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

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

Table of Contents |  Chapter 7: Serving as a Bridge Between Organizations | Chapter 9: Lessons

Chapter 8.

Strengthening the Capacity of Intermediaries

In addition to funding intermediaries and research on promising practices, the Compassion Capital Fund also established the CCF National Resource Center to provide training and other support to the intermediaries themselves. The center disseminates information to the intermediaries through websites, guidebooks, workshops and technical assistance provided on-site and through teleconferences, and it leads annual workshops that provide opportunities for intermediaries to learn from each other and from expert presenters.

In addition to utilizing this support, intermediaries in this study took additional steps to strengthen their capacity. Partnerships, in particular, proved to be a key strategy for providing a fuller range of services to a diverse group of organizations. These partnerships benefited intermediaries, and the FBOs and CBOs they served, by enabling them to provide technical assistance in substantive areas they would not otherwise have been able to cover, such as Internet technology and the use of specific software. And some CCF intermediaries joined with partners to manage the large-scale sub-award program, conduct organizational assessments of faith-based and community organizations, and manage fiscal reporting.

For some intermediaries, partners also made it possible to extend their reach. Partnering with entities that had their own networks and constituencies allowed the intermediaries to expand their target audience, and their services, to groups which they otherwise might not have been able to access, such as small, grassroots faith-based programs.

One important way that intermediaries can strengthen operations is to perform evaluations of their current effectiveness. Measuring outcomes of their services to organizations provides an opportunity for intermediaries to test their own perceptions of their value, improve services, and provide evidence of this value for funders.

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Promising Practices

Organizational Mentoring

Organizational mentoring at the executive level involves frequent communication between senior leaders of different organizations. The mentoring relationship is focused on helping to develop specific organizational capacities. The intermediaries engaged in organizational mentoring reported that this approach enabled one of the partners to develop the skills to function as a lead intermediary and provide services on a larger scale.

Boston Capacity Tank (BCT). BCT—a partnership of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB) and three faith-based organizations (the Boston Ministerial Alliance, the Emmanuel Gospel Center and the Boston Ten-Point Coalition)—is a new entity created to deliver CCF intermediary services. The partners all brought different strengths to the initiative, ensuring that they would be able to meet a broad range of needs.

The UWMB was selected to function as the lead agency in this partnership because of its capacity to manage large contracts and award grants to small organizations. It also had a successful history of funding faith-based organizations during the previous seven years through its Faith-in-Action program. While the Boston Ministerial Alliance (BMA) had previously provided capacity-building services to small black churches, at the time the CCF project began, none of the faith-based intermediaries was strong enough to manage the contract on its own. In order to address the need for stronger faith-based intermediaries in the Boston area, the partners' application to HHS proposed that the UWMB would build the capacity of the other three organizations—in particular, the Boston Ministerial Alliance—in preparation for an eventual transfer of lead agency status from the UWMB to the BMA.

In order to ensure progress in implementing their CCF intermediary project, all of the partners initially met weekly to make strategic decisions. The UWMB set up the systems for performing some of the complex functions of grant management and financial reporting. While the BMA did not have the capacity to handle these functions during the early stages of the project, the UWMB provided ongoing support and executive coaching to enable that organization to take on more responsibilities over time. As one key BMA staff member stated, the UWMB is "empowering the BMA to become the lead agent."

The critical piece of the partnership enabling the BMA to assume the lead has been the intensive mentoring that the vice president of community investments at the UWMB provided to the executive director of the BMA. During the first year of the project, these executives spoke every day by telephone, and they met in person for two to three hours every week, in addition to attending the weekly meetings of the partners. During the second year, as the capacity of the BMA grew, the contact between UWMB and BMA executives deliberately became less intense, although they still spoke occasionally by phone and met in person once a month. Their conversations were guided by the BMA leader's agenda, often revolving around such issues as staffing, financial systems, and policy and governance issues. As a result of this coaching, the BMA has successfully undertaken a variety of critical organizational changes, such as hiring a comptroller, strengthening its financial and computer systems, and developing its staff infrastructure.

The UWMB also provided other staff to support the BMA, including arranging for a consultant to train the BCT assistant director (a BMA employee) in conducting financial reviews and overseeing financial reporting. By working with the partners consistently through the initial stages, and by providing flexible support (staff, money and time), the UWMB ensured that the project moved forward and overcame challenges.

Frequent communication, respect and active participation among the key players enabled the partnership to succeed. One participant suggested that the "key to establishing trust between the partners is to come to all the meetings, or at least send a representative, [and] do the work you say you'll do." Another discussed the importance of "taking time to hammer out well-defined roles for each partner and formalizing those roles in a contract."

Using External Evaluation

Having outside professionals conduct evaluations provides an opportunity for intermediaries to make their services more effective.

Nueva Esperanza. External evaluators have been involved with Nueva Esperanza's CCF project from the start. One goal of the evaluation is to measure outcomes—primarily whether, over time, there are higher levels of organizational capacity among participating organizations. Nueva Esperanza developed a "Continuum of Capacity" framework. Using this approach, the evaluator plans to measure individual organization's gains in capacity between the first organizational assessment (completed at the beginning of the project) and a second assessment (completed after the organization's involvement in training and technical assistance). Nueva staff are tracking the number of hours of training, the amount of one-to-one technical assistance received by each service organization, and the additional contacts between Nueva's regional field staff and the participating organizations. Their hope is to correlate changes in the assessment to participation in training, technical assistance and contact hours.

A second goal of the evaluation is to use information on how the project has been implemented to inform improvements in training and technical assistance. To help gauge the project's success, evaluators held six focus groups (one in each region where Nueva operates) with representatives from 44 service organizations and conducted 14 one-on-one in-person interviews and 26 phone interviews at the end of the first year of the project. One issue that emerged during the focus groups concerned the training content, with some finding it too basic and others feeling it was too advanced. This finding contributed to Nueva's current plan to group organizations by capacity level for some of the training sessions.

Using Internal Approaches for Measuring Outcomes

Well-designed reporting forms completed by sub-award recipients document, in a systematized and comprehensive manner, how the sub-awardees used and benefited from their grants. These reports can provide valuable outcomes data that can be used by intermediaries to improve their own services and provide documentation of the value of such services to funders.

Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA). Intermediaries commonly request narrative reports from sub-grantees that cover the status of their activities and accomplishments during the reporting period, challenges and how they were addressed, and activities planned for the next reporting period. MEDA recently instituted a more specific semi-annual report that tracks sub-awardees' progress in achieving particular capacity-related outcomes.

MEDA asked grantees to report on the following:

• Whether the CCF sub-grant strengthened the organization in the following areas, and how those changes are concretely demonstrated within the organization's operations: increased ability to do effective long-term planning; improved governance of the organization; increased access to funding; upgraded use of technology; improved program monitoring, reporting and evaluation processes; increased capacity to do effective publicity; and improved financial management systems.

• How clients of the organization benefited from the project that the organization undertook with its CCF sub-award.

• Whether fundraising was part of capacity-building work during the period. If so, organizations were asked to report each source to which they applied, the results and whether the organization had previously received funding from the source.

This report format will make it possible for MEDA to track the most common outcomes attributed to its sub-awards and analyze whether specific services it offers as an intermediary are associated with particular outcomes.

Table of Contents |  Chapter 7: Serving as a Bridge Between Organizations | Chapter 9: Lessons