Supporting Nonprofit Collaboration

Member Examples and Stories

The Davenport Trust

Operates in a community of about 10,000 residents in Maine. Out of concern that arts and culture are among the first programs to be cut in difficult economic times, they awarded an educational outreach grant to Maine State Music Theatre (MSMT) that will provide 350 tickets for area young people to attend one of its three youth theater shows this summer. Tickets will be go to young people involved with nonprofits with which the trust works.

The Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation

Located in Montgomery County, Maryland, recently launched an initiative to help area nonprofits get to know one another. Team Up: Non-Profits in Partnership offers a grant of $150,000 to a team comprising four or more area nonprofits that work jointly on a program supporting middle schoolers. The foundation involved area nonprofits in planning the initiative, which kicked off with a full-day briefing to introduce nonprofits to one another and to discuss the pitfalls and possibilities of collaboration. They selected recipients in spring 2009.

The Lodestar Foundation

Based in Phoenix, AZ, created The Collaboration Prize, a $250,000 award for a top-notch nonprofit collaboration. Nominees must be part of a pre-existing collaboration. The prize, to be awarded in March 2009 in Scottsdale, seeks to identify achievements in collaboration as models for inspiration and replication in the nonprofit world. The Collaboration Prize recognizes collaborations among two or more nonprofit organizations that each would otherwise provide the same or similar programs or services and compete for clients, financial resources, and staff. Finalists include museums, cancer research institutes, community centers, and legal services organizations. The prize also seeks to build an information base of effective practice models that can be studied and used by academics, nonprofit leaders, and grantmakers to inspire and advance their work.

“I think reaching out in respectful ways is the key. I just contacted people I know at local non-profits we work with to see how we could help in small ways that make a difference. I think that they really appreciated us just asking for their opinion.”

–Barry Sturgeon, The Davenport Trust, Bath, ME

“Supporting nonprofit collaboration is one of the most effective ways to maximize the impact of grants—a key issue for small foundations. And it doesn’t require a lot of money to create a huge impact. If you provide funds for nonprofits to investigate joining forces, or help fund third-party costs incurred in the course of a merger, or bring your grantees together to meet one another and share best practices, you are helping nonprofits explore ways to allocate their resources more effectively and efficiently to increase impact.

Moreover, the leverage potential of an investment in collaboration is truly exponential; for example, our $13,000 grant to facilitate the merger of a struggling women’s prisoner reentry nonprofit into a stronger women’s support agency has led to $3 million in additional grants that neither organization would have been able to obtain on its own. We believe that our strategy of supporting collaborations and mergers has maximized the impact of our resources and has enabled our grantees to achieve greater impact as well.”

–Lois Savage, The Lodestar Foundation, Phoenix, AZ