Social Venture Partners (SVP) Cleveland piloted a new program earlier this year called Investment Reimagined, and Deaconess Foundation is on board!
You may be familiar with SVP’s previous approach to building capacity with small non-profits: it leverages the skills, expertise, and time of its ~70 members, along with financial grants, to provide wrap-around assistance to select non-profits. This previous work has served more than 70 nonprofits with more than $1 million in multi-year unrestricted funding and 10,000+ hours of capacity-building volunteer consulting support, with the aim of having the benefits from the SVP engagementoutlast its direct assistance. SVP often partners with organizations experiencing a period of growth or change and offers a collaborative relationship to help see them through. SVP has recently worked with organizations such as Birthing Beautiful Communities, Kinnect, Jordan Community Resource Center, Cleveland Kids Book Bank, and many more.
SVP recently launched Investment Reimagined, a pilot of program aimed to support more young and small non-profits each year in a highly holistic way. This Investment Reimagined pilot started in July for 5 local non-profits:
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- Colors+ Youth Center(led by Kristen Pepera)
- Courage to Caregivers(led by Kristi Horner)
- Literary Cleveland(led by Matt Weinkam)
- Urban City Codes(led by Tondi and Terrance Allen)
- Writers in Residence(led by Zachary Thomas)
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The 5 leaders are in a “cohort” together, experiencing the 4 aspects of the pilot:
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- Regular peer cohort meetings where these nonprofit leaders come together to share insights, challenges, and receive support from one another. These sessions are guided by a facilitator but co-designed by the participants; the cohort has selected the theme of “celebrating wins,” to focus on this year, and participants will learn about it and other leadership topics through readings and group discussions—gaining new tools, and professional expertise.
- Customized capacity-building support on 2-3 unique challenges identified by the non-profit, with support provided by 1-2 SVP member partners on each challenge.
- A Partner Liaison for each leader, selected for themselves from among the SVP member partners. This liaison provides a more trust-based, collaborative relationship consistent with being a mentor or a friend (as opposed to a coach or partner in building capacity.) Joint learning comes out of the liaison relationship.
- Financial support
Deaconess Foundation has supported Urban City Codes’ participation in this pilot, and Tondi Allen’s comments say it all: “What we hope to gain out of this relationship with SVP is…more relationships with other business people who have more experience in their fields and get… insight and some wisdom. But most importantly, (we seek) to establish ourselves with a network of people who can help us in different areas of business. That’s what we’re really looking forward to.”
The cohort is only ~20% into their time together, and we look forward to sharing more about the results of this pilot!