Promising Practices for Improving the
Capacity of
Faith- and Community-Based Organizations
Table of Contents | Chapter 1: Introduction |
Chapter 3: Organizational Assessments
Chapter 2.
The Intermediaries and the Organizations They Served
In this chapter, we present the intermediary organizations that were chosen for this study of promising practices and provide an overview of the types of organizations with which they worked.
Table 1 describes the 10 intermediaries that participated in the study. As it shows, the selection process succeeded in yielding a diverse group. The selected intermediaries and their service areas span all regions of the country, and include six intermediaries that were funded under the first round of CCF grants and four that, though not funded through CCF, also work to help faith- and community-based organizations improve their abilities to deliver services to their constituents. The sample also includes both faith-based and secular intermediaries.6
The CCF-Funded Intermediaries
Among the six intermediaries in the sample that were funded under the first round of CCF grants, two are secular (Associated Black Charities and JVA Consulting) and four are faith-based (Boston Capacity Tank, Father Joe's Villages, Mennonite Economic Development Associates and Nueva Esperanza). All six provided similar types of services, at least in part because of requirements for receiving CCF support. CCF intermediaries were obligated to provide training and technical assistance to FBOs and CBOs, and to offer financial support through sub-awards to some subset of those organizations. The technical assistance activities had to be provided at no cost, and sub-award recipients had to be chosen through a "fair and open competitive process."
As a result of the government's guidance, expectations and stipulations, CCF intermediaries focused most of their work with FBOs and CBOs on those required services (training, technical assistance and sub-awards). Despite that similarity, however, CCF intermediaries differed in their size (overall budgets ranged from approximately $3 million to $47 million), organizational histories and experience, and in how the CCF program fit into their mission.
The sample includes both locally based and international organizations. Associated Black Charities (ABC) is a nonprofit secular intermediary that has been operating since 1985. ABC provides technical assistance and grants to organizations in Baltimore and across Maryland on issues of special significance to the state's African-American communities, including family preservation, health promotion, economic empowerment, youth development and community revitalization. Its Compassion Capital Fund Demonstration Program, which has been implemented in three regions of Maryland, including the Baltimore metropolitan area, the Eastern Shore, and Prince Georges County, focuses on organizational assessments, sub-awards, and group training.
While ABC has always operated locally, Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA)—a faith-based intermediary—has a 51-year history of international economic development work and 10 years of working in economic development across the United States. Started by a group of Mennonites, MEDA is a membership-based organization of about 3,000 business people interested in faith and its integration with business development. MEDA assists communities around the world to sustain themselves through micro-enterprise. In its CCF project, MEDA has broadened its role as an intermediary to include organizations that focus on issues ranging from at-risk youth to hunger and homelessness.
The sample of CCF-funded intermediaries has one collaborative (The Boston Capacity Tank—BCT), which includes the United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB) and the Black Ministerial Alliance (BMA), who joined with the Emmanuel Gospel Center and the Boston Ten-Point Coalition to provide support for organizations that serve high-risk youth. Each of the partners brings different strengths to the initiative, ensuring that the team is able to meet a broad range of needs among its target organizations; and the relationships among the partners are consistently recognized as honest, transparent and non-competitive.
During BCT's first year, UWMB—as the partner with the most experience in managing large government contracts and funding faith-based organizations, and with the greatest capacity among the four—served as the lead agency, setting up systems for grant management and financial reporting. UWMB provided support to the other three partners, and especially to BMA, the organization slated to take over BCT leadership functions after the initial year. With this transition well underway, the intermediary collaborative is now officially housed at BMA.
In another distinctive partnership, the sample's only for-profit intermediary—JVA Consulting, LLC (JVA), located in Denver—joined with the Metro Denver Black Church Initiative (MDBCI), a faith-based membership organization serving African-American churches, to serve FBOs and CBOs in Denver and across the state of Colorado. JVA was formed 17 years ago, primarily as a grant-writing firm for nonprofit organizations, schools and government agencies. Over the years, it has expanded its services to include more capacity-building projects, such as helping organizations to develop strategic plans and resource development plans.
The CCF funding has allowed JVA to assist less sophisticated groups that otherwise could not afford its services, expand its geographic reach from the Denver metropolitan area to the entire state, and develop a more comprehensive approach. In its CCF project, the intermediary has specialized in working with smaller organizations—those whose capacity-development needs are greatest. And in order to maximize the number of organizations with which it works, JVA strives to limit each organization to an average of 30 hours of customized technical assistance, which typically takes place within a period of six to nine months. The organization then "graduates." JVA admits new organizations through an annual application process in the fall. Its partner in the CCF project, the MDBCI, operates somewhat differently. MDBCI has opted to work with the same small number of organizations over several years to deepen their mastery of nonprofit management areas.
While the majority of the intermediaries in our sample had at least fairly substantial experience, two were new to that role—although they were able to draw on their organizations' experiences and reputations as well-established direct service providers. Father Joe's Villages (FJV) began 50 years ago with a modest operation in downtown San Diego, providing food to the homeless. Over the years, that has evolved into the expansive campus of the St. Vincent DePaul Village in downtown San Diego, which provides emergency, short- and long-term transitional housing, and permanent supportive housing for the homeless. In addition to housing nearly 1,000 individuals per night, it offers clients access to a comprehensive array of support services, ranging from assessment, licensed childcare, elementary and high school education, case management, health services (including psychiatry), career education, and mental health counseling and recovery services.
While St. Vincent DePaul Village serves as an organizational anchor point, Father Joe's operation has expanded both its scope of services and its geographic reach. It now operates six other comprehensive rehabilitation centers in Southern California and Mexico, including Toussaint Youth Villages, which address the needs of homeless teens; Josue Homes/National AIDS Foundation, which provides housing and related services to those living with AIDS or HIV; and Martha's Villages, which provides rehabilitation services for homeless families, women and men. As the size and scope of FJV grew, other organizations became interested in learning from its success. Thus, expanding its role to serve as an intermediary seemed like a logical step. In 2003, with its CCF grant, the organization created the Village Training Institute, a self-contained entity within FJV, to operate its first intermediary project.
Nueva Esperanza, located in Philadelphia, also has extensive experience as a direct service provider. The largest Latino faith-based community development corporation in the country, Nueva was founded in 1987. It currently offers housing, economic development and job training services, and operates a charter high school, junior college program, and campsite and retreat center.
Nueva Esperanza's work as an intermediary began in 2002, when it launched the first prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C. for Hispanic clergy. With its CCF funding, Nueva Esperanza provides training, technical assistance and sub-awards in six regions around the country. Nueva brings all participating FBOs and CBOs together in Washington, D.C. as part of a national training event.
The Non-CCF Intermediaries
In providing details on promising approaches for improving the capacity of FBOs and CBOs, we wanted to document a wide array of practices that would be appropriate for replication by a far-reaching group of intermediaries. For this reason, we did not restrict the research exclusively to intermediaries that had been funded by CCF at the time this study began, but also included four non-CCF-funded intermediaries in order to better document the roles and services of intermediaries across the board.
While some of these non-CCF organizations provided training and technical assistance which was similar to that provided by the CCF-funded sites, they also played other important roles. Three focused their work on helping FBOs and CBOs to develop new partnerships and coalitions. And although it was less prevalent than other services, two of the intermediaries also served as "capacity surrogates": they lent staff or performed administrative or service functions for the FBOs and CBOs. Providing this type of service to grassroots organizations can enable them to operate more effectively until they have sufficient funds to hire their own staff.
These non-CCF intermediaries include three nonprofit secular organizations (Palm Beach County Local Initiatives Support Network, the Urban Strategies Council and Seedco) and one faith-based intermediary (Good Samaritan Ministries). With the exception of Seedco (a large, multi-site operation), the non-CCF intermediaries have budgets of about $1.5 million and work primarily with FBOs and CBOs in their city or region.
The Local Initiatives Support Network is a national intermediary founded in 1980. The largest community development support organization in the country, it serves as the umbrella for 38 regional program offices across the nation. One of those offices is the Palm Beach County Local Initiatives Support Network (LISC), which serves Palm Beach County and parts of Broward County in Florida.7 Founded in 1991, LISC has been integral to organizing different segments of Palm Beach County around economic development and housing issues. As a part of its community organizing activities, it has directly supported the establishment of 25 community development corporations (CDCs) that are currently focusing on creating affordable housing and supporting retail infrastructure in some of the county's most underserved regions.
LISC has experience offering a wide range of technical assistance and training opportunities to its partner CDCs and other nonprofits, and it provides grant and loan assistance by acting as an intermediary between private lenders and neighborhood groups. It has also developed the South Florida Community Development Training Institute (CDTI), through which it offers locally based and regional seminars, workshops, and assessments for a wide range of entities, including CDCs, other nonprofits, government agencies, financial institutions, and builders and developers.
The Urban Strategies Council is another community-focused intermediary. Founded as a secular, nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, in 1987, it is a community-building support and advocacy organization that assists stakeholders in creating partnerships and alliances for collective action that will reduce poverty and transform low-income neighborhoods. The organization takes a leadership role by identifying issues that have an impact on urban communities—including employment, public safety and public education—and building an understanding of the issues among stakeholders, and developing plans for addressing them. One of the council's key functions is conducting research that provides data relevant to the issues being addressed and disseminating those data to stakeholders so the information can be used to plan and manage community-change efforts.
A third non-CCF intermediary, Good Samaritan Ministries, is located in Holland, Michigan. Founded in 1969 as a non-denominational, faith-based organization, Good Samaritan was created by individuals from a variety of churches who collectively recognized growing social needs in the region and felt that the faith community had a calling to respond.
Good Samaritan fills a variety of roles. The organization collaborates with local agencies to provide a limited number of direct services, including financial counseling and life skills mentoring. It performs assessments on individuals and families seeking assistance for essential needs such as housing, maintains information on available services in the area, and refers clients to appropriate organizations and other resources. To strengthen the services the individuals and families receive, Good Samaritan provides training and technical assistance to those organizations, most of which are faith-based. It also works to build networks of churches that can identify and address community needs through joint programming.
Unlike the other three intermediaries, Seedco, headquartered in New York City, with regional offices in Birmingham, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee, is a large organization that serves more than 200 CBOs and FBOs a year. It works with organizations that range widely in size and sophistication, from those with only one or two employees to those with a staff of more than 200 people. The intermediary's focus includes training and technical assistance connected to economic development, affordable housing, entrepreneurship, workforce development and increasing the supports available to working families. It also provides financing to support selected program activities of the organizations it serves.
One defining characteristic of Seedco's technical assistance is the emphasis it places on measuring and improving the performance of organizations' program activities. Seedco developed its own system—known as Performance Measurement & Managementsm—to help organizations articulate outcomes, collect data about these outcomes, and then use the data to continually inform and improve their programs.
Recruiting Organizations
For the CCF-funded intermediaries in particular, the first major task was to recruit organizations that could benefit from the services they offered. The intermediaries used multiple methods—including mailing lists, e-mail, word of mouth, information sessions and introductory group training workshops—to inform social service providers about their services. Some of the intermediaries had already established reputations for effective work, and this helped attract FBOs and CBOs to their services. In addition, a couple of the CCF-funded intermediaries continued to work with organizations they had already been serving by bringing them into the CCF project.
Intermediaries' staff and resource capacities meant that they could serve only a limited number of organizations through technical assistance, although some opened their larger group training workshops to any organization in the community. Geography was also a limiting factor, with most intermediaries targeting specific areas. A few intermediaries operated multiple program sites across the country, but each of those sites served a defined region.
Intermediaries attempted to enlist FBOs and CBOs small enough to benefit from capacity-building services, but established enough to survive, so that the training and technical assistance efforts would be a good investment. In general, the intermediaries based their decisions on who would receive services—and, particularly, technical assistance—on at least some of the following eligibility criteria:
Type of services provided. The HHS Request for Proposals (RFP) had listed six areas of service provision: hunger, homelessness, substance abuse, prisoners re-entering the community, at-risk youth, and families in transition from welfare to work. Some intermediaries included organizations that provide services in any of those areas while others focused on a particular service area, such as at-risk youth.
Track record. Some intermediaries looked for FBOs and CBOs that had been operating for at least a minimum number of years, rather than start-up organizations.
Size (budget). Some intermediaries, for example, targeted organizations with an operating budget under $300,000 or under $500,000.
Limited prior experience with receipt of government grants.
Lack of technical assistance services from other sources.
Organizations Served
For the most part, intermediaries reported that they successfully recruited sufficient numbers of FBOs and CBOs. The group training sessions attracted large numbers of participants, and the number of organizations interested in receiving technical assistance generally met intermediaries' expectations. The intermediaries also received a larger number of acceptable applications for sub-awards than they could fund.
All intermediaries in this study recruited both faith-based and secular organizations. The religious character of the intermediary did not necessarily determine the type of organization served. Secular intermediaries proved adept at recruiting FBOs, while several faith-based intermediaries reported difficulties recruiting FBOs.8
As Table 2 illustrates, the number of organizations served varied across the intermediaries. These FBOs and CBOs included start-up and established organizations, and ranged from very small, volunteer-run programs to large, multi-million dollar operations. These organizations sought to improve their communities through a broad range of social services: serving the homeless, mentoring children of prisoners, helping welfare recipients find employment and providing after-school opportunities, among many others.
The following chapters describe the services these organizations received from the intermediaries and detail some of the promising practices that contributed to the effectiveness of those services.
| CCF | Faith-Based | Location | Service Area | Total Staffd | CCF Staff | Annual Budget | CCF Annual Budget | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Associated Black Charities (ABC) | Yes | Noa | Baltimore, MD | Baltimore, Eastern Shore, Prince Georges County, MD | 44 | 9 | $23 million | $1.5 million |
| Boston Capacity Tank (BCT): United Way Mass Bay; Black Ministerial Alliance; Emmanuel Gospel Center; Boston Ten-Point Coalition | Yes | Yesb | Boston, MA | Boston, MA | 12e | 2 | $20 million | $2 million |
| Father Joe's Villages (FJV) | Yes | Yes | San Diego, CA | Southern CA | 600 | 4 | $47 million | $673,041 |
| Good Samaritan Ministries (GSM) | No | Yes | Holland, MI | Holland, MI | 17 | Not applicable | $1.5 million | Not applicable |
| JVA Consulting, LLC | Yes | Noc | Denver, CO | Colorado | 23 | 8 | $2.8 million | $1.8 million |
| Local Initiatives Support Corporation Palm Beach (LISC) | No | No | West Palm Beach, FL | Palm Beach County, FL | 5 | Not applicable | Not available | Not applicable |
| Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) | Yes | Yes | Lancaster, PA | 5 regions in US | Not available | 5 | $5 million | $1 million |
| Nueva Esperanza | Yes | Yes | Phila., PA | 6 regions in US | 140 | 11 | $8 million | $2.4 million |
| Seedco | No | No | New York, NY; Birmingham, AL; Memphis, TN | 10 states in US | 150 | Not applicable | $21 million | Not applicable |
| Urban Strategies Council | No | No | Oakland, CA | Oakland & national | 11 | Not applicable | $1.3 million | Not applicable |
| Number of FBOs & CBOs Servedb1 (first year of the CCF project) | Budget Size (range) | % FBOs | Focus of Services | Eligibility Criteria Set By Intermediary | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Assistance | Group Training | Financial Assistance (sub-swards) | Associated Black Charities (ABC)a1 | 90c1 | 659c1 | 46 | Up to $500,000d1 | 40% | Allf1 | Have 501c3 Operate 3+ years No previous government funding |
| Boston Capacity Tank (BCT)a1 | 12 | 99 | 32 | $225,000 - $1,070,000e1 | 50% | At-risk youth Operate 1 year | Have 501c3 Have paid staff |
| Father Joe's Villages (FJV)a1 | 200 | 922 | 10 | $50,000 - $500,000e1 | 37% | Allf1 | None specified |
| Good Samaritan Ministries (GSM) | 97 | 14 | 14 | n/a | 87% | Allf1 | None specified |
| JVA Consulting, LLCa1 | 84 | 137 | 39 | $3,000 - $500,000e1 | 50% | Allf1 | Budget under $300,000 (sub-awards); under $500,000 (technical assistance) |
| Local Initiatives Support Corporation Palm Beach (LISC) | 25 | 25 | 25 | n/a | 12% | Housing, community development | Committed to good business practices |
| Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA)a1 | 32 | 321 | 22 | Up to $500,000d1 | 56% | Allf1 | None specified |
| Nueva Esperanzaa1 | 32 | 138 | 29 | Up to $5,000,00e1 | 75% | Allf1 | Primarily Latino-owned or operated organization
Operate 1 year Have 501c3 |
| Seedco | 30 | 215 | 30 | n/a | n/a | Low-wage workers, workforce development, asset building, economic development | Implementing community building projects |
| Urban Strategies Council | n/a | n/a | n/a | Up to $2,500,00e1 | Few | Low-income communities | None specified |
n/a means information is not available.
Table of Contents | Chapter 1: Introduction |
Chapter 3: Organizational Assessments