Milwaukee-based Alliance for Children and Families recently received a $5.375 million, multi-year grant from the Kresge Foundation of Michigan. The grant money will be used to help its member nonprofit human service organizations hire chief strategy officers to continue and enhance organizational growth. The grant is the largest grant ever received by the organization.
“The underlying rational here is that nonprofit organizations, particularly larger nonprofit organizations are characteristically under-investing in strategy,” said Peter Goldberg, chief executive officer of the Alliance. “Many confuse a strategic plan for strategy, but throughout our research we have found, particularly in the corporate world, those with chief strategy officers are more able to excel and grow.”
The Alliance is a national membership organization that supports other private nonprofit human services organizations dedicated to serving children and families, Goldberg said.
The grant money will underwrite the salaries of chief strategy officers for nine Alliance members and will also give ten more organizations support funding for improving strategy initiatives.
“This is an organization-wide transformational initiative with game changing potential for the human services field,” said Goldberg. “The Alliance is honored that The Kresge Foundation has made it possible for us to capture the potential of an intervention at this size, scale, scope, and ambition.”
Alliance has locations and member organizations in nearly every state across the country. Alliance has nine member organizations in the Milwaukee area and seven others throughout the state of Wisconsin that could potentially receive grant money.
“At Kresge, we are committed to creating opportunities for vulnerable populations moving out of poverty and know that human service agencies play a central role in that process by providing high quality and responsive services which are in great measure, dependent on organizational effectiveness and strategic action,” said Tamitha Walker, program officer at The Kresge Foundation. “Kresge is pleased to work with the Alliance to help nonprofit human service organizations gain greater capability to make more positive impacts on their communities. By implementing various interventions to ratchet up organizational strategy functions, human service agencies can further assist those most in need.”
Alliance plans to issue a request for proposal to its member organization over the next three months and will select recipients of the grant money before the end of the year.
“We hope to have the strategy officers in place by early 2012,” Goldberg said.
Selected organizations will need to commit to the program for the entire three years of the grant. Accountability measures will also be put in place to ensure organizations are utilizing the strategy initiative to create more organizational capacity, generate revenues and expand successful core services, Goldberg said.
“We’re operating under the assumption that the era of scarce resources and funding options is going to continue,” Goldberg said. “The climate is going to differentiate high performing organizations from others and strategy is going to play a significant role in that differentiation.”
