Options for Incorporating Whole Family Approaches in Your Investment Strategy
Foundations can incorporate a range of whole family strategies into their grantmaking and their overall engagement in whole family work. Depending on the mission, existing investment strategy, and anticipated or planned investment in whole family work, foundations may decide to expand existing grants to incorporate more elements of whole family work, pivot to policy work, invest in both policy and practice, provide technical assistance or capacity building to support solid whole family approaches, or some combination of all of these.
This section offers considerations for each kind of philanthropic investment. There are four broad areas for consideration:
- Programmatic
- Pilots
- Policy/Advocacy
- Capacity/Field Building
1. Programmatic
Goal: To serve families more holistically with comprehensive, coordinated services so that families can increase their well-being faster.
Considerations:
At the program level:
- What is the springboard for the approach – in which element or elements of whole family work are your foundational investments?
- What are the gaps in programming now across the whole family approach?
- Do the organizations in your current portfolio have the capacity to deliver a broader range of services? If not, what other organizations might you engage either as backbones or partners?
- Do the organizations incorporate a racial equity approach in their work with families?
- Do your grantees engage parents in decision-making and/or routinely engage them to calibrate their services?
At the foundation level:
- If you are investing in more than one whole family area, how might you align grantmaking from within your foundation?
- What is realistic as a “stretch” strategy given your other investments and annual investment level as a foundation?
- Who else is funding in this space?
- Where can you have the most impact?
- As you think about expanding your focus, are you using a racial equity lens on your decision-making?
- What capacity building might you need to put in place for programs to transition to a more whole family approach?
Examples:
| Some | The Texas Women’s Foundation established a Child Care Access Fund, recognizing that quality and affordable child care is critical to women’s economic success. |
| Lots | The Women’s Foundation of Colorado intentionally asks partners to work together to coordinate services and provides networking across grantees and technical assistance, allowing families to access many services across partners. |
| All | The Women’s Foundation of Mississippi supported grantees to undertake a whole family strategic planning process to create a comprehensive whole family approach in their communities. |
2. Pilots
Goal: To explore and test how whole family approaches support better outcomes for the entire family.
Considerations:
At the foundation level:
- What are you seeking to learn?
- What would be the elements of a pilot that would offer your foundation and community greater insight into what works for families with low incomes?
- What funds do you have to invest? This will significantly impact what you can do.
At the program level:
- What is the scale of the pilot? Can you leverage existing programming in the community and invest in the aspects of the pilot that are unfunded (often backbone and data collection)?
- How formal or informal would your pilot be?
- At the beginning stages, you might collect more qualitative than quantitative data to understand how to structure pilots.
- A later-stage pilot would have more formal arrangements and a set of metrics to be collected to demonstrate impact.
- What metrics would help you measure success? How skilled are your grantees in collecting and analyzing metrics?
- Is this a good time to implement a pilot? What are the economic, infrastructure, and other conditions in the community that might support or hinder a pilot?
- Does the pilot incorporate cultural and community strengths while working to address structural inequities through a multigenerational approach?
Examples:
The Birmingham Manufacturing Pilot sponsored by the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham has created 18 manufacturing pilots for primarily single mothers that combine quality child care with training and placement services.
CareerAdvance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, piloted recruiting parents from Head Start programs for a health care careers program funded by the federal government, creating a whole family approach that has supported parents in job training and children in moving forward with critical developmental benchmarks.
3. Policy/Advocacy
Goals: To scale whole family practice by influencing policies and funding streams that support families, and/or to advocate for systems change to place families at the center.
Considerations:
At the foundation level:
- Do we undertake or invest in policy work now, and if so, in what arenas? If not, what additional information do we need to step into this area of work? If we decide not to engage in policy investments, how can we align our programmatic work with policy/advocacy work by other foundations and by advocates?
- Are there legal considerations, or do we need to learn the guidelines for philanthropies investing or engaging in policy work?
- How are our policy work/policy priorities informed by what we learn from our grantees about what is effective and what is needed in policy improvements?
At the policy/advocacy level:
- What is the political environment in our community/state? Is there openness to change? What are the messages related to families that resonate among policymakers?
- Who is engaged in policy work now related to whole families and whole family approaches?
- Are there places our voice/investments could propel existing policy work forward?
- Are there gaps in policy work related to whole family approaches where we could invest? What are the opportunities and challenges related to those gaps, and would investments likely translate into successes or run into walls?
- Have we applied an equity lens (both racial and gender) to the policies we are considering addressing? Have we used data to understand where policy change would be most impactful?
- How are grantees incorporating parent voice into advocacy efforts? Are parents engaged in advocacy either through our foundation or our grantees?
Examples:
The Southern Arizona Women’s Foundation holds an annual day at the statehouse to educate legislators on key issues for women and their families, and it buses in parents who are trained on how to tell legislators their stories and advocate for better policies for themselves and their children.
The Texas Women’s Foundation engages in deep advocacy work related to child care, recognizing quality care as a pillar for parent success and family economic mobility. Through direct advocacy and grantmaking, they have won key victories, including creating easier and more integrated application processes for women to obtain multiple family-focused benefits.
4. Capacity Building/Field Building
Goal: To build grantee capacity to provide whole family program services and incorporate whole family thinking into policy approaches.
Considerations:
At the foundation level:
- Is capacity building one of your investment areas? If not, are there partner philanthropies to engage and partner with?
- Are there technical assistance providers equipped to support capacity building in whole family work? If not, how would capacity building take place and what would you need to get it into place?
At the field level:
- How do we assess interest in whole family approaches among grantees and then assess existing approaches and capacities?
- Where could capacity building and technical assistance have the greatest impact and why?
- How would we measure our efforts?
Examples:
Ascend’s Accelerating Postsecondary Success for Parents Initiative, funded by the Omidyar Network, brings together parents and postsecondary institutions to identify policy and practice solutions that support parents in achieving credentials that set them on a path toward economic mobility.
The Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham’s Collaboration Institute offers deep technical assistance to cohorts of organizations to build whole family programs and collaboratives.