Foundation Directed Initiatives (FDI) provide non-profit agencies with long-term funding
By Caitlin Crawshaw
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This article is reprinted with permission from Edmonton Community Foundation. It was first published in Legacy in Action ECF’s 20th anniversary magazine.
Although Edmonton is a city of great wealth, there are many who can’t access the wide range of economic and social opportunities. Because of language, educational and socioeconomic barriers, people may struggle to meet the needs of their families and fully realize their potential.
That’s why Edmonton’s non-profit agencies are so crucial: they provide programming to help the city’s leastadvantaged citizens help themselves, boosting their quality of life and strengthening the fabric of our community.
Non-profit leaders say this is tremendously rewarding but difficult work. They are constantly refining programming to better meet client needs and working to maximize funding dollars. But for many organizations, the biggest challenge of all is simply securing those funding dollars in the first place. That’s why the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) created the Foundation Directed Initiatives (FDI) project in 2007. The three-year pilot program offers flexible, longer-term funding for selected Edmonton agencies.
“We thought it was the best way of meeting our community’s needs,” explains Scott Graham, ECF’s
director of community grants. The FDI project is one of the first proactive funding arrangements in Canada.
Generally, community foundations require agencies to apply for funding, but in this case, the ECF board selects recipients on the basis of community impact and need.
The two- and three-year grants, totalling nearly $1 million, were given to 13 groups identified as having a broad community impact. Graham explains that the funding is designed to help organizations focus on program delivery, not grant applications. “It gives some breathing space to the agency or program to
focus on their work, rather than on chasing dollars,” he says.
The FDI program is also unusual in that it doesn’t involve extensive reporting protocols, as many other funding programs do. This frees up the time of staff members who would normally be required to produce lengthy reports.
For Terra Association, an Edmonton agency dedicated to helping teen parents and their children, the FDI funding couldn’t have come at a better time. “It came at a time when we were really struggling with our funding model,” explains Karen Caine, a senior manager with the agency.
The funding supports the Young Dads Parenting Program, an outreach program that helps teen fathers learn how to care for children and create a stable life. The program has been in place since 1999 and employs two male outreach workers who do home visits or meet with dads at the association.
“The focus of the work, ultimately, is building their parenting skills and knowledge of child development, but often a lot has to get done before that can be done,” says Caine. Some of the dads are homeless, for instance, and need to achieve stability. Children of the 35 men in the program are likely to have far brighter futures than those without involved fathers, she adds. Kids who know their fathers are less likely to have sex
at a young age and perpetuate the cycle of teen pregnancy. They’re also more likely to succeed at school. The father’s involvement is also a tremendous benefit to the mother. In addition to reducing the stress of parenting, having a dad in the picture lowers the mom’s risk of post-partum depression and is associated with greater success with breast-feeding.
At the moment, there are about 35 fathers actively involved in the program, most of whom heard of the program through word of mouth, but some were referred by government agencies.
The flexibility of this funding has helped Terra Association focus on helping young dads, says Caine. Most funders identify the outcomes of a funding arrangement, but ECF allowed Terra Association to determine its own goals for the funding and how it would measure success. “It’s been a huge gift. We were all sort of in awe that ECF had recognized us and had almost given us money without strings attached.”
Like the Young Dads Parenting Program, Partners for Kids is an established program. Launched in 1997, the school-based initiative, which is run by the United Way and several community agencies, targets kids and families affected by poverty. The program connects kids with mentors, outreach workers from the Family Centre and other services. “It’s about building social skills and looking at resiliency factors that allow children and youth to succeed despite adverse conditions,” says Barbara Dart, United Way vice-president, Community Building and Investment.
Many families have come to depend on the program over the years, but securing funding is always challenging. “We strongly believe that once you put services in place that are proven to be valuable, you don’t suddenly pull out,” says Dart. Having FDI funding has “made a huge difference,” she adds.
For the Edmonton Social Planning Council (ESPC), the FDI grant is helping to enhance core funding as the agency continues its revitalization and restructuring. The 70-year-old organization now has a dedicated staff member to expand ESPC’s existing resources and help communicate these resources to other agencies who can benefit from them, explains Executive Director Susan Morrissey. “We’re a social research organization and our goal really is to serve the needs of people in low-income. We don’t do direct service, but through research or communicating research that exists, our role is to help change policy.”
Receiving three-year funding from ECF offers financial stability, something that’s increasingly difficult to come by. “More and more funders are saying, ‘We won’t cover off operating costs, just a specific project,’” says Morrissey. While project-based funding is appreciated, more flexible funds are also needed to maintain an office, pay staff and generally maintain institutional infrastructure.
Since Big Brothers Big Sisters launched in Edmonton in 1972, the organization has helped countless kids realize their potential by connecting them with mentors. Almost 40 years later, Edmonton youth continue to need a helping hand from caring adults, particularly new immigrants and refugees who are building futures in a brand new culture with a brand new language.
Right now, there are about 18,000 immigrants from Somalia and Sudan, says Liz O’Neil, executive director for the Edmonton chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters. In fact, when Big Brothers Big Sisters received FDI funding in 2007, the number of immigrant children in need was growing rapidly. “The money was given to help us create a mentoring response that particular year for the Somali community,” she explains.
O’Neil explains that while these children have come to a stable community from a volatile country, things
can continue to be very difficult. “There are lots of kids in Edmonton who grew up in war camps and now
they’re going into their first schooling experience.”
Since the start of the early childhood intervention and inschool mentoring initiative, Big Brothers Big Sisters – with help from Success By 6 and United Way – has served about 1,000 kids from Somalia and Sudan. The initiative has included mentorship by older children originally from African nations, homework groups and other programs, all running at the African Centre.
Having continuous funding for three years has lent the program stability and has helped many children receive the support they need, says O’Neil. “The Edmonton Community Foundation is helping to do the heavy lifting in the community.”
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Friday, 03 September 2010 
