Our grant partners are showing how to pivot for impact during COVID-19

At Tableau Foundation, our grantmaking is a learning process. After operating as a philanthropy for over five years, we’ve developed a good understanding of the types of partners and projects we aim to fund—those who keep data for problem solving at the core of what they do. And we’ve figured out how to support them well, by providing long-term, flexible funding and support.

What hasn’t factored into our work, until now, is a pandemic. We’re now in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our grantmaking, which we like to think of as proactive—long-term, focused on tackling problems strategically and at scale—has had to get much more reactive. We’ve worked to assess needs and where we can make an impact, both in our local and global communities, and among our partner organizations. And we’ve had to work quickly to speed up our responsiveness to those needs.

In early March, when we really began to grasp the severity of the outbreak, we made the decision to significantly increase our grant making budget for the year. We knew that we were doing the right thing, and Vu Le, who writes the blog Nonprofit AF, backed that idea up in a post on March 16, where he says: “if there was ever a time for you to increase your payout rate and get more money out the door, this is it.” The coronavirus, he adds, has already created so much upheaval in our society, from shutting down local businesses to overburdening medical facilities. This is the time for more money and more support, moving as quickly as possible to the people who need it most.

We’re fortunate at Tableau Foundation that we have the backing of Tableau corporate to be able to do just that. Once we got the green light to increase our budget, we turned to our nonprofit partners (we call them partners, not grantees) and communities with the simple question: How can we help?

The answers are still coming in. One request was for help buying some equipment so our nonprofit partner staff could work from home. We’ve provided flexible funding to support that request. We also know that this is not a situation that nonprofits and communities will be able to solve for in a day, so we’re setting flexible funding aside in anticipation of meeting rolling needs as this crisis develops. 

But one of our partners, FareStart, had already begun thinking about how they could switch their model to withstand the crisis.

The team at FareStart felt the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak right away. FareStart, a Seattle-based nonprofit, runs a number of restaurants and cafes that employee people with barriers to employment——homelessness, criminal justice system involvement, past unemployment—who are going through FareStart’s job training program. Like all organizations in the food service industry, they knew they would be hard hit by the outbreak. At their restaurant near downtown Seattle, just blocks from Amazon’s headquarters, foot traffic dwindled practically overnight as the news of the virus intensified. The same thing happened at their two cafes around the city. Orders placed through their popular catering service ground to a halt.

Small local businesses—particularly those in the food industry—are facing acute uncertainty as the coronavirus spreads throughout the world. FareStart, though, is determined to rise to the challenge. “We naturally did what FareStart does, which is try to think about the problem in an innovative way,” says Megan Hampson, the organization’s chief development officer. “We were founded on the idea of providing healthy, nutritious meals to vulnerable populations, like homeless shelters, and training people from vulnerable populations for jobs.” Looking at the effect the outbreak was beginning to have on FareStart’s restaurants, cafes, and catering operations, Hampson says they decided to focus their resources and people-power in on their meal delivery program, which since 1992 has delivered over 10.5 million meals to people in need across the Seattle community. Making this shift will enable FareStart to continue its job-training programs while supporting people made especially vulnerable by the outbreak across Seattle.

“We just started reaching out to partners and saying hey, we have this capability of providing single-serving meals to the community—how can we help?” Hampson says. “We went from thinking about how we can solve this problem to how we can be a part of the solution.”

One of the first organizations to respond to FareStart’s call was Plymouth Housing, a nonprofit supportive housing provider in the Seattle area. Their residents all fall into the categories of people who will be especially hard hit by the virus, either medically or financially. Many are living on low incomes without access to sick leave or health insurance; many have pre-existing health issues that make them particularly vulnerable to the virus. All need to be sure that they’ll have access to food during this time. Plymouth Housing typically provides residents meals from their communal kitchens, but have had to stop serving due to restrictions brought about by the virus. Because FareStart is equipped to prepare single-serving meals, it's able to help Plymouth Housing continue to meet its residents’ needs.

FareStart did the math: It would cost them around $237,440 to provide two meals per day, seven days a week, to Plymouth Housing’s 265 residents for eight weeks. To help them pivot their business model to meet that need, we worked with FareStart to meet their financial needs using a portion of the $1 million fund we set up for COVID-19 response. In the first week under their new model, FareStart provided 20,935 meals—around 2,000 more than they do in an ordinary week.

Now that FareStart is prepared to focus on providing single-serving meals to the community during this crisis, the next question is: Where else can they help? “We’re constantly assessing that,” Hampson says. In addition to Plymouth Housing, they’ve begun supporting other organizations like the Downtown Emergency Services Center, the Seattle Indian Health Board Elders Program, and Navos Mental Health Solutions. They’re also thinking about how they might partner with more food service businesses around the city, like Tom Douglas Restaurants, to scale up meal provision as they’ve had to adjust their business models. “Those are the questions right now: What’s the need? And how does it make sense for us to partner with others to fill it?”

FareStart is proving how important—and how possible—it is to be flexible amid a crisis. We’re learning from their example as we figure out how to extend support to more organizations in the coming months. We know the need is enormous now and will only continue to grow. The important thing will be to keep asking “how can we help” instead of assuming we have all the answers. This is a crisis, but there’s an opportunity here to learn how to better work with and support each other through it. 

If you are interested in learning more about Tableau Foundation’s efforts during the COVID-19 outbreak, visit our website here. And if you would like to contribute to FareStart’s ongoing efforts to serve their community, visit their website.