Community Meeting Notes: Capacity to serve needs of children, youth, and families
As part of its strategic planning process, WPF held twelve facilitated meetings, involving nearly 150 civic leaders, practitioners, public officials, and subject-matter experts in areas related to our grantmaking.
The following are notes taken at a meeting held on October 11, 2011 to discuss how WPF should think about the capacity of the public and nonprofit sectors to address the needs of children, youth, and families.
Individuals participated with the understanding that they were speaking without attribution, so their names are intentionally omitted from these notes.
Meeting Purpose and Questions
Over the last decade, the Foundation focused its CYF
investments in three areas: Early Childhood, Public Education, and Youth
Development. To support these
investments, we also provided substantial resources through intermediary
technical assistance providers to promote sustainable infrastructure among
youth- and family–serving nonprofits in the region. In addition, we invested in advocacy work
that would leverage funds from the public sector and national foundations to
Philadelphia.
The current economic climate presents tremendous challenges
to the sustainability of many nonprofit organizations. The Foundation is
therefore interested in a two-part discussion: 1) to what extent and how should
the Foundation promote a healthy nonprofit sector serving children and
families; and 2) given the smaller “pie” available in general, are we targeting
our funding to the right issues, and using it as effectively as possible.
We invited representatives of the public, nonprofit, and
public sector to discuss the following questions:
What is our role as a private funder relative to that of the
public sector in creating an effective nonprofit community and scaling
interventions that work? Which parts of the sector need to be improved? Large intermediaries? Community-based
organizations? Coalitions of nonprofits?
Given limited funding, how does the Foundation partner most effectively
with the sector? How can we promote innovation in the nonprofit sector? And how
can we use innovation to help organizations and the broader community?
Are there gaps in the current content areas that we focus
on? Have we missed issues that are
critical to advancing progress in our priorities?
Systems change and integration is essential in diverse public
systems serving children and youth.
Public-private partnerships have been a driving force in
recent efforts. Examples include
financing of facilities, taking programs to scale, linking education with
health, public safety, day care, and juvenile justice systems, etc.
The investment in data and data management is a critical
factor in identifying desired outcomes and tracking progress. Need to use data to guide and track
investments.
The sector is attracting younger social entrepreneurs. The
generational transition represents a positive future for the field – as well as
a need to attract and support the new leaders as they step into increasingly
challenging work at the organization and system-wide levels.
The field is struggling to find new financial models to start-up
and/or take the work to scale. The demand for services exceeds current capacity
of the service delivery organizations.
The sector faces mergers and alliances; at the same time,
providers struggle to finance the costs of transitioning to an efficient/effective
scale.
Encourage
consolidation of nonprofits working in a particular area, and provide support
for alliances and mergers at multiple levels—financial, staff development,
governance, succession planning etc.
Provide intellectual
and financial capital needed to explore and operate financial models that use
both public and private financing.
Call for
accountability of public institutions and in delivery of services based on
definition of clear outcomes and data analysis that tracks results.
Effective operations
are the backbone of every service delivery system. Support managers and leaders able to run a
strong operating system.
Reward the effective;
pressure the less effective to step up their performance – or close.
Support emerging entrepreneurs
as they develop organizations that operate differently.
Provide professional
resources such as coaching for organization leaders.
Serve as the “good
housekeeping seal of approval” – providing support to the changes in the
sector.
Promote a civic
dialogue about the realities of poverty and discrimination as the economy limits
economic options for many in the community.