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

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

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

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

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!