A Determined Attack on Need... Empowering America's Grassroots

Promising Practices for Improving the Capacity of
Faith- and Community-Based Organizations

Table of Contents |  Executive Summary |  Chapter 2: The Intermediaries and
the Organizations They Served

Chapter 1.

Introduction

President George W. Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiative promotes new partnerships between the federal government and faith-based and community social service providers, with the goal of better serving residents of impoverished communities. Faith-based organizations (FBOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) have a long history of delivering needed services to these low-income residents. In many poor neighborhoods, they are often the only institutions with both substantial support within and respect from outside the community.

These organizations often have direct and consistent contact with those who are in the greatest need of social services. In fact, their inherent mission to serve those less fortunate can mean they are willing to work with the most difficult of populations—populations that more established service agencies are unlikely to reach. Their presence and status within these low-income communities provides them with relevant information about the challenges these residents face, and allows them to earn the trust of those they serve. In addition, the FBOs share a unique connection to service recipients through religion.

Despite the promise that FBOs and CBOs hold for delivering a broad array of services and making a difference in the lives of those in need, some may lack the organizational resources necessary for reaching their full potential. They frequently rely almost exclusively on the dedication of staff and networks of volunteers. Among FBOs, those volunteers are typically members of their congregations. These organizations often need assistance with such essential tasks as strategic planning, management and volunteer mobilization. Some lack the capacity for administrative and financial operations. They often do not have the knowledge or resources to monitor and evaluate their work, both for purposes of program improvement and for reporting to funders and policymakers. And they may not be well positioned to develop the institutional partnerships that can prove vital to the success of a small organization, allowing it to continue to focus on its core competency of delivering social services, while being supported in other areas.

In addition, until nine years ago, there were substantial barriers to the participation of faith-based organizations in federally funded projects. It was only with the passage of the Charitable Choice provisions of the 1996 welfare reform law that FBOs of all kinds were specifically allowed to compete for government funding to support their work with low-income residents in their communities. More recently, President Bush expanded efforts to increase the access of these organizations to federal funding sources by removing administrative barriers to their participation, particularly by creating Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in key government agencies.

Back to TOC

The Role of Intermediaries

Beyond the removal of administrative barriers, grassroots faith-based organizations, like many small community-based organizations, also need training and technical assistance to help them become more effective organizations and, ultimately, more viable candidates for federal funding. To address the need of both FBOs and CBOs for strengthening their programs, the government turned to intermediary organizations—a class of organizations that, in the words of Hudson Institute researcher Amy L. Sherman, "helps frontline organizations do what they do better"¹—as the conduits for the new partnerships between government and these grassroots groups.

Intermediaries, as the name suggests, connect local organizations with government, foundations and businesses, and can provide the strategic assistance that allows FBOs and CBOs to serve more people more effectively. In a recent study of faith-based intermediaries, Dr. Sherman found that "intermediary organizations currently make enormous contributions to the scope, scale, and effectiveness of grassroots, faith-based social service agencies, and often do so at low cost." ² Among the benefits facilitated by the intermediaries on behalf of the grassroots organizations were increased funding, development of alliances, increased volunteer pools and increased public exposure. In addition, the study notes that much intermediary support to faith-based organizations is "intangible," but related to mentoring, coaching, and assistance with the articulation of program vision or mission.³

Similarly, in an in-depth study of a Philadelphia intermediary, Branch and Taylor found that it had facilitated a wide range of benefits for the congregations with which it worked. Among the benefits were access to dialogue with grantmakers in the private and philanthropic sectors, often for the first time; access to technical expertise in a variety of fields including law, accounting and architecture; access to a network of congregations that were similarly interested in social service provision; improvements in overall operations, including upgrading their boards, and developing strategic plans and long-term budgets; new programs, improved outreach techniques and contact with more community residents; and significant steps toward fundability—including establishing 501(c)3 status, initiating contact with grantmakers, submitting proposals and writing letters of appeal.⁴

While the structure and service mix of intermediaries vary considerably, their common objective is to strengthen the capacity of the frontline organizations with which they work. Intermediaries help build on the strengths of grassroots organizations and address gaps in organizational capability where needed. They strengthen the resources of faith-based and community groups through a broad menu of services, among them:

• Organizational Assessment—Identifying organizations' strengths, weaknesses and most pressing needs. The relationship between an intermediary and an organization commonly begins with such an assessment.

• Group Training—Workshops on organizational capacity delivered to large groups. Intermediaries offer training on a broad range of topics, including marketing and public relations, volunteer and human resource management, and creating partnerships.

• Technical Assistance—Instruction or guidance provided in one-on-one or small group settings. Intermediaries provide technical assistance in such topics as board development, strategic planning, financial management and fundraising.

• Re-Granting or Making Sub-Awards—The distribution of funds, received from the federal government or other funders, to smaller organizations. Those organizations might otherwise lack the administrative infrastructure required for the management and monitoring of such funds.

• Bridging—Serving as a liaison between constituent organizations and other nonprofit institutions, or foundation and governmental funding sources. In this role, intermediaries help organizations develop partnerships or secure funding.

• Serving as a Capacity Surrogate—Performance of administrative or service functions for organizations. In this role, an intermediary might, for example, serve as a fiscal agent or handle record-keeping functions.

Back to TOC

The Compassion Capital Fund

The Compassion Capital Fund (CCF), established by Congress in 2002, provides funding for intermediary organizations to work with faith-based and community organizations, performing responsibilities similar to those listed above. In the first round of CCF funding:

• A group of 21 intermediary organizations was selected through a competitive application process. Those intermediaries received grants so they could begin to provide training and technical assistance to faith-based and community organizations, along with making sub-grants to them on a competitive basis.

• A National Resource Center was established to provide information and training to the CCF intermediary organizations themselves. Dare Mighty Things, a Virginia-based organization, received a grant to operate the resource center.

• Awards were made for the support of research activities designed to assess the effectiveness of faith-based and community organizations.

• Awards were made to support a study that would document the practices of the intermediaries and delineate the "value added" that intermediaries bring to the work of faith-based and community organizations.

Back to TOC

About This Study

Branch Associates, Inc., partnering with Abt Associates, Inc., was selected to conduct the study of the intermediaries, which has four components: a study of promising practices drawn from an examination of 10 exemplary intermediaries, some of them funded through the Compassion Capital Fund and some of them not; the development of recommendations and an evaluation design, should the government choose to conduct an impact analysis on the effectiveness of Compassion Capital funding; the development of a benchmarking strategy—a series of quantitative and qualitative descriptors that can be used as uniform measures of the performance of faith-based and community organizations; and the development and dissemination of operational guides that will serve as practical tools for the ground-level implementation of some of the key activities identified in the study of promising practices.

This report completes the first of these study components. It documents the range of services that intermediaries provide to their constituent organizations, and identifies those among them that constitute promising practices. We define as promising practices those efforts undertaken by the intermediaries that:

• Show potential for producing successful outcomes
• Are widely used and accepted and/or have the potential for replication among other organizations.

We included practices that, during the course of site visits, impressed members of the research team as being particularly strong, as well as practices nominated by the faith-based and community organizations themselves as having been helpful and resulting in significant improvements to their operations.

The practices that were observed and documented in this report generally fall into two categories. The first category—the larger of the two—includes sound, useful and easily replicable practices that govern organizational assessment, group training, the sub-award process and facilitating partnerships. These practices, when well implemented, contribute to increased organizational capacity in the frontline organizations with which they are used. They are neither new nor groundbreaking—in fact, previous research on intermediaries confirms that similar practices do lead to desired changes. These practices are nevertheless not universal; they had not been implemented by the majority of the intermediaries we visited, leaving considerable room for intermediaries to improve their own efforts.

The second category of promising practices, involving project-based technical assistance and organizational mentoring, entails holistic activities that require more intensive engagement on the part of the intermediary and the frontline organization. These practices emphasize "teaching in the process of doing." While also sound, valid and useful, replication of these practices would require the right set of actors and circumstances, as well as significant dedication. The appeal of these practices is their potential for bigger breakthroughs in improved organizational capacity. In defining these practices as "promising" the research team was guided by the literature on intermediaries, which suggests that intensive practices provided in the context of strong and close relationships "makes it more likely that the practical skills and tools frontline staff acquire through the intermediary's training are actually put to use"⁵

Methodology

The first step in this study involved selecting a sample of intermediaries that exhibited promising practices. In order to do so, a database of 65 existing intermediaries was developed. This database served as a sampling frame from which the research team selected the 10 intermediaries to be included in the report. The intermediaries in the database were identified by experts in the field, including members of the project's Technical Review Group, or through reports, publications and document reviews. Each of the intermediaries was considered—either in the literature or in the opinion of relevant experts—to be implementing interesting or exemplary practices in interactions with their constituent organizations.

Brief telephone interviews with the intermediaries in the database provided basic information about each organization's religious or organizational affiliation; geographic location and service area; operating budget and source of funding; and types of services provided. These interviews also identified promising practices used by the intermediary.

Guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directed that about half of the intermediaries in our sample were to be selected from among the first group of 21 intermediaries funded by CCF. The others were to be chosen from among a group of intermediaries that had a track record of working with faith-based and community organizations but had not received CCF funding. Additional criteria included a minimum of three years of experience operating as an intermediary and an operating budget of $500,000 to ensure a minimum level of stability. The final sample was also intended to reflect geographic diversity, and include both secular and faith-based organizations.

Using matrices that categorized intermediaries on these variables of interest, the research team chose the sample of 10 intermediaries that are the subject of this report. This sample was selected to highlight promising practices and is, therefore, not representative of all intermediaries.

The primary data collection strategy consisted of site visits to the 10 case study intermediaries. During each site visit, researchers interviewed staff from the intermediary and its partner organizations, as well as from two or more FBOs and/or CBOs served by the intermediary. The research team also observed training or technical assistance sessions conducted by the intermediary and reviewed relevant documents.

Back to TOC

About This Report

This report highlights practices that show promise in building the capacity of faith- and community-based social service providers. It examines the types of services intermediaries offer and the constituent organizations they target, and addresses the following questions:

• What are examples of promising practices of intermediary organizations, practices that are worthy of replication by other intermediary organizations?

• What strategies should HHS promote and encourage among its intermediary partners?

The following chapter provides a brief description of the intermediaries in this study, the kinds of organizations with whom they worked and how they recruited them. Chapters 3 through 7 then describe intermediary functions and highlight the promising practices discovered in this research. Chapter 3 describes intermediary efforts to assess the FBOs and CBOs—the first task undertaken as part of their Compassion Capital grants. Chapters 4 and 5 document the ways that the intermediaries provide group training and one-on-one technical assistance, while Chapter 6 discusses the intermediaries' sub-award programs through which they handled the redistribution of federal funds. Chapter 7 describes ways in which the intermediaries serve as bridges between their constituent organizations and funders and other nonprofit groups, while Chapter 8 examines strategies used by the intermediaries to foster and measure their own success. The final chapter presents lessons learned from this study, with recommendations for how HHS can support and enhance the effectiveness of its intermediaries. Throughout the report, we present stories of FBOs and CBOs, showing how they have benefited from their work with the intermediaries.

Table of Contents |  Executive Summary. |  Chapter 2: The Intermediaries and
the Organizations They Served