New Models for Fundraising in Tough Times: Non-Profits Awarded National Grants to Expand Community Funding Support

New World Foundation, Open Society Institute, and Stoneman Foundation Collaborative Announces Small Donor Development and Diversification Grant Recipients: $510,000 in Grants to be Awarded to Eight Grassroots Groups

Eight community-based social justice non-profit organizations from across the United States will receive a total of $510,000 in grants from a new national funding initiative formed to support innovative fundraising campaigns that can help struggling non-profit groups to identify new ways to move ahead even in the economic downturn.

Initiated by the New World Foundation, Open Society Institute, and Stoneman Foundation, with additional support from the French American Charitable Trust, the Donor Development and Diversification Initiative (3D Initiative) will provide grant funding to support grassroots membership organizations in building more effective approaches to small donor fundraising.

The participating foundations believe that this will enhance the organizations’ fiscal health and reduce their reliance on foundations whose grantmaking budgets are unpredictable due to stock market fluctuations.

The eight organizations each work to advance social justice through community organizing and issue based advocacy, especially among low-income people, people of color, immigrant, LGBTQ, and youth communities, and were selected from an open, nationwide call for proposals in which more than 315 groups sought funding.

Each recipient proposed a new approach to diversifying foundation-dominant funding bases that could provide inspiration to other grassroots groups facing great fundraising challenges. Several of the successful proposals also demonstrated a commitment to improving the fundraising capacity of alliances of organizations and not solely their own groups.

The eight organizations selected for one-year grants include:

• Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative (CCOC), Denver, Colorado, $120,000, to build the shared fundraising capacity of eight community-based groups working collectively to advance racial and economic justice in Colorado. The CCOC will hire two fundraising consultants to provide tailored assistance and ongoing training to each organization and conduct rigorous evaluation to determine which fundraising approaches – in person, phone, mail, online – work most effectively to increase membership contributions and sustain long-term donor loyalty;

• Kentucky Coalition/ Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, London, KY, $75,000, to deepen the connections between community organizing, grassroots fundraising, and membership recruitment and retention. The Kentucky Coalition has tripled its membership and increased its grassroots fundraising by nearly 350% from 2004 to 2009 and projects to do similarly over the next five years;

• FIERCE, New York, NY, $70,000, to build stronger member-led grassroots fundraising efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identified (LGBTQ) youth of color in New York City and to develop a grassroots fundraising model to share with other social justice organizations;

• Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), Woodburn, OR, $60,000, to expand the donor bases and fundraising capacity of nine immigrant and farmworker organizations in rural Oregon. PCUN will establish a leadership institute to provide fundraising training to 100 staff and leaders from the nine partner groups;

• Domestic Workers United, New York, NY, $50,000, to strengthen its membership’s commitment to fundraising, expand its fee-for-service Nanny Training Program for its largely immigrant women membership, and implement a “Donor Member” initiative that will raise matching contributions from non-domestic workers to match the membership dues of its domestic worker members;

• Make the Road New York, NY, $50,000, to implement the “Our Money, Our Power” fundraising initiative, including instituting a member donor program and connecting thousands of low-income immigrant New Yorkers with low-cost, non-predatory banking services, financial counseling, loans, and other financial services;

• Washington Community Action Network, Seattle, WA, $50,000, to expand its membership and donor base (currently at 35,000 members) through the targeted development of small business leaders and to increase membership retention through the use of enhanced technology, including web-based predictive dialer phone capacity;

• Just Cause Oakland, Oakland, CA, $35,000, to implement its Unity Campaign to raise $100,000 in small membership contributions in the first year of an organizational merger of its grassroots base of low-income, primarily African-American tenants and workers with the largely Latino community membership of the San Francisco-based St. Peter’s Housing Committee.

The foundations behind the 3D Initiative are excited by the creativity and strategic thinking behind the proposals. The foundations also recognize the special vulnerability of community-based organizations that are rooted in low-income, people of color, immigrant, and youth populations working for social justice and community change. Each foundation has committed one year of funding for this initiative and will work with the grantees to host convenings, share success stories and lessons learned from the fundraising efforts, and disseminate their findings to other foundations and the broader non-profit sector.

For more information about this initiative, please contact Anna Fink, Senior Program Officer at the New World Foundation, at afink@newwf.org or 212.497.3470 or Bill Vandenberg, Program Director for the Open Society Institute’s Democracy and Power Fund, at bvandenberg@sorosny.org or 212.548.0600.