Funding the Spirit of Collaboration

FS: What are charities expected to collaborate on?

PK: We have three points that we look for. And those are: Is the proposed collaboration going to meaningfully change the way that an organization does business over the long term? It's not one-off fundraising events jointly or that kind of thing, but are really more deep and strategic ways of changing the way they do business. The second is, because it's more strategic in nature, we're expecting that the boards of the organizations who are collaborating would be involved. There would need to be some sort of documented resolution that the boards are aware of and are interested in pursuing the collaborations. And then, lastly, the fund is very much interested in preserving and expanding services. So a collaboration that does that will be absolutely one that we would look at.

FS: What are examples of the types of collaboration the Catalyst Fund would finance?

William Pinakiewicz: We have 90 organizations who've expressed an interest in participating and getting allocations from the fund, just to give you a sense of the presented demand that we're seeing in the Boston area. We actually had two organizations that did a joint venture on their development areas. One organization had a lot of capacity in development — good, long-standing success in their fundraising efforts. And the other organization — a very similar type [of] organization, in terms of mission, geographically close to the other organization — had a very little bit of fundraising capacity. And they entered into a joint venture by which they shared some resources and did some joint fundraising sorts of things. They spent a long time developing the understanding about how it would operate, which resources would be shared for how many days a week, and the types of projects that they would be involved in, and basically enshrined that in the form of a memorandum of understanding.