Community Partner Pipeline Project
As we shared in our June newsletter, we’ve been exploring ways to scale our impact and provide support to multiple Community Partners at once. This is a new model, and different from how we’ve historically approached partnership development, which has been focused on one organization at a time.
Ginny Gray, one of our Investor Partners, has been investigating what this might look like. When she joined in February, we selected seven high potential nonprofits with whom we felt we could have the biggest impact. This is the first time an Investor Partner has looked at a group of potential Community Partners together to see whether and where there are common needs, and therefore economies of scale.
Ginny spent a few months meeting with key leaders from each of the seven nonprofits. Six of them are early childhood learning centers, and one, Work Systems, is a nonprofit focused on building out the teacher pipeline for early childhood education. She spent a few hours with each organization, talking, emailing, and even touring a couple of the facilities. As Ginny put it, “This was a wonderful opportunity for me to dig deep into SVP and to learn a lot about the different organizations out there in a very short time.”
When she took the information she gathered and distilled it into the format SVP uses to evaluate organizations, she found a lot of commonality between the nonprofits. While they may serve different populations, at their root they have very similar needs. Most have built out their organizations and now are at a place of trying to scale to make a bigger impact. What they need help with is creating the processes and procedures that are needed to operationalize and grow sustainably.
Additional support needs that came up among these nonprofits were grant writing, HR processes, and building out a teacher pipeline. The workforce gap was another common challenge among the schools, and many were thinking about how to find teachers that represent the student populations they serve. Training also came up, both for teachers and also for parents. Furthermore, creating a shared database was suggested as a great way to facilitate sharing of information, strategies and learnings.
Ginny presented this information to our Portfolio Management Team (PMT) to give them a full picture of each of the organizations, their missions, what help they need, and where there may be synergies. The PMT is now considering the needs of the organizations as well as budget and Investor Partner bandwidth, and at an upcoming will be making the decision about where and how to invest.
It was helpful for SVP to see that there’s a lot of commonality between the nonprofits. When needs are the same across different organizations, it’s easier to say yes to more of them since we can replicate what we’re doing to help, such as building out common documentation for HR processes, and a common framework to help the organizations write compelling grant proposals.
Seeing the needs of all these organizations together is a crucial step in understanding how we can make a bigger impact with the same amount of resources. As Ginny put it, “By being able to look at these organizations holistically together, we can see where their common needs are, and where we can bundle needs together and leverage Investor Partner resources in a more effective way.”
