Rationale
Approach
 
 
 
 
 

 
Blue Ridge's Philanthropic approach — developing institutions and integrating the work of our grantees — is rooted in some basic beliefs about what a foundation our size can do to help achieve lasting social impact.


Social change requires strong organizations operating at the local level to deliver critical services, catalyze civic engagement, and give voice to the concerns of their constituencies.

Blue Ridge Foundation New York’s focus on seeding new groups to work in under-resourced areas is designed to develop the infrastructure for change. Start-ups in particular can be vehicles for innovation. Often lead by entrepreneurial and creative thinkers, new organizations can address unmet needs, produce important lessons, and offer inventive models to improve peoples’ lives.

Our role is to help institutionalize these innovative strategies so that the ideas of talented founders become sustainable institutions that contribute to lasting change. We complement our funding by identifying best practices in nonprofit management and then we help new groups put these into place from the beginning. Similar to an incubator model, we provide significant financial and in-kind resources to a small number of grantees and work closely with organization directors to achieve program goals.

In addition to making the start-up phase run smoother, we believe that exposing nonprofit staff to model practices early on can help our grantees over the long term. Staff members develop high expectations about the level of organizational infrastructure that should be in place and acquire high quality habits. By implementing strong internal systems and drawing on advanced management tools right away, we believe that organizations are more likely to develop a culture of excellence and hold themselves to demanding standards.


Entrenched, complex social problems demand multifaceted solutions.

Blue Ridge actively facilitates programmatic partnerships among our grantees. We select new organizations in part based on their synergies with our existing groups, and we communicate clearly with portfolio groups that we expect them to work together. Grantee by grantee, we build a portfolio of organizations whose sum, we hope, can be greater in its social impact than that of its individual parts.
Social change is more likely to occur when people and neighborhoods can benefit from comprehensive services. Few nonprofits, however, have enough resources and expertise to offer a broad range of supports on their own. While collaboration is a watchword within the philanthropic field, in practice there is often too little trust, infrastructure, and dedicated staff time to allow for meaningful coordination among different agencies.

We realize that it takes resources to bring groups together. Our shared office space makes it easier for organizations to become familiar with each others’ work and to trade ideas. We facilitate joint trainings, consolidate back-office services, and hold round-table discussions. By integrating our grantees’ work, we allow individual organizations to concentrate on their core competencies, while together they deliver more comprehensive assistance to the people and communities they serve.



Venture Philanthropy +
Community Building =
BLUE RIDGE

Blue Ridge’s philanthropic approach draws on elements of venture philanthropy and community building.

Venture philanthropy applies an investment perspective to grant-making and combines funding with strategic management assistance to build and strengthen organizations. There is an emphasis on defining objectives and measuring outcomes. Long-term, significant funding commitments are valued over one-time grants. Perhaps most notably, venture philanthropy promotes the need to build the operational capacity of nonprofit organizations so they can perform at peak levels and sustain themselves over time.

Community building analyzes problems in terms of their interconnectedness and draws on the skills and resources that reside within neighborhoods to address local issues. Concerns such as unemployment, under-performing schools, steep crime rates, and health problems cannot be solved in isolation. Instead, lasting change requires strategies which take account of the ways that distinct problems build on one another to affect individual lives and shape the way that neighborhoods function. Community building preaches comprehensive thinking, values neighborhood assets, and stresses the importance of expanding the networks that local residents can tap to access resources.

Both fields offer useful and complementary frameworks for understanding and addressing social issues. In our own work, venture philanthropy practices guide the tactics we use to build lasting institutions, while community building principles drive our strategy of integrating the complementary activities of our different grantees.