The Rise of Multisector Partnerships to Address the Problems of Place
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Funders are backing multisector approaches to entrenched local problems like homelessness and low healthcare access. Photo: mark gusev/shutterstock
Place-based, multisector partnerships continue to make the news — at least here at IP and in the world of philanthropy more generally.
The term may sound complex, but it’s essentially a new way of talking about the long-established practice of collective impact — various groups coming together to solve big problems. The shifting language points to an evolution of these efforts, which are being used to address more issue areas than in the past and garnering bigger investments from funders.
This is good news because multisector collaboration lets philanthropy play to one of its key strengths — its unique independence. A trusted funder can be like the convener in the old stone soup fable: It puts out a big iron soup pot — of money and intention — inspiring others to gather round, adding in whatever they have. The results? A far richer impact than any one organization or individual could make alone.
The value of independence in place-based collaborations
This role of funder as mediator-convener was evident in the Houston Endowment’s leadership in the city’s recent success at housing 28,000 chronically homeless people, a feat many other cities have repeatedly failed to accomplish.
The ever-rising population of unhoused people around the country points not only to the complexity of the problem but also to the inability of well-meaning groups to put aside their pet approaches and prioritize unity. (Yes, L.A., I’m looking at you). In Houston, the perpetual, place-based, private foundation leaned on its long-established reputation as a neutral, city-focused player to bring people together, including idealistic homeless advocacy organizations — which, in some cases, were working at cross-purposes to each other — religious leaders, civic groups and commercial real estate developers, as I wrote when covering the foundation in August.
While the Houston Endowment eventually contributed $30 million over 10 years toward the project, and added another $15 million this year, its first investment was time, not money. Its presence helped create momentum. “The Houston Endowment has a broad mandate to benefit the people of greater Houston, to deal with important issues and to leverage its dollars by tapping public funding streams and partnering with the business and nonprofit community,” said Houston Endowment President and CEO Ann Stern. “But it is free to go about that mission in whatever way it sees fit.” This freedom led to what has become one of the biggest success stories in addressing the complicated problem of chronic homelessness.
Another Texas-based funder, the Dallas-based Meadows Foundation, followed Houston’s example and implemented its own multisector homelessness initiative in Dallas. As Peter Miller, the foundation’s current president and CEO, told me for a recent profile of its work, “I don’t think it could have happened if we didn’t structure it as a collaborative effort of the funders in town and shown unity in philanthropy.”
Complex problems call for collaborative solutions
Many major issues facing our cities, towns and communities require the input of multiple players from various sectors — not just homelessness but also issues like climate change and health. By supporting collaborations, philanthropy helps solve problems that are often too big — and too expensive — for any one organization, agency or discipline to tackle alone.
Take Ballmer Group’s $175 million grant to the Cincinnati-based Strive Together, a national network of local communities striving to achieve racial equity and economic mobility — worthy but ambitious aims that, even on the local level, are highly complex and involve many moving parts. The Ballmer grant, the largest StriveTogether has ever received, will go toward the nonprofit’s new $280 million strategic plan. Designed to take StriveTogether through 2030, the strategic plan includes strengthening and expanding its national network of place-based partnerships, training partners to use data for evaluation, and advocating for policy change to support communities. Ballmer’s investment here will give StriveTogether the time and space it needs to plan and implement this wide-ranging vision.
Ballmer Group is also one of a handful of funders behind the LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment, which also includes the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, First 5 LA and several government agencies. In June, this group announced a new player on its team: the Los Angeles Times. With funding from Ballmer Group, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Sobrato Philanthropies and the Stein Early Childhood Development Fund (at the California Community Foundation), the newspaper’s new initiative will expand its coverage of children from birth to age five.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, philanthropy, tech companies, UC Berkeley and various city agencies have united behind the “Yes San Francisco, Urban Sustainability Challenge,” as IP’s Connie Matthiessen recently wrote. Designed to bring the city back from the brink of a host of urban problems, this place-based, multisector collaboration put out an open call for entrepreneurs to reimagine and transform the city through an environmental lens.
Collaborators and funders include, among others, the Deloitte Foundation, Salesforce and the World Economic Forum. These three combined to create Uplink, an “innovation platform.” The challenge is the first place-based initiative on Uplink, and drew a total of 143 applicants. As the challenge’s Uplink application portal put it, “Our goal is to cultivate an ecosystem of organizations that can revitalize [San Francisco’s] downtown and grow its position as a leader in sustainability innovation.”
Uniting multisector resources for physical health and mental health
As another example, consider the health field. When it comes to both physical and mental health, numerous upstream factors come into play, and the problems of place are often front and center. One prime way that health experts talk about the interwoven nature of these issues is through the social determinants of health rubric, which specifically addresses how societal and environmental inequities lead to unequal health outcomes.
COVID highlighted the degree to which these kinds of outside factors can impact health in particular places, for instance, localities lacking internet access or transportation to clinics. But even before COVID, philanthropy began forming multisector partnerships to address chronic disease. Longtime funders working in this space include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Commonwealth Fund, John A. Hartford Foundation, Peterson Center on Healthcare and SCAN Foundation, among others.
One interesting multisector collaboration in Detroit taps schools as healthcare hubs. With funding from Ballmer Group, Kresge Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and the Detroit-based Children’s Foundation, this healthcare initiative has a goal of operating “health hubs” in a dozen schools across the city. Working in partnerships with the schools, this program will offer free healthcare, including mental health and dental care, for Detroit students. It also connects families to many other resources.
Meanwhile, there’s an acute need for better healthcare in rural places, including mental healthcare. Some 65% of rural counties do not have even one local psychiatrist. Meanwhile, people with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to die during an encounter with a law enforcement official than are other civilians, as IP’s Martha Ramirez recently wrote.
In South Dakota, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust is tackling this rural need, working on a nuanced, multisector approach to handling 911 calls by people suffering mental health crises — and reducing the load on emergency rooms and police officers.
Called the Virtual Crisis Care initiative, which Helmsley funded first as a pilot program in 2020, it aims to connect people with mental health professionals on the spot, virtually. “The program provides law enforcement agencies with training and tablets to connect people undergoing mental health crises with response teams that can help de-escalate the situation and provide immediate psychiatric telehealth care,” Ramirez wrote. These portable computers are connected to a third-party private vendor called Avel, which runs a kind of provider-to-provider network, allowing officers to link individuals to psychologists, nurses and others.
The program has now expanded, tapping government dollars, throughout South Dakota. Helmsley also launched a Virtual Crisis Care initiative in Nevada.
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Taken together, these examples show how philanthropy is using its unique characteristics to address serious place-based problems, and in many cases, steer government funds toward them. As the Houston Endowment’s Ann Stern put it, “Every single issue we care about and focus on at the Houston Endowment, the hard issues — the real dollars are in the public systems.” Place-based, multisector partnerships can help philanthropy unlock those dollars.
The proliferation of philanthropy-led, multisector collaboration is reassuring in another way, too: In an era filled with actors who seem bent on driving us ever further apart, these efforts reinforce the possibilities of unity.
