SVP Portland Status Report
Prepared for SVP Board, June 2015, by Mark Holloway, Executive Director
The following report aims to give a high-level statement on how we’re doing against our mission and our progress in achieving the Ready for Kindergarten goal. It was a primer for a presentation I made at our Board of Directors annual retreat in June. It is divided into three high level areas of the organization: community impact, partnership & development, and governance & operations. Within each, you will see our goal, status on the goal, and what is needed to fuel further progress toward that goal.
Any Partner wishing to learn more or discuss anything in this status report, please let me know.
Community Impact Goal: Fully leveraging our venture philanthropy model, resources and power to achieve our Ready for Kindergarten goal.
Status: We have three things in our corner here:
14 years of experience and a reputation for nonprofit capacity building excellence;
new relationships and credibility formed through the Ready for Kindergarten Collaborative; and,
adjustments to our investment model that have improved our service delivery and relational trust with nonprofit partners.
These have put us on a new plateau but we have to up our game if we’re going to achieve our community goal.
There are 45,000 children under 6 years old in Multnomah County and 130,000 throughout Portland metro. To achieve the “all children ready” goal, we need to focus on those most affected by barriers to successful starts in school: children of color and English Language Learners (ELL) who are living in poverty. (See why below.) That gives us a total population of 17,000 children in Multnomah County and 35,000 metro-wide. Currently our investments are reaching an estimated 4,300 total children under 6 years of age.
To Fuel Progress: Clearly our investments are not at the scale needed, nor are they as focused on the depth as needed. In order to make progress on this, we need four things:
The imagination to think bigger, the moxy to do it, and the discipline to focus on what matters most. We have been developing strategy and making investments on an ad hoc basis with best available information, thinking and resources. We are determining a tighter investment focus now and the strategy mapping exercise should help further. Still, we won’t get to greater scale if we lose focus on the end goal, rest on our laurels, or resource ourselves too poorly to execute.
A forcing function. Something is needed to change the fragmented and scarcity-fueled narrative with R4K nonprofits/programs and systems. We believe that the R4K Collaborative started that and the data revealed in our strategy mapping project will provide another. A key (and attainable) forcing function for us would be increasing…(see point 3)
More money, expertise and influence. Even with imagination and focus, we can only make new investments when we have the funds and talent to engage. This means growing the Partnership for one, but also looking creatively at other ways to closely align major resources from donors, foundations and government funds to our goal.
Cultural responsiveness and credibility with communities of color. We have learned a great deal and made good progress in working with our culturally-specific community partners. Still, we have only implemented four of the 20 recommendations (and five partially) the Coalition of Communities of Color made to Oregon’s grantmaking community. First among the priorities must be building our Partnership and Board’s cultural competencies and understanding of power and privilege as funders. When we more fully align our policies and practices with our intentions, we can forge even more trusting relationships and leverage our influence to make further progress on the community goal.
Partnership & Development Goal: Grow our Partnership and build a resource base (money, talent, etc.) that efficiently addresses R4K barriers without delay and ensures our vitality and sustainability.
Status: To address this status, you have to ask, “what’s the optimal size of our Partnership?” or rather, “when do we have critical mass?” and then, “optimal size and critical mass for what?” We aim to solve the Ready for Kindergarten problem in Portland and we have seven years left to do it. We are meeting our financial needs now (mostly by diversifying our revenue streams) but in the past two years we have had only modest growth without Rising Leaders and Encore Fellows.
To Fuel Progress: Our traditional Partnership sits at 75 memberships (about 110 people). We must add corporate Partners, many more traditional Partners (and in priority networks) to increase our influence and resources for investing in more nonprofits and system innovation projects. The increased influence and “risk capital” resource of our Partnership, along with clarifying our investment focus and using data to show the priority population need, will help us align larger sums of outside resources to our goal. To do these, we simply need to follow through on our budgeted and planned sales and marketing investments.
Governance & OperationsGoal: Maintain exemplary organizational infrastructure, governance and accountability systems to speed progress toward the goal.
Status: Last year we had staff turnover that caused a strain on our progress but we came out of it stronger and I believe we finally have the right staff in place to fuel the progress listed above. The Board is also growing stronger and more engaged in strategy but remains less engaged in moving the levers of progress than we ultimately need. I believe this is in part an information gap (i.e. clarity on the need and the levers) and a board composition issue (i.e. having people with critical networks).
To Fuel Progress: I believe we are very close to having the foundation of data, governance, and operating systems in place to scale quickly. Beyond the clarity of what is needed to fuel progress in the areas above, what’s needed here is simply time to let new staff and committees get their bearings and systems developed. This will also allow me to operate at a different level of leadership: oversight of our operations, creating more community connections to our mission, and recruiting more donors to SVP and investments aligned with our goal. Simultaneously, I want us to add the sales and marketing resources referenced above and a few more Board members with networks we have prioritized.
Why the priority focus on children of color and English language learners who are living in poverty?
The majority of kids under six years of age in Multnomah County are children of color.
The vast majority of kids living in poverty in our community are children of color.
School outcomes locally for children of color are dramatically worse than white kids.
SVP has what is needed to make change for kids of color: courage, social capital, capacity building expertise, and access to capital.