Prue Brown is a Chapin Hall Research Fellow. Based in New York City, her work focuses primarily on community change: how to understand and learn from it, and how to improve practice and policy to build communities that support children and families.

Dr. Brown is the co-director of Chapin Hall's Program on Philanthropy and Community Change, an effort to build knowledge and stimulate learning for foundations and their partners working on community change.

Before coming to Chapin Hall, she served as Deputy Director of the Urban Poverty Program at the Ford Foundation. She holds a PhD in Social Work and Psychology from the University of Michigan.             

To learn more about Prue and her work, click here.  

Mikael Karlstrom is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research experience in East Africa on cultural identity and political culture.  He has been a researcher at Chapin Hall since 2004, with primary responsibility for the embedded philanthropy study during the past two years.

Mikael holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Cesar Cala is the Civic Engagement Associate for the Calgary Foundation. He has extensive experience in community development in Canada and abroad, and was involved with social movements in the Philippines for almost 20 years before immigrating to Canada in 1996.

Cesar was a founding member of the Ethno Cultural Council of Calgary, the Asian Heritage Foundation and the Children’s Legal and Educational Resource Centre. He served on the board of Oxfam Canada and the Arusha Centre. Cesar volunteers his time working with a number of Calgary’s refugee and immigrant communities.

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The Experience of Embedded Funders

What is an Embedded Funder?

Embedded funders share four defining criteria:

• They work in a particular community over an extended period of time.
• They have direct relationships with a variety of community actors.
• They view community relationships as key to their work. The relationships are not incidental - they are the primary way they accomplish their work.
• They provide other supports beyond conventional grant-making, such as research, training and convening.

Lessons for Other Funders

There are many advantages for funders to working in an embedded way, including:

1. A longer time-frame allows for follow-through on changes. Any significant change will only pay off  over the long run.
   
   
2. An array of supports is a better way of building relationships than grants can be on its own.
   
   
3. Listening to community voices provides the ability to self-correct.
   
   
4. Trust can provide better leverage towards effective change over the long term than money.

According to Mikael, Humboldt Area Foundation accomplished more community economic development by serving as a trusted neutral convenor than they could have achieved by offering grants. 

The Piton Foundation worked with community groups to push an education reform agenda when the school system was not interested in reform.  When the administration of the education system changed and the Foundation was invited to participate in reform, they had both internal and external leverage.

Some funders have addressed the nature of relationships structurally. They do this by putting community activists on their boards, or by asking active community members to join their staff for a period of time.

Challenges

Prue recalls a challenging experience when the Hewlett Foundation evaluated a long-term initiative, but everyone was disappointed with the results.

The evaluators came to the conclusion that Hewlett failed in two important aspects.  Firstly, the Foundation did not have the ability to form good relationships with a variety of different players. Because the relationships were poor, there was little or no learning. 

In hindsight, Hewlett realized that they should be evaluated too.  The evaluation needed to be candid, with equal exposure to everyone involved. There was no need to do a “show and tell” to impress the funders.  For this kind of evaluation to work, the funders need to invest in the capacity of their partners for self-evaluation.  The evaluator also needs to be an active participant who seeks ways to increase the success of the initiative. 

Cesar and the Calgary Foundation are examining their presence in the community to determine their present role. They believe in taking risks to create meaningful change. Some of the challenges that faces them are internal capacity, finding strategic relationships with others doing positive work, and figuring out how to support citizens who are not part of a formal, charitable organization.

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Questions that Remain

Prue believes that to realize their potential, philanthropists need to move from grant-making to change-making, and consider the full spectrum of ways they can use their civic influence to create change. 

The Calgary Foundation is examining how to develop a more coherent, long-term strategy now that they have the necessary tools to convene. They are faced with the challenge of figuring out how these tools can work together.

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Links & Resources

Chapin Hall Center for Children - Chapin Hall is a Center for Children at the University of Chicago. Their work concentrates on five primary aspects of children's lives, but has one overarching concern - building knowledge to improve the health and well-being of children.

Embedded Philanthropy and Community Change - Chapin Hall’s work on embedded philanthropy began in 2003, as an outgrowth of a long-standing research program on philanthropy and community change. This page offers links to a range of their publications.

Hard Lessons About Philanthropy & Community Change - This report outlines the efforts of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to help three neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area reduce poverty and develop new leaders, better services, more capable organizations, and stronger connections to resources.

Communities of Opportunity - This San Francisco-based initiative brings the City, residents of its southeast corner and philanthropic organizations to fundamentally change the way these three groups work together to transform a neighborhood. 

The Calgary Foundation - The Calgary Foundation facilitates collaborative philanthropy by making powerful connections between donors and community organizations for the long-term benefit of Calgary and surrounding area.

Calgary's Vital Signs - One facet of Calgary’s Vital Signs is a report card Calgarians grade our city on our quality of life and provide a clear snapshot of its wellness and livability in each of the 12 vital issues. There are 65 indicators that can be looked at individually, but the Vital Signs Report Card is meant to be looked at when woven together.