Funding the Spirit of Collaboration

Collaboration is a catalyst for nonprofit growth and improvement. And the newly formed Catalyst Fund for Nonprofits was created to help foster that collaboration.

At the end of October, the Boston-based fund began accepting applications from nonprofits seeking help with the collaboration process and soon should be distributing funds from pooled resources provided by The Boston Foundation, Boston LISC, the Hyams Foundation, and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley.

William Pinakiewicz is the New England director for the Nonprofit Finance Fund — the organization that manages the Catalyst Fund; NFF Associate Peter Kramer manages the fund's day-to-day operations. They talked recently with FundRaising Success.

FundRaising Success: What is the Catalyst Fund for Nonprofits?

Peter Kramer: The Catalyst Fund for Nonprofits is a funder collaborative that's been set up over the next five years to provide support for technical assistance engagements [which] means that we're developing a pool of technical assistance providers — consultants and technical experts, people from the legal field, from the accounting world — who can bring their expertise to bear on things like feasibility planning, implementation planning and actual implementation to support nonprofit collaborations.

FS: Who determines what criteria are involved for funding?

PK: Nonprofits who already have some idea of how they want to collaborate and have put in some of the thought and laid some of the groundwork will submit applications and proposals for work that they want to explore and ways they want to engage with technical-assistance providers. So we as a fund are not necessarily determining which charities should be working together; that's coming to us. The criteria involved are a few things: The fund is interested in supporting four mission areas initially — arts and culture, community development, human services, and youth development. So the organizations must fit into one of those mission areas. They must be located in the Boston area, and they must complete a thoughtful application to the fund. And what that entails is demonstrating that there's board buy-in, that they've had some of these conversations, that they can articulate the plan and articulate, also, intended outcomes from the proposed collaboration.

FS: What are charities expected to collaborate on?

PK: We have three points that we look for. And those are: Is the proposed collaboration going to meaningfully change the way that an organization does business over the long term? It's not one-off fundraising events jointly or that kind of thing, but are really more deep and strategic ways of changing the way they do business. The second is, because it's more strategic in nature, we're expecting that the boards of the organizations who are collaborating would be involved. There would need to be some sort of documented resolution that the boards are aware of and are interested in pursuing the collaborations. And then, lastly, the fund is very much interested in preserving and expanding services. So a collaboration that does that will be absolutely one that we would look at.

FS: What are examples of the types of collaboration the Catalyst Fund would finance?

William Pinakiewicz: We have 90 organizations who've expressed an interest in participating and getting allocations from the fund, just to give you a sense of the presented demand that we're seeing in the Boston area. We actually had two organizations that did a joint venture on their development areas. One organization had a lot of capacity in development — good, long-standing success in their fundraising efforts. And the other organization — a very similar type [of] organization, in terms of mission, geographically close to the other organization — had a very little bit of fundraising capacity. And they entered into a joint venture by which they shared some resources and did some joint fundraising sorts of things. They spent a long time developing the understanding about how it would operate, which resources would be shared for how many days a week, and the types of projects that they would be involved in, and basically enshrined that in the form of a memorandum of understanding.

We have another organization in town that is a shelter that does workforce training for men. One of the areas where they do workforce training is in food preparation and food service. They've created a business out of that, whereby they provide food-service operations to other nonprofits. So what they're doing is collaborating with nonprofits who have a need for food service as part of their mission but don't have the facilities or the capacity to do that. And they actually purchase those services 
from this organization that has it as a part of their 
training and part of their mission to bring to the men that come to the shelter.

We also have had two human-services organizations in Boston who were doing very, very similar things — contiguous service territories that decided they could do a much better job if they did a complete merger. And, in fact, they did that and now are working through all the details of how they actually operate on an ongoing basis as merged entities. So that gives you a sense of the range of things that we're talking about. FS