Nonprofit Quarterly ran a post Friday offering a really inspiring case study of a group of elder care advocates that used a sub-$10K annual budget to mobilize $200M in public investment for improved care of of elders. The group, called Dignity Alliance Massachusetts, compliments a larger institutional campaign. The article, written by a member of their leadership team, positions the group’s work as informed by leverage strategies from tech venture capital that philanthropy would do well to learn from.
Let’s build, and fund, more strategies like this!
Dignity Alliance does at least three things I think are worth pointing to.
- They figure out who the specific points of leverage are, in for example, the state congressional system responding to a tragedy, and they host Zoom meetings on Friday evenings when those leaders are home and can participate.
- They have a weekly email newsletter rounding up key news developments, thoughtful quotes, and calls to action. It’s called the Dignity Digest and it’s delivered as a 30 page table format (!), in PDF and Word docs. It’s an absolute delight! The article says it has over 1,000 subscribers, including many state legislative leaders. I love these kinds of stories where advocacy groups say “you’re making decisions related to our area of focus, so we’re going to send you regular resources to help you put your activities in global context.” That kind of thing helps give people a sense of the breadth of options available to them, a sense of the importance of the issues, and some air cover by demonstrating they can act without being first movers.
- Dignity Alliance Massachusetts is largely made up of retired professionals throughout elder care and related industries. Sounds like an amazing use of compounded knowledge, all in a distributed campaign. And likely a key source of credibility. Route that knowledge to the key points of leverage in Zoom calls and a digest email!
You might say this shifts the role of legislators from a target to be persuaded to users of a community infrastructure enabling them to act. (That might be overstating things, they might still need persuading!)
Author James A. Lomastro writes, “We need a shift in which philanthropy recognizes that microgrants that strengthen how civic systems learn and govern themselves can unlock disproportionate public value. Investing in this way honors a principle that both technology innovation and community organizing have long understood: the people closest to a problem are its most reliable diagnosticians, and that the infrastructure to act on that diagnosis is frequently more valuable than any solution proposed from outside. They also carry lower political risk than large institutional bets, generate faster learning cycles, and avoid creating parallel institutions that must eventually be dismantled.”
Right on!
This NPQ article was recommended to me by Hawkeye, the intelligence system I’ve built for organizations who want to do things like this – scan their field, know what’s emerging, and then point at things they’d like to see more of in the world!