have taken me five more years to build
the credibility and relationships.”
In turn, the network has exerted a boomerang effect on the Barr
Foundation, making it more knowledgeable about and sensitive to
what’s happening in Boston. Trustee Barbara Hostetter explains, “I
always assumed, as I sat in elegant conference rooms and private
dining rooms at the top of the financial district, that this was where
the city leadership resided—until I met our first Barr Fellows. Then
I understood who was really running the city. The fellowship recognizes
their talent and commitment, and they have brought our
work at the foundation to a new level.”
Eight Years, 48 Fellows
At eight years and 48 fellows, the foundation’s goals are being reached.
Fellows are self-organizing and collaborating across issues, organizations,
and neighborhoods. For some, the power of the network is in
its collective capacity to influence the city of Boston. As 2007 fellow
Meizhu Lui remarks, “While each of us is focused on one issue, we
now have a broader sense of how our issues intertwine. The fellowship
has increased local connectivity so that we can better address
the root causes of poverty and inequality.” For others, the network is
about the energy they get from relationships. Hacobian, who freely
admits to his early skepticism, says, “I have been fortunate with a lot
of chance things in my life, including being with this motley group of
people who are graced, intentional, and loving.”
The foundation is beginning to synthesize the lessons learned
about creating a place-based connectivity network of social change
leaders. Lessons include:
Prepare to invest in sabbaticals and disruption. The costs of
the sabbatical include a flexible $40,000 grant to support the organization
during the sabbatical and modest sums for fellows to
access executive coaching. The major expense applies to the design
and logistics of the group journeys: In 2011, the two-week trip of 12
fellows to Haiti cost $100,000, including airfare, lodging, and IISC
planning and facilitation. Although the trips to the global south are
by no means luxurious, they require careful planning and insurance
for risky situations like political unrest, disease, and other conditions
brought about by extreme poverty.
Select from a broad base and be flexible. Fellows are selected
through nomination and several rounds of vetting, with the foundation
encouraging diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, and sector. For
the first cohort, nomination was limited to older executive directors.
Starting in 2007, the criteria expanded to include younger,
albeit seasoned, executive directors, and the foundation witnessed
the benefits of intergenerational cohorts. Another lesson relates to
temperament. Leaders who depend on hierarchy and positional
authority are less likely to have a transformative experience or benefit
much from this type of network.
Engage a network knowledge partner and assess early and
often. As thought partner to the foundation, IISC brought knowledge
of both network theory and collaboration. IISC was charged
with creating conditions and disruptive experiences, whereby leaders
would connect to each other in authentic relationships. Claire
Reinelt of the Leadership Learning Community, which tracks and
analyzes the network’s evolution, credits IISC’s tools and provocative
questions for eliciting meaningful conversation and facilitating
cluster groups in the early stages of development. The foundation’s
investment in evaluation and mapping also has been critical in
enabling the staff to make assessments of the fellowship program.
Recognize that the funder-grantee relationship is complex. The
power imbalance between funder and grantee has been acknowledged
and discussed with every cohort. Barr Fellows do not gain
preferential access to foundation grants, although some organizations
whose work is aligned with the foundation’s strategies are
already grantees. Regardless of their financial relationship, most fellows
say that they feel connected to the foundation as partners for
social change. Still, tensions have surfaced at times around expectations
that were not satisfied. The foundation has invested in some
network collaborations, such as the Boston Promise Initiative and
the Margarita Muñiz Academy, which line up with existing strategies.
Yet the foundation has aimed not to overplay its role, focusing
on emergence and connection among fellows rather than pushing
for or funding tangible initiatives and outcomes.
In the end, the primary learning from the Barr Fellowship
Network is about the return on relationships. The trust and respect
among Boston social change leaders has proved to be a currency for
social change. As Casagrande remarks, “We’ve done one-off projects
on a limited scale, affecting hundreds of people. Now we’re
starting to do work affecting thousands of people, and we’re seeing
the payoff in the investment of time, money, and resources to build
this network. It’s taken that long to have real impact. It doesn’t happen
overnight.” Brandes and the Barr Foundation are not afraid of
slow change. “We have faith in these people,” she says. “We believe
that by nurturing the well-being of mission-driven leaders and paying
close attention to network health, we can transform the DNA of
our sector in Boston. In so doing, we can carry forward Martin
Luther King’s wisdom that ‘love is mankind’s most potent weapon
for personal and social transformation.’”