Fighting tight funds to help families

A LIFE OF SERVICE: Family Service of Rhode Island Chief Financial Officer Anthony H. Bliss has spent his entire professional life in the nonprofit realm. He came to Family Service five years ago. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
A LIFE OF SERVICE: Family Service of Rhode Island Chief Financial Officer Anthony H. Bliss has spent his entire professional life in the nonprofit realm. He came to Family Service five years ago. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Anthony H. Bliss is a numbers guy. He’s also a man with a heart. So when the numbers guy had to tell his bosses how to save money in ways that meant losses of jobs and lessening of services, it weighed heavily.
“It was not easy to do,” said Bliss, chief financial officer of Family Service of Rhode Island, which endured layoffs and cuts last year en route to reversing a million-dollar deficit. “We went through some hard times.”
It’s a tough job in a tough field, one that he knows well.
Bliss, 63, has spent his professional life in the nonprofit realm, managing multimillion dollar budgets for hospitals and medical centers in Pennsylvania and his native New Jersey before coming to Rhode Island five years ago to manage FSRI’s $20 million annual budget. The agency, which specializes in helping children and families in need, is one of the state’s oldest nonprofits.
“As a direct result of his leadership and strategic focus, FSRI has experienced significant financial and programmatic growth in line with a clear and diverse, long-term sustainability plan,” said the agency’s CEO, Margaret Holland McDuff, in nominating Bliss for the award.
McDuff said Bliss is responsible for several significant agency milestones, including one in his first three years at the agency, when he turned a $1 million deficit into a $300,000 surplus by 2011. That was a difficult but necessary task, Bliss said.
There were layoffs (a loss of 77 full-time jobs in 2011), salary reductions, every contract was reviewed, he said, clearly not at ease with the human side of cutting costs in an agency that is all about humanity. “The agency was going through a transition,” Bliss said. “Some of the large programs we received state funding for were changed, and we had to change the model of providing services.
“Those were very stressful times for the agency,” he said, adding that FSRI employs more than 300 people “but as the state keeps cutting back, it’s harder and harder on the employees. They deserve to be well-treated, but unfortunately sometimes the dollars aren’t there.” The recession hit the agency hard in two ways: A reduction in state funding and increase in clientele, thanks in part to the difficult economic times.
One part of Bliss’ job is seeking grants and donations, working with the agency’s fundraisers. He recently led a process to acquire the largest private individual contribution in the agency’s history – a donated building and property valued at $885,000, and a Champlin Foundations grant of $134,000 to renovate the space, which will allow the agency to reduce its footprint of leased space and move into a building it owns, reducing rent and occupancy costs for existing programs by about $100,000 a year.
The agency has seen a sizable increase in federal, state and local grants, contributions and fundraising over the past three years. In 2009, the total stood at $4.53 million. By last year, it had blossomed to $8.52 million.
“In a tough economic climate, people are looking at agencies where the money is well-spent, and us maintaining a sound financial basis helps,” Bliss said. “They want to know the money they give is used for the purpose for which it was intended.”
Bliss has also developed specific strategies to reduce funding fragmentation, McDuff said, and under his leadership the vice president of finance recently reorganized the agency’s 14-member finance department staff. It resulted in more effective cash-flow management, elimination of duplicated efforts, streamlined accounting practices and greater third-party billing potential.
Thanks to Bliss, who led the development of FSRI’s first-ever technology plan in 2010, the agency got a $65,000 corporate-foundation grant to upgrade its technology infrastructure – the largest IT grant it has ever received.
Bliss also fostered development of several successful programs and social-service partnerships that saw a jump in clients the agency serves. There was a 30-percent increase in unduplicated clients served, going from 6,200 in 2009 to more than 8,000 in 2011. He is also responsible for the agency’s affiliation with the Lucy’s Hearth homeless shelter in 2007 and the merger with AIDS Project Rhode Island in 2008, which has retained its name as it operates as a division of FSRI.
“The AIDS Project was having financial difficulties, and we had our own AIDS program, so it was a natural fit,” he said. “We saw the advantage of taking work we were doing and combining it with theirs and building a stronger program.”
Other partnerships have been created or expanded under Bliss’ leadership. In 2009, FSRI became the lead for the Urban Core Family Care and Community Partnership, a five-agency collaboration that helps families with children under 18 who are at risk. The same year FSRI spearheaded the creation of the Ocean State Network for Children & Families as a recognized nonprofit and became the lead agency for the 20-member collaborative in 2011.
McDuff said Bliss’ influence has played a role in the agency earning recognition for excellence, including the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility in 2007; Year Up’s Urban Empowerment Award in 2007; the Mayor’s Providence Community Partner Award in 2008; the Providence Housing Authority Partnership Award in 2009; and the MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award in 2010.
The main thrust of what FSRI does is working with families and children, to keep them together, to get them safely through crisis situations and engineer a happy ending, Bliss said. And even for a numbers guy, that’s the most important thing of all.
“We want to go in, help in a crisis, give them the tools so they can continue on without a need for us,” he said. “That’s the best.” •

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