From Research to Action: Building a Repeatable Process
Where do you start when you want to move the needle on a major social challenge? We’ve been wrestling with this question since we launched in 2023. While we started with principles and hypotheses, we are actively testing and refining a process for our first initiative, Flourish: Children & Families, that is repeatable for future problems and portfolios. In this post, I will share the process we’re developing: the research, strategy development, due diligence, and evaluation that are shaping our strategy and grant portfolio.
Research
Our research process started with conversations with people close to the problem and a deep dive into the best literature and data. Foster care, the focus of our first initiative, is a particularly personal challenge. Most of the people I interviewed – foster parents, organization leaders, agency workers, policy experts – had their own stories; most were a mix of hard, hopeful, frustrating, and inspiring. These stories were the “why” they started or remained involved; they saw an opportunity for positive change and wanted to do their part.
In our conversations, we learned how each person experiences the system, which challenges were most pressing, and where innovative work was happening. For example, one leader told me, “We (Christians) did a great job of recruiting foster parents in the early 2000s, but we didn’t ensure they had the support systems and trauma-informed training they needed to succeed.” In total, we had more than 100 conversations. Unsurprisingly, themes began to emerge that defined the problem and highlighted the biggest opportunities for our involvement.
Alongside the interviews, we dug into academic literature and government data to validate what we were hearing. We needed to understand the issues causing family separations and placement disruptions, how government dollars flowed, and which solutions had the most evidence of success. We examined how different states and counties responded to challenges, how their outcomes differed, and what evidence exists around promising practices.
Finding and analyzing child welfare data is not for the faint of heart. We encountered multiple challenges with the lack of data and standardized measurement. Almost every state has a unique way of measuring its system, and data can be delayed by up to two years! Nevertheless, we found local sources with high-quality data and a federal source that provides a snapshot of the national landscape with a delay. With a clear view of the biggest challenges and most promising levers for change, we developed a vision for a better system and started building a strategy to get there.
Strategy Development
Our research process surfaced numerous opportunities to get involved in foster care, but we can’t solve every problem in the system. We had to answer:
Where can investments in the child welfare ecosystem have the highest returns for children and families?
Which program models and organizations are most ripe for philanthropic investment?
How can Flourish Fund add distinctive value?
Ultimately, we are prioritizing parent empowerment, church mobilization, and strengthening local ecosystems.
Parent empowerment strengthens families by supporting the stability and well-being of parents, helping prevent foster care and break cycles of instability and trauma. Through church mobilization, we lean into the unique resources that churches offer—a call to care for the vulnerable, a theology of incarnation and suffering, and a community of committed volunteers ready to respond to challenges. By strengthening local ecosystems, we address the complex nature of family needs, recognizing that a strong network of local stakeholders can more effectively support at-risk families than any government agency or organization acting alone.
As a catalytic funder, we divide our investments into three categories: scaling innovation, strengthening the field, and developing proofs of concept (more on why). Our three categories of investments are focused on proving and growing better solutions that respond to core problems while ensuring relationships and technological infrastructure are in place to scale and replicate successes in other geographies.
For proofs of concept, we are focusing on a few places with distinct child welfare systems to maximize our learning and contextualize the approach to different regions and political dynamics. We looked at many data points, including the presence of churches and believers, the health of the current public system, and the dynamics of the nonprofit ecosystem. We also visited many places and discerned the stakeholder environment, including the desire for collaboration and demand from local leaders.
After evaluating 20+ cities, we selected Fort Lauderdale, Fort Worth, Memphis, and San Diego. These places will be essential for understanding what works and providing potential markets for innovative programs we’re supporting. We’re actively discerning our timing and sequencing for target cities due to our desire to learn and adapt with each new city’s launch.
Preliminary Due Diligence
Who should receive our funds? There are a lot of great nonprofits doing meaningful work, but we wanted to identify the most innovative and effective organizations that aligned with our strategy. We partnered with Simple Charity, a philanthropic advisor, to help identify, analyze, and vet high-potential nonprofits across the country.
To start, we compiled a nationwide list of organizations that might be ideal partners. Simple Charity then evaluated organizations across three categories—operations, culture, and impact. In addition to looking through websites, reports, and financial statements, we conducted interviews with leaders to humanize the data points and bring their stories to life. In total, we evaluated over 150 organizations.
One takeaway from our partnership with Simple Charity was the value of cost equivalencies. Cost equivalencies assign expected outcomes to each dollar granted to organizations to estimate the impact of an investment. While imperfect, the metric helped us compare where we could get the greatest return on investment – for example, whether we’d want to fund the recruitment of 22 foster families or support 63 respite homes. At the same time, we know that the full impact of a nonprofit can’t be captured in numbers alone; intangibles like leadership and the strength of relationships matter.
Evaluation & Decision-Making
After identifying organizations that align with our strategy and pass initial due diligence, we are using the following framework to guide our assessments of potential grantees:
Strategic Alignment: Level of alignment between the organization’s activities and our own strategy for Flourish: Children & Families
Innovation: Our assessment of the organization’s distinctiveness and potential for positive disruption
Growth Potential: Organization’s desire and readiness to scale or replicate to serve more people (or churches, organizations, etc)
Success & Measurement: The organization’s ability to achieve its objectives and validate outcomes with evidence
Church Engagement: The church’s role and level of participation in the organization’s activities
Leadership: The leadership team’s clarity of vision, capacity to execute, and commitment to their team’s well-being
As we prepare to finalize our first round of decisions, this rubric will help us focus on what matters most to our strategy and avoid the distractions of worthy but out-of-scope opportunities. The first round of grants will support innovative organizations with a regional or national footprint, laying the groundwork for future investments in local partners within our target cities.
What’s Next
So, where are we now? We’re raising the first $10 million of the fund and finalizing the monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework along with refining our place-based approach. The development of our place-based approach and MEL framework have been challenging but will be critical to achieving our goals and evaluating our long-term impact. I’ll leave it to a future post for more details on those processes and end products.
As we turn from strategy development and funding decisions toward execution and impact measurement, I’m excited to learn more lessons that will shape our funds in the future. For example: besides funding, what will it take to encourage collaboration, more accurate data and measurement, and ongoing innovation? And as an outside funder, how can Flourish Fund contribute in ways that strengthen—rather than overshadow—what’s already working locally? We don’t have the answers yet, but we look forward to learning and sharing along the way.
