An Update from Our Flex Fund – Positive Feedback from Our Investees

At SVP we define capacity building as the support and enhancement of core skills, management practices, strategies, and systems to enable an organization’s effectiveness, sustainability, and ability to fulfill its mission. In 2022, we rolled out a brand-new granting stream: the Capacity-Building Flex Fund. These smaller grants are made available to our Investee and Alumni community to support capacity-building projects that are crucial to the improvement of their service delivery but that are consistently not funded by other sources. When working with Investee organizations, there are often additional areas of need that emerge―for example, a literature review, executive coaching, or an IT upgrade—for these organizations to get to their end goal.

By not only helping them to identify what they need to get them where they want to go, but also providing the funding to make it happen, we are working to lower barriers and help provide solutions.

The Flex Fund is a manifestation of our values in action: being agile, responsive, and filling gaps in the funding landscape to ensure our non-profit organizations can improve their operations to ultimately better serve children and youth. 

Recently we checked in with three recipients of the Flex Fund: current Investee The Treehouse, as well as two Alumni organizations Urban Horse Project and Mom2Mom. While all three organizations were experiencing a lack of capacity-building resources, their desired outcomes for the Flex Fund varied. 

The Treehouse was in need of an executive coach to work on leadership development to help move the organization forward. However, their financial constraints, typical of an organization of their size and scope, was a barrier to accessing coaching. Nancy McRitchie, Executive Director of Urban Horse Project, shared that prior to the Flex Fund, which they used for both training and systems implementation, UHP was “young, optimistic and at risk of overwhelm.” Their tiny leadership and administrative team didn’t have the capacity to realize their goals of organized systems and infrastructure to ensure their sustainability, and leadership burnout was looming. Mom2Mom had similar concerns around systems and infrastructure. Their small team lacked the resources to access IT training, and therefore were not up to date on the most recent security knowledge and protocols. With no IT support or policies in place, they had concerns about being at risk for security threats. 

The results are in, and these three organizations have glowing reviews of what the Flex Fund was able to support. Leah Zille, Executive Director of The Treehouse, has this to say almost one year in: “We have more clarity on moving our vision forward thanks to the focus provided through the executive coaching sessions. The clarity and acuity gained through these sessions have empowered us to articulate and work towards achieving The Treehouse vision with enhanced confidence. By understanding our strengths and critical stretch points, it is expediting how we develop as an organization.” 

The Urban Horse Project team is now feeling “relieved, focused and more resilient” which is a far cry from Nancy’s initial concerns of overwhelm and potential burnout. The impact on the non-profit staff teams is clear, and it extends beyond them to the children, youth, and families that they serve. Melodie Mallinder of Mom2Mom shared the following: “Improved security at Mom2Mom benefits our participants, stakeholders, and volunteers because they share their vulnerable information and personal details with us. With the systems in place, M2M can keep their information safe. The IT protocols and training that we were able to purchase have helped eliminate unnecessary administrative work for staff so that they can focus on serving single moms and children living in poverty.”