A few months ago I blogged about Jay Connor’s (“Community Visions, Community Solutions:Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact ”) suggestions for how funders can contribute to real community change. His big concern is that the current tendency to fund individual elements of complex problems is not producing the desired results. Often such funding does produce positive program level outcomes, but community level outcomes are rarely measured and typically are not achieved.

Connor suggests that instead of supporting individual programs, funders should fund communities and systems. When he talks about supporting “communities” he means that funders should support the processes by which communities collectively identify their aspirations for their communities and how those aspirations will be achieved. When he talks about “systems” he means the educational, health, recreational, economic or other systems that contribute to the health of a community. Connor proposes that funders prioritize certain systems over others, and that they fund a multiplicity of programs and organizations within the prioritized systems.

One of the keys to achieving community level outcomes is to support a backbone organization, sometimes called a “community support organization”. This is the organization that will be tasked with getting people involved, making meetings happen, following up between meetings, gathering data, coordinating the community planning process, tracking outcomes and bridging the community work with policy advocacy. There are many ways to structure the role of the community support organization. Occasionally the funder can take on some or all of those roles.  Regardless of how this work is done, it needs to be properly resourced. History is clear that collaborative efforts are rarely sustained when they are held together by people who are working at it off the sides of their desks.

There are some dilemmas in supporting a community support organization. The resources required to do that can potentially draw funds away from other program areas, thereby exacerbating the sense of competition for limited resources. CSO’s sometimes find themselves drawn into the direct provision of programmatic services, and need to avoid having collaborative partners develop an unhealthy dependence on the CSO. But at the end of the day these are dilemmas that need to be managed. They are not reasons to avoid establishing a CSO.