A few years after I came to Camden, a community leader asked me to meet for coffee. Their issue? That their neighborhood organization didn’t have 501(c)3 status and had to use a fiscal sponsor – and the fiscal sponsor had been leveraging that position to ensure the majority of the grant dollars in the grant application went to existing programs at the fiscal sponsor. The community leader was stuck between a rock and a hard place – the status quo was bad, but they worried if they complained to the funder they were less likely to receive the grant. So they asked if I could backchannel and talk to the funder. I did, and I’ll never forget the funder telling me “we’re the good guys here” and that the neighborhood organization should be thankful for the fiscal sponsor because without them neighborhood associations would not get any money at all. That was the start of my writing and work in philanthropy.
Dr. Brandi Blessett and I wrote up that story, and other similar observations, in our piece Nonprofit Segregation writing that:
With each grant that goes to a high-capacity nonprofit, the divide across the sector deepens. The initial challenges of becoming professionalized are compounded for grassroots nonprofits. Worse still, grassroots that do pursue such funding rarely receive it, leading to a perception that such efforts are wasted time. As a result, professionalized nonprofits continue to send signals that they are capable of managing funds and performing on short-term objectives, whereas grassroots non-profits are unable to build the capacity to compete for similar or larger grants in the future. The residential and economic segregation of the region becomes built into the segregation of the nonprofit sector.
It took years to get it published –philanthropy scholars blocked its publication echoing the argument that the philanthropists are the ‘good guys’ and shouldn’t be criticized. But once it was published, we heard from practitioners, scholars, and philanthropists interested in trying to change the ways philanthropy excluded community organizations.
Rutgers-Camden Associate Provost Dr. Naomi Marmorstein was familiar with my work and asked if I was interested in becoming co-lead of the South Jersey Institute for Population Health (SJIPH). SJIPH serves as a funder for community-engaged research to improve health outcomes in South Jersey. I was already familiar with the institute and its “Sandbox” model. Co-founders Drs. Nicole Vaughn (Rowan) and Sarah Allred (Rutgers-Camden) had developed a Sandbox event for grant applicants that brought teams to a half-day workshop before their final applications to get feedback from reviewers and strengthen the applications. I’d recommended the model to philanthropists who had read my piece and wanted to know how they could be more friendly to community organizations applying for grants.
I wanted in. I’d spent years writing about these challenges and wanted to be part of an organization looking to rectify them. That partnership with SJIPH was the first contract I brought to the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE).
We recently announced SJIPH’s 4th cycle of funded community-engaged research projects. It’s a cohort I’m exceptionally proud of. In the run up to this funding cycle, CURE and SJIPH provided Partnership Development Awards to 10 community organizations to try to improve their chances at receiving funding and expand the reach of SJIPH. We’ve worked closely with those awardees: matching them with faculty at Rutgers-Camden and Rowan; meeting with them about their research projects; ensuring they understood the nuances of our request for proposals; and, yes, inviting many of these partnerships to this year’s Sandbox event where they received feedback and support from the very same people that would evaluate their final applications. In the world of philanthropy, funders too often serve as arbiters of what a “good” project is, these applicants had the chance to meet, discuss, and strengthen their projects to increase their chances to receive funding.
The results have been remarkable. Seven of the 10 community organizations that received Partnership Development Awards received positive scores from our external reviewers and received a second, larger community-engaged research grant from SJIPH. SJIPH itself – already a leader in funding community partnership – has expanded the geographical reach of its grantees deeper into hard-to-reach areas in rural South Jersey, and funded more grassroots organizations directly serving South Jersey residents. The latest cohort also includes our first research partnership between faculty and an Indigenous tribe – the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation of New Jersey. This new cohort is addressing critical health issues throughout the region, ranging from the impact of prescribing art classes to support mental health, to patient feedback on different forms of HIV mediation, to interventions that address grief and depression within churches, to health impacts of switching to homemade meals for seniors in Salem County.
I cannot wait to see the impact these projects have on health outcomes throughout South Jersey, and I’m exceptionally proud of the work SJIPH and CURE have done to make our philanthropy accessible for community organizations.
– Dr. Stephen Danley, Director, CURE