Our Approach to Partnerships
People with Lived Experience
Central to successful partnerships are the voices and perspectives of people with experience in areas the Foundation addresses (e.g. homelessness, opportunity youth, or early childhood development). Engaging people with lived expertise and local perspectives leads to improved program design and policy outcomes.
Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
Grants in this portfolio are co-funded with other philanthropic institutions and seek to leverage more significant contributions from the public and private sectors. Learning, capturing and sharing best practices are key elements of how we work.
Calls to Action
The Foundation’s multi-stakeholder partnership framework is designed to address four Calls to Action.
Recognize power
by including community members early in the partnership process.
• Simplify partnership requirements.
• Conduct power and privilege analyses of partners to ensure equitable dynamics.
• Where imbalance exists, revise governance structures to share decision-making power with impacted communities.
Radically expand networks
by reducing hurdles for new partners and small organizations.
• Support a network “infrastructure” to map existing players in relevant ecosystems and identify opportunities where partners can collaborate and complement one another.
• Invest in building cross-sectoral leaders.
• Support the financial and operational capacity of community-based organizations (CBOs).
Make every dollar count
by alleviating funding burdens for community-based organizations (CBOs) partners.
• Provide general operating support.
• Actively encourage cooperation – rather than competition – among implementers.
• Incentivize increased private investment through catalytic capital, blended financing and pooled resources.
Be accountable
by being transparent on all aspects of our partnerships; including incentive structures, governance structures, costs and impact.
• Rigorously evaluate partnership models to assess impact (relative to non-partnership efforts).
• Enable community-led accountability of partnerships to ensure progress toward goals.
• Act on key learnings with agility; changing approach as needed to maximize inclusion and effectiveness.