By Katie Merrow
During our 50 years of working to
improve the quality of life in communities
across our state, the New
Hampshire Charitable Foundation
(NHCF) has learned many
lessons about what it takes to increase our
impact. We’ve found that three approaches
are essential to achieving large-scale impact:
partnering across sectors; long-term investment
to strengthen grantees; and supporting
promising and proven programs.
Partnering across sectors.To solve
pressing social problems, it is important to
reach across sectors and build partnerships
among government, nonprofits, and business.
To combat New Hampshire’s rising
rates of youth substance abuse, for example,
NHCF entered into a 10-year partnership
with the state of New Hampshire to co-fund
substance-abuse prevention coalitions.
We are also leading a state commission
charged with developing a plan to reduce
substance use in New Hampshire. Our work
on the commission brings state agencies
and community partners together
around shared goals and
measurement systems, and we
have leveraged more dollars for evidence-based
prevention. We reinforce this work
by funding local advocacy efforts promoting
policies that prevent youth substance
abuse.
NHCF has benefitted from partnerships
with the business community as well.
When a local technology entrepreneur
came to us wondering whether his platform
that helps small businesses compete
against big chains might benefit the charitable
sector, we saw a ready-made opportunity
to scale up our efforts to strengthen
nonprofits. NHCF partnered with the entrepreneur’s
company, CCA Global, and
the New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits
to develop a Web-based platform that provides
nonprofits with vetted tools and realtime
instruction to improve operations.
More than 1,500 nonprofit employees and
board members are taking advantage of
this platform to make measurable improvements
in organizational behavior, board
engagement in fundraising, and leadership.
This project leveraged CCA Global’s innovative
product, the Center for Nonprofits’
relationships and deep knowledge of the
sector, and NHCF’s ability to convene and
raise significant start-up capital.
Long-term investment to strengthen
grantees. One of the ways that NHCF
helps nonprofits increase their impact is
by making long-term investments in building
grantee infrastructure. Grantees need
consistent, multiyear support in order to
build strong leadership, effective operations,
community partnerships, and the other pieces of infrastructure necessary to
scale up impact. This is especially important
in the many rural areas of our state, where
scaling up programs is more challenging.
An example of how we help New Hampshire
nonprofits scale up their impact is
our five-year investment in early childhood
development. We provided grantees with
multiyear funding, built their evaluation capacity,
and supported their coming together
to establish shared goals and strategies and
to learn from each other. This community-driven collaborative has substantially
increased the number of young children
in northern New Hampshire receiving developmental
screening to identify critical
needs, from 0 percent to 14 percent. The collaborative’s
goal is to reach 100 percent. In
another case, we provided three years of flexible
support while a grantee worked to complete
an evaluation and draft a business plan
to expand operations. The grantee is now
positioned to seek national funding to grow.
We also leverage federal dollars to build
nonprofit infrastructure in New Hampshire
and increase resources for areas where the
foundation has invested deeply. In the past
three years, NHCF helped New Hampshire
secure $52 million in federal grants by directly
funding grant writers, providing a
required state match, or funding collaboration
and collective action that attracted
multiyear federal grants in areas like substance
use, housing redevelopment, and
children’s behavioral health.
Supporting promising and proven
programs. Our foundation supports proven
programs wherever possible, but we will
also support promising programs when
they are a better fit with local needs and capacities.
We intentionally work along a continuum to advance evidence-based practice
in our state.
We do so in two ways. First, we fund the
development and evaluation of promising
local approaches to issues we care about.
When a high school program to prevent
substance abuse showed promising results
and a strong fit with our strategy, we funded implementation in New Hampshire schools
and simultaneously co-funded a formal
evaluation with state and federal partners.
The second way we advance practice is by
bringing knowledge to grantees about how to
implement proven programs. We fund a local
Center for Excellence that provides grantees
with technical assistance to ensure fidelity
to evidence-based models or to adapt models
without compromising effectiveness, as
they did when New Hampshire communities
adopted a proven coalition model to reduce
youth violence and addiction.
The Path Ahead
Place-based funders like NHCF are a ready-made
network for disseminating knowledge
about what works and advancing proven
practices about how to scale up. We have in-depth
knowledge of grantees and the communities
they serve that can inform successful
efforts to scale up. Looking ahead, we
need more accessible co-funding arrangements
with national funders that will create
a more robust pipeline of scalable initiatives.
Philanthropy has a real opportunity,
but we need to work together in new ways to
create a network for change.