Latino Community Foundation provides organizations a hand up, not a handout
CHICAGO >> Masha Chernyak had an epiphany in the back of an Uber, while listening to her fellow passenger, an aspiring tech entrepreneur, gush about his big, game-changing idea.
“These guys will give me the elevator pitch for their catfood delivery app, look me right in the eyes and say they’re going to change the world,” said Chernyak, vice president of programs and policy at the San Francisco-based Latino Community Foundation. “The many organizations we work with really, truly are changing the world — they just don’t know how to tell that story. Or they’re spending all of their time and effort on their mission and don’t have the capacity or resources to get the help they need to tell that story.”
Chernyak told me this on the eve of the pitch night of what she called the first-ever Latino Nonprofit Accelerator. It’s modeled after the technology sector’s strategy of “incubating” small businesses by providing them support to refine their pitch to mentors and investors at what’s known as a demo day.
With help from Google.org, the San Francisco Foundation and Akonadi Foundation, the LCF has spent the last 16 months funding a small group of organizations, mentoring them on how to grow their outreach and training them on marketing, fundraising and communications skills.
“I talk to potential funders all the time and rave about the amazing work these organizations are doing, whether it’s organizing their communities around immigrant rights or increasing civic and political power,” Chernyak said. “But then they go to the organization’s website, and when it’s really unimpressive, they tell me: ‘I’m just not seeing it.’ It became obvious that what these organizations needed was to invest in storytelling, in simple language and in beautiful visuals.”
The problem is that, in the world of philanthropy, few funders want to give organizations money to rent space, keep the lights on or hire accountants. Giving money for marketing, photographers, videographers, web developers and designers is even less appealing.
The people who hold grantees accountable usually want to make sure every cent goes directly toward fulfilling a stated mission — like teaching young Latinos how to increase their economic power or become future leaders — but this leaves the critical areas of marketing and communications underfunded, even though they can be a key to success.
In a quest to fill this void, the LCF decided to invest in nonprofits the Silicon Valley way.
During the LCF’s demo day, organizations that had spent 16 months “incubating” with LCF — learning how to tell the story of how they’re impacting education, workforce development or civic engagement — had three minutes to pitch a panel of potential business mentors and investors. The organizations talked about their readiness to grow, their track record of success and their connection to the communities they serve.
By the time the demo was over, the LCF had granted the first prize of $25,000 to an organization called One Day at a Time, which teaches teens leadership and coping skills. The money will go toward continuing the group’s outreach and conflict-resolution services for teens. And, of course, the demo provided the winner and eight other similarly inspiring organizations the opportunity to shine in front of some of Silicon Valley’s most deep-pocketed and influential business leaders.
“Yes, we gave away a total of $65,000, and that’s important,” said Chernyak, “but realistically, the money is very limited to creating postcards, one-pagers, annual reports and printing and mailing them, which is in itself huge. The big thing, though, is giving these organizations the opportunity to gain confidence, to be able to speak clearly and passionately about what they do and to inspire funders to invest in projects that are for the community by the community.”
The criticism that many grassroots activists level at large philanthropic entities is that they would rather fund big, established nonprofits to go into neighborhoods to “save” the poor brown people than invest money in community-based groups that are already doing the work on the ground but have few resources to scale up. In fact, only 1.1 percent of philanthropic dollars are now invested in Latino-led nonprofits, according to the LCF.
But if more charities take the LCF’s lead by teaching community organizations to market themselves to potential funders the way that sophisticated nonprofits do, the disparity in the number of dollars going to minority-led nonprofits might finally improve.
This could result in community leaders of color giving more of their beneficiaries the much-mythologized “hand up” rather than the less lasting “handout.”
And in today’s bootstrapping economy, it can’t come a moment too soon.