Grants are great, but they can create a dependency within nonprofits, use up valuable resources such as staff time and energy, and they can be taken away or not renewed, or just be given for a limited time period. It has been estimated that by the time funds from traditional grant-making arrive, 20% of the money has been spent just on acquiring it.
The dependence on grant money can be a vicious cycle for both the organization and the foundation. Foundations would love to see their grantees become more self-sufficient. It would allow their dollars to go further and wider across multiple projects.
Ashoka, known for its work in identifying and fostering social entrepreneurs, has an entire program dedicated to helping organizations working on social change (what they call CSOs or citizen sector organizations), achieve sustainability through a broad engagement of their communities beyond the usual seeking of grants and traditional fundraising. Ashoka's program is called the Citizen Base Initiative and its method involves creating a wide and strong base of support.
What is a Citizen Base?
Supporters in this model invest, rather than donate; become active supporters, opposed to passive donors; and enjoy a two-way relationship with the citizen sector organization.
Citizen base support is a diversity of resources including money, people, goods and services. The best known of these strategies is the establishment of for-profit ventures that funnel their income back into the organization's mission.
Citizen base support takes the "social enterprise," as these ventures are called, further by making sure the enterprise is aligned with the organization's mission in an organic way. This provides a feedback loop that involves much more than just selling a product or collecting fees for service.
The mix of resources is also much more complex, including local labor, in-kind goods, and volunteer support.
Two Examples of Citizen Base Support
- Men on the Side of the Road Project
- The Solidarity Foundation
An Ashoka Fellow, Charles Maisel, developed a way to help employ some 18,000 men who gather at roadsides in South Africa waiting for a day's labor.
The Project launched a nationwide marketing campaign to raise awareness and to encourage donations of old, unused, and broken tools. The workers repair the tools which are then lent out or sold to the unemployed who pay membership fees to be a part of the program. The tools are sold through a second-hand retail shop run by volunteers.
To build community support for the Project, the laborers themselves went out and collected the tools from households and businesses. This created personal contact and investment in the mission on the part of the public in an otherwise very divided community.
The Project partners with hardware stores to provide training and information about specific trades, job placement, and self-employment. This effort not only tackled local unemployment but also gave rise to worker federations that increase the workers' success. The groups have built shelters, educated workers about their rights and established partnerships with the government, unions, and human rights organizations to improve their standard of living.
The Solidarity Trader Store is part of the Chilean Solidarity Foundation, which works on poverty issues. The store distributes goods that are handmade by groups of low-income women who are micro-entrepreneurs. The store provides income for the Foundation and the women. The store also builds the organization's image or brand, which in turn helps the Foundation build corporate partnerships and support from the community.
The Foundation brings together and trains small-scale artisans in how to produce high-quality and in-demand crafts such as pottery, puppets, and educational products. The Trader store then marks up the products by 22-30% in order to recoup costs and make a profit.
The Trader Store and the Foundation have created work for 490 members and the products are sold to 18 countries. The goods have been good enough to land contracts from the government's education agency, winning them against such competition as Fisher-Price and Mattel.
A well-trained workforce, competitive products and community resources add up to a winning solution for the women the Foundation serves.
The Strategies
There are many more examples of organizations that are designing innovative ways to partner with their communities to solve problems. The Ashoka's Citizen Base Initiative website is a treasure trove of these stories and examples. They illustrate the strategies that Ashoka's Citizen Base Initiative uses and teaches:
- Generate a diverse income of financial and non-financial resources.
- Create a deep involvement with the community.
- Develop a visible and tangible presence. Organizations can and should use marketing, branding and advertising techniques to become well known in their communities.
- Build strategic partnerships with private sector institutions (businesses for instance) and with public sector organizations (such as the government.
Ashoka believes that this complex and rich mixture of resources from diverse entities is the key to sustaining the success of citizen service organizations. As a representative of Ashoka wrote:
"The Citizen Base Initiative is trying to inspire a fundamental shift within the sector and the way we think about grants, resources, and sustainability. We believe citizen sector organizations can free themselves from the chronic dependence on unpredictable and unsustainable foundation and government funding by developing a broad base of citizen support, which we are calling the citizen base. We believe this will lead to greater self-sufficiency, ultimately leading to increased sustainability and greater social impact."
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