Sometimes a pile of cash lands hard.
The Center for Cultural Power received an $11 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in 2021. Two years earlier, it had been awarded a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Ford Foundation.
Those two grants and others allowed the arts nonprofit to nearly quadruple in size in three years. It went from a budget of $2 million in 2020 to $16.6 million in 2023.
But its fast growth didn’t come without challenges. One big factor was the racial reckoning after the police murder of George Floyd. At the same time, the pandemic required that employees switch to remote work because of the pandemic, which required new systems and work processes.
The people the center supported — BIPOC and immigrant artists who use their work to advance social justice — were also members of vulnerable groups themselves, particularly affected by both the pandemic and the racial-justice uprisings. So, demand for the center’s programs was particularly strong.
“When we went into the pandemic in 2020, we were about a staff of 12 to 13. And now we’re about a staff of 45,” says Liesel Bocalan-Lim, senior human-resources and operations manager of the Center for Cultural Power. “And we anticipate to be closer to 50 by the end of the year.”
The center’s challenges and changes are common to groups that have had large, unplanned, and rapid growth, says Victoria Dunning, senior program officer of the Ford Foundation’s $1 billion program, Building Institutions and Networks, or Build, which is designed to help social-justice groups become sustainable.
Dunning says Ford officials “began hearing that some of these organizations had gone from deep pandemic financial uncertainty to budgets that had grown three or more times in record time.”
That is why, when Ford renewed its Build program with another $1 billion in 2021, it added a new advisory program to support grantees that had grown quickly. Part of the goal was to help nonprofits learn from one another. Ford hired La Piana Consulting to design and lead the program, called Building for Growth. As part of its research before creating the program, the consultants spoke with more than 50 grantees about the challenges caused by unexpected, rapid expansion. La Piana found a number of common concerns, including:
- Staff burnout. In the midst of the pandemic and racial-justice protests, staff sometimes experienced stress in their personal lives while the need for the services they provided increased.
- Defining organizational culture and values. The fast-moving cultural climate and sudden organizational growth often made it difficult to set aside time to focus on the organization’s global mission.
- Hiring the appropriate number of employees to meet organizational needs. As groups increased their staffs quickly in a time of crisis, it was sometimes hard to know how best to hire and support staff.
Along with a report on how organizations can best deal with fast growth, La Piana has used it research work with Ford to build a free online tool nonprofits can use to prioritize tasks during rapid growth, as well an article, “Riding the Wave of Abundance.”
(The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
IT Contractors and Ergonomic Chairs
Building for Growth participants say that the program’s most valuable feature has been the chance to talk with one another. For instance, after more formal group meetings organized by the consultants, grantees might arrange informal one-on-one calls to trade tips: One person might offer ideas on benefits plans while the other might give advice on long-term goal setting.
Bocalan-Lim of the Center for Cultural Power recalls needing a way to make organizational information easily available to the quickly growing staff “without people asking you the same question 100 times a day,” she says. From fellow nonprofit leaders, she received specific recommendations of contractors and systems to build a central drive or intranet to handle such questions. In return, she offered advice on concrete ways to embed values into an organization’s culture.
Building such an advice-sharing network from scratch is not impossible, but a foundation’s or consultants’ aid can be invaluable. Humberto Camarena, a senior consultant at LaPiana, notes that top nonprofit leaders might reach out informally to other leaders they know for advice.
“This is helpful,” he says, “but is not the same as receiving comprehensive support from an external organization or from a peer cohort.”
Other challenges don’t require a village to solve, just some planning. Bocalan-Lim’s growing staff was no longer a dozen people in a single office. As remote work expanded the potential hiring pool, new employees were soon clocking in from different regions around the country.
With staff now located nationwide, the Oakland, Calif.-based Center for Cultural Power jettisoned the idea of a nine-to-five schedule, allowing employees flexibility. The policy also meant that the center supported caregivers if they needed to pick up a child from school or take someone to a medical appointment.
Danny Cendejas
“We try to find flexibility where we can so that folks can have a full life experience while they’re working alongside us,” she says.
“One of our internal values is the value of care,” she explains. “So we have a flexible sick-leave policy.” Sick days can be taken for illness but also for mental-health reasons.
Another way the organization exhibits this value is by offering a stipend to cover the cost of setting up an ergonomic work area at home.
“We care about how you do your work, how your body feels as you do this work,” she says.
These are all ways the Center for Cultural Power has been trying to help employees avoid burnout, Bocalan-Lim says. The Ford Build and Building for Growth programs helped the organization address these concerns, even in the midst of enormous change, she says.
“So we look at all of those things and the different ways we can support our staff when they do this incredibly important work.”
A ‘Huge’ Demand
The Ford Foundation’s Dunning says that the demand for advisory services among Build grantees was “huge.”
Still, Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, says he hopes foundations will not be deterred from awarding big gifts simply because they see some groups grappling with challenges.
“If you carefully vet organizations, then I think it’s a myth to say nonprofits can’t handle big, unrestricted gifts. Not only can they, they desperately need them,” Buchanan says.
While noting his admiration for the Build program, Buchanan says in general he sometimes sees “an underestimation” of nonprofits that he finds “paternalistic.”
“I think the key is to make sure that the help is really wanted and needed,” he says.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy — which received $10 million from Scott in 2021 — did its own survey of recipients of Scott’s windfall donations (whose median annual budget was $8 million before receiving the grant). In that survey, in contrast with La Piana’s findings, few said they faced organizational challenges or disruptions as a result of these grants.
Special Needs of Social-Justice Nonprofits
The La Piana consultant’s research with Build grantees did indicate a need, they say. The unusually stressful social context in which the groups expanded was a factor, adds Camarena.
“A lot of times, these are social-justice organizations that are responding in real time to things that are constantly surfacing in the landscape,” Camarena says.
It may sometimes be a struggle to manage internal processes and decision making in an orderly manner, in tune with the organization’s values. A group may want to be transparent and use democratic decision-making processes, but in the heat of a chaotic moment, it may seem more efficient for a top leader to make a command decision.
“Systems of accountability, transparency, and effective communication take intentionality and time to build into your culture and your workflow,” Camarena says.
Shubha Balabaer, director of operations at MediaJustice, which examines the effect of media and technology on racial equity, says that responding to emergencies in real time affirmed the organization’s importance: “Like many nonprofits, we were simultaneously facing the fact that our staff was feeling the impact of loss, of grief, of isolation, and in some very tangible ways — because we work on disinformation — the need for the work was also heightened.”
In four years, MediaJustice’s budget grew from $2.5 million to $4.5 million, with two five-year Ford Build grants totaling $7.3 million, among other grants, and the staff more than doubled from 10 to 22 people.
The expansion required some rethinking about team building.
“Under 15 people, you don’t really need to lay out a lot of processes and policies,” Balabaer says. “You can be a little ad hoc about things, where past 15 you can’t do that anymore. You need to add a layer of process that isn’t cumbersome.”
Strategic planning was also necessary in defining the organization’s aims, they say. When it was small, it could be more nimble in responding to circumstance. Now MediaJustice must ask, “What are we doing? Where is our energy going? How do we collectively create our vision and strategy and our theory of change?”
MediaJustice has responded with a business process that sets out objectives and key results. “Here’s my objective for the next six months, and here is how I’m measuring my success,” Balabaer explains.
The very fact of having received large donations has been a stressor for the organization, the director of operations says.
“It’s scary,” Balabaer says. “How do you make sure you’re going to sustain that?”
One way MediaJustice addressed that was to create a development department, which it didn’t have a year ago. Here, the help of the Ford Foundation’s Build program, which is geared to building infrastructure, was key. Using the Ford Build grant, it was able to hire consultants first to plan the organization’s strategy. After the group hired a director of development, the Ford money funded coaching and training for the new hire.
“Especially when you’re a racial-justice organization, the ability to put money behind supporting and growing your own staff is really great. And I have not experienced that in any other organization,” Balabaer says, pointing out that some people from underrepresented groups might not have the traditional credentials for a job but might have “all these other skills and qualities that you really love.”
“So then I think it becomes, how do you make sure you can create the infrastructure to ensure that they’ll thrive?”
Philanthropy has a vital role in allowing nonprofits to have a little breathing room to create a sustainable organization, Balabaer says. “That’s something where you need the privilege of money.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
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