The Hyams Foundation

INTRODUCTION

Through its Civic Participation grantmaking program, the Hyams Foundation allocates roughly one-third of its grants to support community organizing, leadership development, voter and citizen participation, and public-policy advocacy. CO anchors the program, with special grantmaking emphasis placed on civic participation activities that combine public-policy advocacy with organizing, or that promote voter education and registration within a CO framework. Under new grantmaking guidelines, priority is given to groups with the strongest commitment to building and sustaining democratic and participatory organizations based in and accountable to low-income communities.

The Hyams Foundation has not always embraced CO as a major funding strategy. Still, many within the Foundation see its support for CO as a natural extension of earlier work. One can understand why. The Foundation has long been known for its strong neighborhood funding orientation, respect for local leadership, commitment to building local institutional capacity, and concern for low-income communities. Such a view, however, belies the highly deliberate, thoughtful, strategic and, above all, persistent role that key individuals played over a number of years in opening up the Foundation to serious consideration and ultimate embrace of CO as an effective social and community change strategy. In a period of about seven years, Hyams went from being a grantmaker with modest commitments to CO to one that has made CO a central feature of its grantmaking program.

This case study examines the process that led Hyams trustees to vastly increase the Foundation's support of organizing. It also describes some of the new efforts and initiatives that Hyams staff and trustees have undertaken to increase the pool of money for grassroots organizing and leadership development in low-income communities.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Beginning in the 1980's, The Hyams Foundation began to lay what would, in retrospect, become important groundwork for developing and institutionalizing a CO portfolio. First, the Foundation adopted an approach to its grantmaking that emphasized the involvement of the residents of low-income neighborhoods in issues of importance to them. While this did not always translate into an organizing approach, the Foundation funded a small number of grantees that included organizing in their work (such as the Committee for Boston Public Housing, first funded in 1981, and Massachusetts Senior Action Council, first funded in 1986). The Foundation also was involved in initiating a major multi-year effort designed, in part, to increase the participation of low-income tenants in the rehabilitation and maintenance of their housing.

In addition, the Foundation staff was influenced by the precedent-setting work of The Boston Foundation (TBF) which, in 1989, created a new program to provide grants to CO organizations. TBF staff became a resource to Hyams staff as they learned more about CO groups and helped to raise general awareness about this relatively new area of funding. In 1990, the Hyams Foundation and TBF came together with several other funders interested in funding organizing through Associated Grantmakers of Massachusetts (AGM). As a part of this work, AGM sponsored a seminar for funders titled Expanding Community Participation in early 1990 and produced a primer on Funding Community Organizing in 1991. The Foundation used these additional opportunities to learn more about funding organizing, and to share its experiences supporting CO organizations.

Finally, the Foundation's eventual focus on CO was influenced by the composition of both the Hyams staff and board. At the board level, the trustees had made a commitment to increasing not only the racial and ethnic diversity of the board, but also to adding the perspectives of individuals with significant direct experience in low-income communities. The Foundation's diversity-related work evolved over a period of years and resulted, among other things, in a formal Statement of Diversity Principles that includes values such as "recognizing and amplifying communities' 'voices,'" "building on the strengths of community residents" and "developing local leadership." Two trustees in particular - James Jennings, who joined the board in 1991, and Meizhu Lui, who joined in 1995 - were very knowledgeable about CO. Both also were trustees of color. Their experiences added to those of Harry Spence, a trustee from 1983 to 1995 (he recently rejoined the board in September of 2000), who, as the former receiver of the Boston Housing Authority, had been a firm believer in developing strong tenant organizations and leaders.

According to Harry Spence, the Foundation's efforts to become a more diverse organization also increased its capacity to debate hard topics, something that would later be important in the evolution of its grantmaking priorities:

BUILDING A CO PORTFOLIO

Hyams' first major commitment of funds to support CO came in 1992, the year that violence reached epidemic proportions in many of Boston's neighborhoods. It was in that year that the foundation launched its Building Community Initiative (BCI), a multi-year effort to use CO and coalition-building as primary strategies to prevent and reduce youth violence and neighborhood crime. A four-year program that remained active for eight, Hyams invested $2.5 million in the BCI on the premise that "grassroots organizing held the greatest promise for effectively mobilizing residents, community agencies, law enforcement and other public officials in the effort to create safe neighborhoods." Its four components included:

• CO, which provided the resources for grantees to hire one full-time community organizer;
• Technical Assistance and Training, which provided technical assistance and training to assist grantees to carry out their CO and coalition-building activities, and in raising additional funds for their work;
• Public-Policy Advocacy, which focused on public-policy advocacy by linking grantees together to address and act on common concerns at the city-wide level; and
• Evaluation, which committed funds to support an evaluation of the initiative so that its lessons could be distilled and disseminated to others interested in or engaged in similar work.

Planning for the initiative began in 1990, when discussions with Hyams grantees and media reports on escalating neighborhood violence convinced the Foundation that it should take action to address the problem. Henry Allen, recently hired as director for special projects, took the lead role, spending 50 percent of his time researching the issues and engaging in extensive conversations with Hyams grantees, crime prevention experts and funders. With a strong background in CO, Allen developed an options paper for staff discussion that outlined two strategic directions. The first was an expansion-of-services model that would have provided additional funds to community-based agencies delivering high quality services to neighborhoods afflicted with high crime rates. The second, which Allen strongly favored, was a CO model to build resident leadership and support community action strategies to prevent and reduce crime. In the end, staff and trustees endorsed Allen's approach, believing that neighborhood-based, resident-led organizing and coalition-building held the greatest promise for responding to communities' needs for more and better services, increased program coordination, and police and criminal justice reform.

After issuing a targeted request for proposals to seven neighborhood groups, the Hyams Foundation selected and funded four coalitions, providing annual grants of between $50,000 and $60,000 to help them organize residents for neighborhood safety. Each grantee hired organizers to identify, develop and support community leadership; build the organization through outreach and education; assist the organization with the implementation of community-driven action plans; provide the day-to-day support necessary to nurture and sustain organizational progress; and link organizing efforts across neighborhoods and communities.

Throughout the life of the project, Foundation staff had frequent and continuous interaction with BCI grantees. Staff members made special efforts to encourage and support grantees to access technical assistance support in order to stabilize their operations and resource base. Hyams trustees also had significant interaction with BCI grantees, either through trustee site visits or through presentations that coalition staff made to the board.

DOCUMENTING BCI'S IMPACT

Committed from the start to learning from its experiences, the Hyams Foundation contracted with a team of evaluators to begin a four-year assessment of the coalitions' organizational and programmatic accomplishments. The team evaluated the coalitions along five dimensions, and found that BCI had generated results that were both significant and tangible. Foremost among them was the building and strengthening of many new relationships among neighborhood residents; between neighborhood residents and the police; and among government agencies, community-based organizations and grassroots neighborhood groups.

The evaluation noted that these relationships "are now a permanent part of a community infrastructure that can, over time, reduce neighborhood crime and violence; increase feelings of confidence, safety, and connection among residents; and further a broad community development agenda that will contribute significantly to creating and sustaining healthy, safe, and prosperous neighborhoods."

BCI evaluators also found that, in each of the targeted neighborhoods, "the very existence of the coalition and its on-going outreach and network development served as a source of comfort, confidence, and empowerment for residents." All of the neighborhood coalitions made progress in programmatic and organizational development terms - a significant achievement in some of the neighborhood contexts where little, if any, organizational infrastructure existed prior to BCI. Successful organizing drives were waged against drug trafficking and other criminal activities. Block associations were formed to link and inspire community residents to action. And coalitions expanded their outreach to and contacts with other groups and government agencies.

Laura Younger, the board president of one of the BCI coalitions, echoes this assessment:

Our networking has prevented the city from saying different things to different neighborhoods or blocks. By linking grassroots groups together and developing community leadership, we have been able to go beyond adversarial tactics to build new relationships based on mutual respect. That's what organizing is - being able to be at the table, and to design and implement a plan that goes beyond pathology to progress for the community.

BCI's evaluation component documented the coalitions' accomplishments and distilled lessons important for future grantmaking. Chief among them was the need to make a long-term commitment to building capacity in under-resourced communities. At least two of the BCI groups experienced significant difficulties in getting started, with one going through three community organizers in its first few years of operation. It took the careful listening and active support of Hyams staff to help the groups weather unstable staffing arrangements and other serious operational challenges.

While two of the projects eventually became less focused on organizing as a strategy, they nevertheless made important contributions to their surrounding communities. The other two groups developed strong internal organizational capacity that has enabled them to use CO to address a range of neighborhood issues. These results have underscored the Hyams trustees' original belief that not all initiatives will proceed as designed, and that true innovation requires risk-taking as well as flexibility.

The wait for results did not dampen trustee enthusiasm for organizing. The fact that many of the coalitions' achievements came in the BCI's third or fourth years underscored the point that organizing strategies require patient money and lots of support over time. The site visits that trustees made deepened their understanding of and respect for the organizing process. As Hyams' board chair, Jack Clymer, noted:

We all felt very good about BCI because it significantly improved relationships between the police and neighborhood people, and local leadership has been developed with staying power. We also saw what a long-term process organizing is. It involves placing your trust in people to decide for themselves what's important to address and act on. This is not always easy for those who have traditionally controlled the purse strings. Our experience with BCI showed us, though, that if you just stick with it long enough, positive change could happen.

Harry Spence also stated his belief that BCI reconstructed community-police relations on more positive grounds. In his view, the relationships that were built contributed to Boston's dramatic crime reduction while also helping to avoid the more draconian measures that alienated low-income communities and communities of color in other urban areas of the country.

CO coalitions funded by the Hyams Foundation through the Building Community Initiative.

	Four Corners Action Coalition. Housed at the Greenwood Memorial United Methodist Church and working with an expanded number of neighborhood groups, the Four Corners Action Coalition has achieved impressive victories in its eight-year fight for safer streets and better communities. Since 1992, it has broken up drug houses, cleaned up neighborhood streets, prevented the opening of an all-night bar, pressured public officials to repair a vital neighborhood bridge, led a community planning process for economic development in the neighborhood that may lead to significant public- and private-sector investments, and advocated for improved public transit in the area. In the process, the Coalition, staffed by an experienced community organizer, has helped new block associations to form, and supported local residents to get involved in crime watch and other community safety and renewal strategies.
	Project R.I.G.H.T. (Restore and Improve Grove Hall Together). With a mission to promote resident leadership and neighborhood stabilization through door-to-door organizing campaigns, Project R.I.G.H.T. has developed into a coalition of more than 25 neighborhood organizations. It helps residents organize themselves and others into block associations for community action. Through its organizing activities, Project R.I.G.H.T. has developed partnerships with the city of Boston to acquire new housing, demolish abandoned buildings, and build new schools and community centers for youth. Similarly, it has developed strong partnerships with the district attorney, the state attorney general and the Boston Police Department, all of which have resulted in more effective and respectful relationships with the community.
	Project F.R.E.E. (Franklin Residents Efforts for Equality). A coalition of residents in the Franklin Hill and Franklin Field public housing communities, Project F.R.E.E. works with and through the Committee for Boston Public Housing to reduce crime and increase residents' sense of safety by organizing public housing tenants and youth. The Project has formed and maintained resident-led committees - first on safety, then on public housing maintenance - to develop violence-reduction strategies and improve police protection and housing authority maintenance. With substantially fewer gang-related conflicts and fewer apartment break-ins, tenants report feeling safer in their homes and community, especially at night, and are more willing to let their children play outside. One of Project F.R.E.E.'s major accomplishment has been to create a youth council that unites young people from the two developments previously divided by turf issues and related violence. The focus of Project F.R.E.E. over the past few years has been on youth leadership development and organizing.
	Mattapan-Dorchester Churches in Action. Mattapan-Dorchester Churches in Action initially worked with Boston's Organizing Leadership Training Center to develop and implement an organizing model and anti-crime/violence prevention strategy based on a systematic process for developing congregation-based organizations dedicated to training and leadership development. The Coalition collaborated with local police and drug enforcement personnel to rid the neighborhood of drug dealers and to close down crack houses that provided an operations base for drug trafficking. Its work resulted in numerous arrests and the seizure of property identified as drug assets. Through organizing, the Coalition also secured city funds for the renovation of a local park and a decrease in the hours of service of a fast food establishment on one of the neighborhood's main commercial streets.

NEW PLANNING AND ACTION OPPORTUNITIES

The success that the Hyams Foundation had with BCI was critical to its later decision to make CO a central component of its grantmaking. Although not initially conceived as a strategy that would impact Hyams's overall grantmaking, BCI ended up having that effect. It let the Foundation experiment with funding CO on a larger and multi-year scale around an objective - increasing neighborhood safety - that all could support. It helped the Foundation build on its prior but more limited experience in funding a new approach to community change. It also exposed Foundation staff and trustees, in a much more significant way than had previous CO grants, to the CO process and its ability to leverage significant change in low-income neighborhoods. And, it generated key lessons on which the staff and trustees could build in the process of developing a new mission and grantmaking priorities.

In 1995 and 1996, the Foundation continued to organize a strategic planning process that involved both staff and trustees in significant and on-going discussions about the Foundation's history, core values, past and current strategies, and impact. With the support of Beth Smith, Hyams' executive director, staff developed a strategy to increase further Hyams' support of organizing. This strategy involved constant discussion of the issues, with key individuals taking the lead in writing and circulating position papers, conducting research, and creating regular opportunities for trustees to meet with CO groups and others knowledgeable about CO. Materials either developed or collected by staff for distribution included:

• Community Organizing: Measuring the Impact. Key Findings from Three Studies,
• Reweaving the Fabric: the Iron Rule for Dealing with Poverty through Power and Politics,
• Grantmaking and Community Organizing: Making the System Work for Us, and
• What Does Hyams Mean by Community Organizing?

In one staff position paper entitled How CO Meets Criteria for Choosing New Funding Priorities, Henry Allen and Enrique Ball, a program officer with prior experience in CO and leadership development, elaborated on how CO fit within the criteria that Hyams trustees established to guide their selection of new funding priorities. They pointed to the fact that a hallmark of the Foundation had always been its focus on low-income neighborhoods and that CO for the most part occurs in these communities. They also highlighted how consistent CO was with the Foundation's interest in investing in neighborhoods with less access to private and public resources. And they flagged devolution as an issue that made it all the more important to help low-income residents get organized to ensure their fair share of resources. Finally, they pointed to the fact that, because most CO groups are small, Hyams' typical grants - ranging from $15,000-$30,000 at that time - could have a decisive impact on their ability to develop leaders, expand membership, engage in campaigns, and win concrete improvements for low-income families and communities.

Allen and Ball's paper also offered a definition of CO as "a process that brings together people who on a daily basis win personal battles of survival yet lack the ability or power to bring about positive change in their communities. The CO process allows people to act collectively and through an organization to bring about changes that improve the quality of life of community residents, change public policies, and nurture community leaders who represent an organized base. Successful CO brings together people of various class, race, and ethnic backgrounds to promote social change, alter the relations of power, gain social and political influence, and make demands on private and public institutions."

Given the importance of CO as a process of leadership development and resident involvement, Allen and Ball also underlined the importance of letting low-income people decide what is most important to them:

As a funder, we should not decide that Egleston Square ought to be more concerned about housing than crime, and that we will only fund one but not the other. Rather than defining the issues we will fund, we propose that we issue guidelines outlining the types of organizations we will support and what we consider to be the most effective, inclusive, and participatory form of CO.

Remembering this period of planning and discussion, Beth Smith stated:

The foundation debated whether we should fund community organizing to support change in particular issue areas. In the end, we decided not to draw any issue parameters. If it is important to low-income people, then that's our criteria for funding.

Jack Clymer agreed:

An awful lot of our funding had been organized around neighborhoods. With this as a giving focus, we came to the sense that it was not the best or wisest use of our money to force community groups to fit our funding guidelines and priorities. For me, this was personally reinforced when I would make site visits to some of the community groups we funded or were considering funding. When people described what they were trying to do, I would always come away feeling very impressed with their eloquence and intelligence. It made me believe in democracy.

Today, the major debates over organizing versus services versus advocacy have largely been resolved. Dedicated to increasing economic and social justice and power within low-income communities, the Foundation draws no issue parameters around its support for CO. Instead it favors groups that:

• Link short-term, measurable outcomes - which have an impact on the quality of life of low-income communities - with a longer-term vision;
• Show a commitment to developing new leaders and strengthening their memberships;
• Have decision-making processes that are democratic and participatory;
• Raise funds from their members and other grassroots sources; and
• Collaborate with other organizations.

Current grantees include organizations funded under the previous Hyams's guidelines, such as Massachusetts Senior Action Council, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, Parents United for Childcare, Chinatown People Progressive Association and City Life/Vida Urbana, as well as newer grantees such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Massachusetts Jobs With Justice, Immigrant Workers Resource Center, the Boston Tenants Coalition, and Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (IAF). All of these groups have demonstrated their capacity to organize low-income people and to promote their concerns in public arenas or policymaking forums.

Between 1990 and 1999, Hyams staff estimate that grants to organizations with a significant focus on organizing almost quadrupled, from $140,000 in 1990 to $615,000 in 1999. The Foundation made an additional $250,000 in grants in 1999 for public-policy advocacy, most of which included CO as a component. An additional $470,000 was voted for leadership development programs, some of which involved low-income people in CO activities.

The Chinatown People's Progressive Association, for example, has won a series of impressive victories, defeating a proposal to build a ramp for the new artery in Chinatown, winning more than $100,000 in back wages due immigrant restaurant workers, and supporting the formation of strong tenant unions to preserve affordable housing stock in Chinatown for current residents. ACORN successfully fought to secure a living wage of $8.23 for hourly workers of for-profit and nonprofit organizations doing business under contract with the city of Boston. And the newly-formed Greater Boston Interfaith Organization collected more than 120,000 signatures in a petition campaign and held multiple accountability sessions with key state legislators to push for housing policy initiatives that resulted in an increase of $30 million in new state funds to support low-income housing development.

Since 1997, Hyams staff and trustees have continued to explore and create new CO funding opportunities. The Foundation recently commissioned new research to identify the barriers to and opportunities for increasing leadership in immigrant and refugee communities. Recognizing the serious shortage of organizers of color, it is also examining how it might best support the recruitment and retention of organizers of color. Drawing on what it learned from BCI, staff has also worked collaboratively with other funders to catalyze a new organizing initiative on behalf of school reform.

BOSTON PARENTS ORGANIZING NETWORK

The Boston Parents Organizing Network (BPON) is a new city-wide initiative to organize low-income parents and communities into a powerful force for school and education policy reform in Boston public schools. A five-year collaboration between foundations and organizing groups, BPON has been built on the premise that public schools are more accountable and effective when parents and the broader community are actively engaged in their children's education.

Initial planning for BPON started in June, 1997. On behalf of Hyams, Henry Allen and colleagues Klare Shaw from the Boston Globe Foundation and Bob Wadsworth from the Boston Foundation began meeting with CO and advocacy groups to explore options for how they might initiate an effective city-wide parent organizing effort. All agreed that:

• The Boston Public School System (BPS) was continuing to fail the majority of its students, who are predominantly low-income students of color;
• An organized parent and community constituency was an essential component in successful school reform;
• Grassroots parent and CO for the reform of individual schools was exceedingly limited, and almost no organized efforts existed at the city-wide level to hold BPS accountable for meaningful reforms; and
• Groups with a successful track record in organizing neighborhood residents - many of whom were public-school parents - could apply their experience to parent organizing for school reform.

Between June 1997 and October 1998, the idea for BPON gradually emerged. The Hyams Foundation joined one national and six local funders to create BPON as a new funding collaborative that would raise and channel resources from the philanthropic community to support grassroots organizing for school reform. Formally launched in 1999 as a five-year initiative with a budget of $2.8 million, BPON provided six first-year grants to community organizations to build the capacity of low-income parents and community residents to effect change in their children's schools at both an individual school and system-wide level. By December 2000 two more foundations had joined, for a total of ten, and BPON had raised almost $1.7 million. Funders to the initiative now include three national foundations (Annie E. Casey Foundation, Edward A. Hazen Foundation and the Roblee Family Foundation) and seven local foundations (Boston Globe Foundation, The Boston Foundation, the Hyams Foundation, State Street Foundation, the Schott Foundation, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and one anonymous foundation).

BPON founders expected that in the initiative's first year (July 1, 1999 - June 30, 2000) most of the direct organizing work would take place at the local, rather than city-wide, level. The goal was to have each of the six BPON grantees identify at least one issue at the local level for an organizing campaign. With BPON now in its second year (as of July 1, 2000), the expectation is that BPON groups will begin to identify issues of common concern and coalesce around a city-wide school reform campaign. In fact, BPON has been structured to make this happen by requiring grantees to sit on BPON's steering committee and attend regular monthly meetings to facilitate information-sharing, build relationships among the groups, and identify specific systemic reform issues on which the groups might work together. A BPON coordinator, hired by the steering committee and housed at the Institute for Responsive Education, is responsible for organizing meetings, facilitating trainings, sharing information and drawing on a wide range of resource people to work with parents.

The Hyams Foundation has committed an initial $225,000 to support BPON over the first three years, and is open to renewing its support for an additional two years at $75,000 per year, based on progress during BPON's initial years. Committed to evaluation of the initiative, the funders also have selected an experienced team of evaluators to document BPON's progress. Similar in intent to the evaluation component of BCI, it will examine the work of BPON and its grantees over a four-year period to assess how well the initiative meets it key parent organizing and school reform objectives.

PARENT ORGANIZING GRANT RECIPIENTS
	ACORN. ACORN has established an education committee that has begun to identify and train parent leaders. It also has completed an extensive survey of parents in two of the school district's zones, which has identified three key issues as an initial focus to its organizing: increasing parent-teacher conference time: improving the quality of substitute teachers, and improved teaching materials and textbook availability for all students.
	Black Ministerial Alliance. The Black Ministerial Alliance is mobilizing and training a new generation of African American parents to become leaders in education reform in Boston. It has formed education committees in 10 of its 51-member congregations that will serve as an organizing base, and has begun training of parent leaders. It also has played a leadership role in the city on the issue of the negative impact of "high stakes testing" for students of color.
	Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. DSNI is developing a shared community vision for schools in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods. It has formed an education committee whose activities include collecting data and identifying issues for short-term and long-term campaigns. Its initial focus has been on improving access to higher education for area students by advocating for improved student support services and programs to deal with the high dropout rate for minority students.
	Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. GBIO is focusing on leadership development through relational organizing to build power for improving the Boston public schools. It is beginning by seeking out parents who belong to member congregations, training parent leaders and conducting home meetings to identify key educational concerns. It has begun its "Thousand Conversations" campaign, which is designed to elicit the highest priority issues from among its membership. The campaign will guide its organizing and advocacy campaigns.
	Greater Jamaica Plain Parent Organizing Project. A collaboration between City Life/Vida Urbana, the Latino Parents Organization and the Hyde Square Task Force, this project is organizing a series of parent meetings to identify and prioritize issues and to develop campaigns to address them. Its focus is specifically on identifying and meeting the challenges to the active involvement of Latino parents. It has initially concentrated on developing a series of leadership training workshops for its constituency.
	Parents United for Child Care. PUCC is focusing on East Boston, working with public school parents to identify and prioritize local school issues and to develop strategies to address them. It is building on its success in other parts of the city in organizing parents to demand pre-school and after-school care in the public schools.

CONCLUSIONS

Hyams' evolution was marked by several key turning points between 1990 and 1997. They included:

• The influence of The Boston Foundation and other pioneers in funding organizing;
• The diversification of the Foundation's board;
• The hiring of program staff with significant knowledge of and experience with CO;
• The development of a major anti-violence initiative that used CO and coalition-building as primary strategies to combat and reduce youth violence and neighborhood crime; and
• A planning period characterized by intensive staff and staff-trustee interaction.

Each of these turning points opened up new possibilities, leading ultimately to a major transformation in the Foundation's funding priorities and approach that is best captured by its new mission statement: to increase economic and social justice and power within low-income communities. The result was that, in just a seven-year period, the Hyams Foundation moved CO from the margin to being a central component of its grantmaking programs.