Nonprofits collaborate to survive, innovate

WORKING TOGETHER: Michelle Novello, program coordinator at the Providence Community Library, reads to Marelyn Colon, 5, of Providence. Novello’s group’s collaboration with two Providence nonprofits helped land a $250,000 grant last year. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
WORKING TOGETHER: Michelle Novello, program coordinator at the Providence Community Library, reads to Marelyn Colon, 5, of Providence. Novello’s group’s collaboration with two Providence nonprofits helped land a $250,000 grant last year. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Michelle Novello, a program coordinator at the Providence Community Library, got wind of a $250,000 grant on reading readiness last year but had only two weeks to apply.
Because of her involvement with the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet, a nonprofit dedicated to educating young people from cradle to career, Novello had already been working with Ready to Learn Providence, another nonprofit. Together, the library and Ready to Learn Providence designed a program in collaboration with the Providence school district called “Ready for K!” and won the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant in late September.
The Rhode Island Family Literacy Initiative has also dedicated four outreach workers to the project, she said.
Ready for K! began in mid-January with a six-week program for parents to register their children for kindergarten and get library cards at the same time. Following orientation in March, a 12-session program scheduled through August will coach parents on how to help their children read in anticipation of the start of the 2014-15 academic year, Novello said.
Novello’s involvement with the Cabinet helped her meet other nonprofit and city leaders, so that when an opportunity like this grant came along, she said, they could partner to get it done.
“Collaborating is critical to moving the needle, to having the children reading by grade level in Providence,” Novello said. “It can’t happen without a lot of us working together, because the size of the problem is so large it takes a community.”
About one in three nonprofits collaborated with their peers in 2013 to improve services or streamline operations, compared with 2008, observed Neil D. Steinberg, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation. Five years ago, that interest in and readiness to cooperate barely existed, he said.
RIF does not collect data on this but says it has observed an increase, particularly in the last few years.
Since 2010 RIF has provided, on average, about $30 million annually in funding to nonprofits – those “boots on the ground partners” that work in the community, he said, adding that the foundation is responsible for managing 1,300 different funds.
The scarcity of funding and intricacy of issues ranging from health care to environmental stewardship and academic performance make collaboration a critical tool today, Steinberg said, though the potential for it and practice of it has been around for some time. He said the approach today is to share ideas, not just resources. “We’ve definitely seen an increase in collaboration in the last three or four years,” Steinberg said. “Partnership: groups that haven’t worked together before: that’s what you’re seeing. That’s what’s increased. There’s more openness to collaboration now: the financial challenges and a lot of issues are larger and more complex.”
The idea of collaboration begins with having a vision and believing it’s achievable, adds Rebecca Boxx, director of the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet.
“We’re a small-enough city that we can come together across different agencies and systems and create this comprehensive set of support for kids from birth to the time they are entering the workforce,” said Boxx.
Another collaborative experiment with the potential to change how community mental-health care services are delivered is a new wrinkle in the operating methods for Horizon Healthcare Partners Inc., a budding nonprofit-management service involving four community-based mental-health centers.
The four providers – the Newport County Community Mental Health Center, The Kent Center in Warwick, Riverwood in Warren and Northern Rhode Island Community Services in Woonsocket – formed Horizon three years ago to share staff and training costs in an effort to save money, said Chris Stephens, president of NRICS.
The partnership has no operating budget, but has done some shared staffing in an effort to save money, and has the potential to provide services statewide, Stephens said.
For instance, NRICS is already certified as a disaster-response agency through Catholic Charities USA, which contracts with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If there were a federally declared disaster in Rhode Island or a nearby state, as it stands now, NRICS would be the preferred provider to deploy staff to provide support such as emergency housing, applying for food stamps or psychological first aid.
“You can’t just say to places: ‘You’re inefficient; you’re too small and you don’t deserve to exist,’ ” Stephens said. “If small businesses can figure out how to co-market together and collaborate on back-office costs, they have a little bit better survival rate. So, it’s not unusual for competitors to figure out how to share certain costs.”
Under consideration now is a recommendation to change Horizon’s bylaws to give it authority over the four members when executing certain business decisions, such as training of staff or disaster response. The goal is to get approval from the local boards of directors and state agencies and put changes in place by March 1, he said. “Each member agency does some statewide service, but increasingly we will look at Horizon to develop statewide contracts,” said Stephens.
If Horizon were enabled to act as a group, Stephens said, the network of agencies would be available to act in concert across the whole state. That particular contract would need some minor adjustments to accommodate Horizon, Stephens said. The value of collaborating through a formal partnership has definite potential, he added.
“When we were just more loosely connected, we could enter into some statewide demonstration projects, but there were other larger-scale projects where we all needed to operate in a similar fashion in order to be a provider,” he said. “Horizon enabled that.”
Clean Water Action, a national nonprofit with an office in Providence, used collaboration to further some of its concerns in 2013 and is planning to do more of the same this year, said Rhode Island Director Jamie Rhodes. The group focuses on everything from transportation issues and stormwater runoff to climate change.
“Our landfill is going to be full in 20 years and the state is drafting a long-term comprehensive plan this year about reducing waste,” he said. “I want more environmental voices pushing for waste reduction strategies, how we pay for it appropriately, to make sure we don’t move toward incineration or expand the landfill.”
Different nonprofits and partners bring different audiences and constituents to bear on such issues, he said.
Steinberg said the foundation’s “Make It Happen RI” initiative and the Rhode Island Innovation fellowships reflect increased collaboration, as well as the recently launched College and University Research Collaborative, which emerged from Make It Happen.
Just beginning its work in researching economic-development issues here that include manufacturing, arts and culture, and regional competitiveness, the mission of the collaborative is to “increase the use of nonpartisan academic research in policymaking and provide an evidence-based foundation for government decision-making in Rhode Island,” according to its website.
The foundation funded it with $100,000 and the state matched that funding, Steinberg said.
“It’s one of the few times all the 11 colleges and universities agreed to work together,” he said. •

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