Making Donor Collaboratives (Much) More than the Sum of their Parts

For the last three years, my firm has been guiding a group of funders in New York City towards their goal of supporting entrepreneurs of color in the region through a pooled grantmaking fund.

While the city is arguably the global HQ for all things philanthropic, and has an abundance of donor circles and funder collaboratives, until we launched the NY Small Business Funders Collective, there was no such group focused on entrepreneurship as a social sector solution to jobs, poverty, and closing the racial wealth gap.

Now there is.

And after a year of learning (itself preceded by a year of research), a year of “coffering” (that is, filling the coffers), and then a year of designing and deploying, the Collective has now made its first round of grants, is actively learning alongside is grantees, and opening up more seats around the table.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned so far about how a funder's collaborative can come and stay together:

• Don’t rush?
• Don’t push
• Don’t lose your nerve

A group of more than three dozen experts and practitioners in the small business, nonprofit, and philanthropic ecosystem participated at one point or another since the research project kicked off in 2019. And now, five inaugural funder-members (plus two more joining this week), along with more than a dozen community partners are reaping the benefits of these lessons.?

Collaborations are founded on the belief that there is a chance to do something more or different by doing it together, versus going solo.

In more detail, the lessons are:

Don’t rush members to sign on the dotted line. Keep them around the table as the learning agenda takes shape, changes course, expands, shrinks, pauses, and accelerates. Once you have “the thing” they will see their fingerprints all over it and their joining will become a fait accompli.

Don’t push members to make decisions before they’re ready. Build in time for people to take ideas back to their shop and socialize, so that decisions and directions, once settled, have less chance of needing to be changed.

Don’t lose your nerve. Collaborations are founded on the belief that there is a chance to do something more or different by doing it together versus going solo. But, as reversion to the mean is more than just an economic principle, and can refer to human and group behavior more broadly, you need to guard against ruts that channel things back towards the familiar and comfortable.

See below how our first five grantees, themselves collaborative partnerships representing more than a dozen local groups who are moving ideas and capital with ground-breaking initiatives, evidence that the Collective adhered to the lessons as it learned them, is committed to them still, and is already seeing the results:

1: Asian American Federation (partnering with Korean Community Services and Korean American Family Service Center - Empowering small business owners to create and manage their online presence and explore how to assist immigrant small business owners in digital marketplace participation.

2: Evergreen (partnering with Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation and Business Outreach Center Network) - “Growing Green” will advance equitable economic development opportunities for BIPOC-led industrial and manufacturing firms, with a special focus on opportunities in the green economy.

3: Hot Bread Kitchen (partnering with The Acceleration Project) - Creating the Flexible Food Business Roadmap with actionable, customized tools and resources designed to help women entrepreneurs of color scale their businesses in the food industry.

4: Restoration (partnering with Urbane and Brooklyn Business Center) - Assess and pilot a small business pipeline that offers direct support to BIPOC-led businesses in central Brooklyn through a self-sustaining and replicable food guild ecosystem, with an umbrella of turnkey supports.

5: Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice (partnering with The Southern Boulevard Business Improvement District and Hester Street) - Engage local small business owners in the planning process for the Soundview Economic Hub to ensure that the final project roadmap maximizes market access and customer growth opportunities.

As we gather this week for Member business and a “Learn-along” Session with the grantee cohort (including a screening of Echoing Green’s docu-short, Unwavering: Unlocking the Power of Black Innovation), we recommit to our ambition to help close the racial wealth gap.

We keep our cards on the table – and put more seats around it. For we know, more members, more questions, and more transparency equals more impact.

Aligned teams drive impact.

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