Samueli Foundation’s newest charitable cause: collaboration

The theme this time is collaboration.

On Wednesday, Aug. 26, the Samueli Foundation notified 44 nonprofit leaders involved in 10 different projects that their groups will be getting grants through the foundation’s newest charitable giving program: OC+ Fund.

Those numbers – 44 groups and 10 projects – tell a two-part story.

Part one is about the Samueli Foundation’s latest foray into open-call philanthropy.

Over the past two years, the foundation has backed two separate “Breakaway” funds, giving money to dozens of nonprofits to cover things that other donors might not finance – such as accounting services or new office equipment. The wishes might’ve seemed mundane, but several nonprofit leaders have said Breakaway checks helped their organizations stay open and even grow. The foundation also has offered one round of financing for a much smaller world of nonprofits working on real estate projects, a fund called “Build OC.”

The newest fund, OC+ – the one going to 44 nonprofits working on just 10 projects – is the first to try to leverage the idea that innovation can come when lots of brains are focused on a single question or idea.

“Philanthropic capital is the greatest and last best risk capital we have in this country. We have to take big swings here,” said Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Family Philanthropies.

“No one else is trying to support collaboration at scale. So why wouldn’t we try it? Why not us?”

The other story told by the numbers is about survival.

Nonprofits are being forced to evolve, sometimes at hyperspeed and not always happily, during an era when federal politics and the end of emergency pandemic spending have meant less money for charity. Yet, even as money has gone away, the economy – particularly years of persistently high inflation and, more recently, a sluggish job market – has driven up demand for a lot of what nonprofits provide, including basics like food and shelter.

Those headwinds are prompting consolidation or closure for some of Orange County’s roughly 9,000 active nonprofits. For others, it’s meant collaboration.

In all, foundation officials said the first-ever OC+ Fund, financed by Anaheim Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli, will distribute nearly $5 million to finance a range of collaborative projects. Breastfeeding programs, software for nonprofits, streamlined legal aid for lower-income clients; all are among the ideas being executed in a fashion that is starting to emerge in the nonprofit world – working in tandem.

“The idea that nonprofits don’t like to work together is a myth, I think,” Spindle said.

“But they haven’t had funding for collaborative projects. That’s part of why we chose to do this.”

Other data generated by the OC+ Fund backs that point.

In the weeks after the foundation announced it would finance collaborative projects, earlier this year, Spindle said her organization received applications from 265 partnerships involving 758 different groups. Collectively, those groups were seeking $94 million, and more than half (56%) of the projects they wanted to pull off were already in development.

That suggests a lot of nonprofits already were banding together, or at least trying to, before the OC+ funding scheme was announced.

If so, that represents a break from tradition.

Though nonprofit leaders and workers tend to share core values – ranking the desire to help others over, say, the desire to drive a Maserati – they haven’t, historically, worked together. Everything from geography to financing to ego can make it tricky for nonprofits to collaborate, even among groups that vehemently agree on specific goals. Also, as Spindle suggested, funding for such work historically has been rare.

Now, that’s changing. In April, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles issued a report, “Unlocking the Power of Sustained Collaboration: A Guide for Nonprofits,” that detailed why and how charities are starting to work together while maintaining separate leadership, donor lists and mission statements.

And some of the nonprofit leaders contacted Wednesday said they’ve been working collaboratively, or trying to, for some time.

Kate Marr, executive director of Community Legal Aid SoCal, the lead nonprofit for a project funded Wednesday that will streamline legal aid services for lower-income clients in Orange County, said her five-organization partnership got started as a result of a 2023 photo shoot.

Like Marr, the leaders of all other legal nonprofits involved in the project – including the Public Law Center, Community Counsel, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California and Veterans Legal Institute – are women. That fact became the subject of a magazine article in a legal publication and sitting for the photo for that article brought the legal nonprofit leaders together for the first time.

“Historically, we have not played well together as organizations,” Marr said.

“But when we met, for the story, we all sort of asked, ‘Why aren’t we working together?’”

The photo shoot led to shared lunches and, later, group hikes through Peters Canyon. And, during those lunches and hikes, Marr said, they started talking about a problem that’s common to all of their organizations: helping more people.

About 1.2 million residents of Orange County qualify for subsidized legal services, but fewer than 1 in 8 of those actually get legal help. Part of that is because the process to get a pro bono lawyer can be time-consuming and emotionally draining – calling several different groups, telling a painful story over and over, often only to be told to call someone else.

Wouldn’t one phone number, for all five legal aid groups, and sharing information about potential clients, make more sense?

The simple idea has required consultants, new software and money from the OC+ Fund to hire a supervisor and two screeners and other personnel who will help what the project is describing as “JustOC: A Coordinated Entry System for Legal Services in Orange County.”

“We hope to have it up running in the first quarter,” Marr said.

But the bigger impact, she added, figures to come later, when the five nonprofits can share data on the people who need their services.

“It’ll be sort of an ongoing, real-time needs assessment,” Marr said. “We’ll be able to look at the data and see trends in the community that need to be met.

“It’s an important moment.”

If that plays out, the result will be what Spindle says the Samueli family is hoping to achieve from the new collaborative fund.

“Social progress rarely goes in a straight line or a predictable fashion,” Spindle said. “These are such complicated problems, and they fall to the nonprofit sector to try to solve. But breakthroughs appear in unexpected moments and from unexpected places.”

Still, some nonprofit leaders said the OC+ Fund is, in fact, pushing together groups to form entirely new ideas.

“We didn’t think anyone would understand the importance of collective work. … But this innovative grant got people to be brave,” said Christine Sanchez, chief executive of Delhi Center. Traditionally, Sanchez said, her Santa Ana nonprofit has played host to a range of community services at a 24,000-square-foot building on East Central Avenue.

But the new project involves her organization and four others – Latino Health Access, Lightning Youth Academy, Santa Ana College and Family Promise OC – and it’s forming what, is, essentially, a new nonprofit, 92707 Community Wellness Hub.

The name, which includes one of the county’s most economically challenged ZIP codes, only hints at the range of services that Sanchez’s new group will offer to the neighborhood. Physical health checks, mental health checks, financial education and guidance, homework help; all will be available to people in the neighborhood and beyond.

“We’ll become a place where people can access services, in a single place, that currently are scattered throughout the county.”

But Sanchez said her long-term goal runs deeper.

“Look, nonprofits can maintain a lot of things, working independently, working in silos. We can maintain hunger or homelessness or whatever.

“But, if you want to solve those problems, I think, it’s time to try working together. We have to try something because we aren’t doing it alone.”

“In this community, this project will help people dream that they can solve something. That’s important.”