The area causing the most consternation among nonprofits is almost always funding. Anyone who has any relationship with a nonprofit is aware not only of the problems but also some of the remedies employed to attempt to improve the situation. In the case of ECS we have been able to leverage our private-sector contributions, drawing down additional public dollars by using private money as a match. We have also had success independently raising private dollars even though our local founding partners are outstanding fundraisers themselves.[pull quote]

I have often described funding for nonprofits as ephemeral because most funding decisions are not under the control of the nonprofit itself. Rather, politics, policies (new or existing), and administrative or program requirements determine how money will be allocated. Admittedly, sometimes advocacy can be used to influence decisions, but the entire funding process is fraught with vagaries, which means that the revenue streams are neither dependable nor consistent. Improved attention to program accountability and funding programs that either have demonstrated success and/or have the potential to be effective could level the process and result in better outcomes. Creating nonprofit budgets from one year to the next requires informed guesswork and flexibility. And because budgets are policy—whether it is the funder’s budget or the budget of the organization itself—revenue, public or private, determines what behaviors and what outcomes are incentivized.

The nonprofit organization makes its best assumptions for its budget based on experience and an eye on the future, keeping costs down and performance high. It must work diligently with administrative and elected officials to explain the work and provide the reason to fund—the reason to believe. Statistics, outcomes, personal experiences, evidence of effectiveness, and descriptions of need are used to buttress the story.[pull quote]

There are many good and worthy causes vying for attention. Competition is strong, and often a true zero-sum game. Hope is high. But even though ECS ably executed our mission to the best of our ability, there was always an implicit understanding that how far we could go was largely determined by public and private-sector emergent strategic agendas and subsequent funding decisions, and we had precious little opportunity to influence internal planning and decisions.

For ECS, our funding challenges arose from the realities of the impact of the philanthropic sector that were not unique to us: 1) the tendency in communities to fund something new rather than something that is demonstrating that it works; 2) the hesitancy of nonprofit organizations to operate collaboratively for fear of losing their identity or their funding; 3) the pressure upon nonprofits to keep operating costs too low and thus stymie innovation and growth; 4) the imperative from some elected and appointed officials who live in election cycles to want outcomes too quickly—especially problematic for early childhood programs when the child needs to grow to exhibit the outcomes that we seek. Finally, and ironically, for most nonprofits: 5) the total cost of the service is not fully covered and thus each service delivered results in a loss—the more services the organization delivers, the more money it loses.

The funding conundrum is compounded by the persistent problem described so accurately by Dan Pallotta in his 2008 book Uncharitable. He generally discusses the dilemma of nonprofits that are asked to solve the most intractable problems with the lowest budgets. Often, overhead costs higher than 10% are typically not acceptable. Public-sector money is allocated for services with little designated for administration, professional development, innovation, research, evaluation, program enhancement, or program growth—paradoxically the very activities that could lead to improved program operation and implementation of new strategies or the development of new products that could produce new revenue.

Funding for ECS

Public Monies

Public-sector funding requires active lobbying at all levels—local, state, and federal. Our work at ECS concentrated on the local and state levels, with supportive advocacy from early childhood organizations at the federal level. While ECS never received support from the City of Cincinnati, in the early days we received more than $1 million annually in funds from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program designated by the State of Ohio to the Hamilton County Job & Family Services Agency (JFS). Support also came from the Ohio Department of Health (MIECHV/Help Me Grow), and the Kentucky Health Cabinet (HANDS). Kentucky made the decision to use Medicaid funds and proceeds from its tobacco settlement to pay for the home visiting services. All these funding sources required frequent reauthorization and were subject to budget pressure and political decision-making.

For example, in 2001, the Hamilton County Job & Family Services agency had a large budget shortfall. Our million dollars in TANF Hamilton County funding was eliminated, even though we were able to rally strong advocacy from business leadership. It was an enormous setback and we had to adjust. The impact was twofold: Fewer families could be enrolled, and less Ohio money could be brought to the county to pay for services for residents.

For many years, the Commonwealth of Kentucky was able to pay nearly 80% of the cost of the visits, while in Ohio the fraction was closer to 70%. In both cases, we subsidized with private dollars to cover the actual cost to deliver the service, and achieve the outcomes we promised to our families.

Moreover, in both states, the public investment in early intervention programs was insufficient to really make a “step change” in enrolling and addressing the level of need and risk. We were never able to move beyond serving approximately 20% of those families who qualified for our service, and at 20%, the community needle moves insignificantly. The National Home Visiting Yearbook documents similar gaps between the size of the population that might benefit from home visiting and the number of actual participants documented for the United States overall and for each state.

A contributing factor to the funding instability is that, as new people occupy public and private leadership positions, the focus or the interest in one program or another changes, and the process of educating, cajoling, and convincing begins anew. In any event, ECS did not grow.

The reality was obvious to many: Without an improved funding formula, ECS would be unable to move beyond meeting 20% of the need for its services. Doing more with less was not an option, as we operated with only an 11% administrative cost and we were committed to a high quality, comprehensive program with verifiable results, not a program watered down to accommodate the funding source.

During our many meetings with administrators and legislators to secure public funds for ECS and Help Me Grow in Ohio and HANDS in Kentucky, the leaders almost uniformly acknowledged the importance of our service and our ability to deliver. However, when it came time to vote—to create the budget—competition for dollars was fierce, decisions were not always made with evidence, prevention programs had difficulty documenting bad outcomes they had prevented, and children had no vote.

Moreover, the government-funding model for educating children is upside down, with the least amount of funding available for the earliest and most critical learning period. When I wrote to the mayor of Cincinnati in 2002 asking that ECS be considered as part of the Cincinnati Empowerment Zone and/or the Anthem Neighborhood Development program, I ended my letter with these words: “Each one of our families represents a success story—each family has an improved chance for themselves, for their children, and for our community. Isn’t that, after all, what community means, what empowerment zones and neighborhood development are all about?” We received no funding.

But the outcomes were not all bad. Beginning in 2019, Ohio adopted a more-favorable funding formula, and Governor DeWine demonstrated interest and support for the kind of evidence-based home visiting provided by ECS and Help Me Grow. Soon after DeWine was sworn in as governor—within hours—he appointed LeeAnne Cornyn to the senior position of State Director of Children’s Initiatives, a new position for the state of Ohio. Her job was to coordinate children’s services and programs both from the service and the state agency perspective. I was asked to be the vice chair for what became the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Home Visitation. With broad representation from various interest groups in the field, by March 2019, in only three months, we had produced a set of recommendations that are still being used to guide program development and implementation.

As the pandemic shadow covered us all in 2020, having the DeWine administration recommendations, coupled with fine work from the Ohio Department of Health and Medicaid program, gave high-risk families a lifeline, even when they stopped receiving the in-home visits that anchored our work.

In his introductory letter for the 2019 report Recommendations of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Home Visitation, DeWine explained why he supported this work:

At ECS, we have advocated for policy choices that focus on issues rather than organizations. We wanted to put the money where the need was greatest and where evidence of success was visible. Further, we have stressed that money should follow programs that can measure positive outcomes for families. Our belief from day one has been that you get what you measure. We provided well-documented service for over 28,000 families (56,000 people) over our 20-year history. Those numbers are far from perfect but much better than zero.

Additionally, as we followed the trends in public financing, our work was underway to create a strategy for paying for services based on outcomes rather than fee for service. Certainly, there is strong and credible recognition that programming for infants in the early years matters and agreement that the better investment is in prevention rather than later remediation.

Private Monies

When ECS was being created in the late 1990s, one of the key players was the United Way. Our program emanated from the study commissioned by the United Way board and participation by our other two founding partners, Cincinnati Children’s and the Community Action Agency. Private dollars were made available for the planning and the initial launch of the program. United Way was the largest financial supporter, but funds were also donated by other organizations and individuals who recognized that the ECS mission was founded on good science and a definable, unmet need. The public monies from Ohio and Kentucky were augmented by private dollars—approximately 30% of the service cost in Ohio and 20% of the cost in Kentucky—to deliver the high-quality program that led to positive outcomes.

We have been aware and have articulated frequently that programs like ECS cannot be carried on the shoulders of philanthropy alone. However, the private-sector contributions are important for success. In addition to subsidizing the cost of the home visits, we depended upon private money to pay for what the public sector didn’t, including but not limited to program administration, evaluation and research, training and staff development, community outreach, marketing, program enhancements such as treatment for maternal depression, early literacy, and books. Cincinnati Children’s provided sizable in-kind support. We were fortunate.

The funding picture has become even more complicated, as philanthropic-fundraising paradigms are shifting nationwide, especially for donations that have historically been made by employees through their employers. First, many employers have moved away from involvement in an employee’s philanthropic choices. Rather, they ask only that the employee be charitable, but they do not suggest to whom the money should be donated. Some employers are using philanthropic giving platforms that include snapshot descriptions of many worthy organizations and the potential donor chooses from among them. Organization profiles are displayed online so the organization itself must have a strong, concise case statement delivered in a compelling manner to win donations in a highly competitive and totally remote marketplace.

Moreover, as people retire earlier and often with funds to invest, they may want to have a role in the nonprofit they are supporting. They can offer the kind of guidance from experienced, smart volunteers that we have been able to benefit from for more than 20 years. Further, these donors want to be assured that their charitable investment is producing results, a reasonable request.

A big looming “moose on the table” is this: Under what conditions will funders, public or private, be willing to make difficult and often unpopular decisions that result in decreasing and/or eliminating funding for organizations that are not producing results? Secondarily, but certainly contributory, is whether the organization itself actually has enough funding to produce what they have promised to deliver and to validate that the strategy is working.

The Founding Partners’ Essential Role in Sustainability

The United Way has been steadfast in its ongoing support for ECS, since the idea of ECS became a reality in 1999. For that first United Way Campaign that included ECS in its fundraising story, there were two important voices speaking to the community. First, George Schaefer, then president of Fifth Third Bank and chair of the 1999 United Way campaign, specifically cited ECS as a primary reason for contributing to the campaign. He also initiated and successfully raised additional funds through his $250,000 Fifth Third Bank Challenge Match. That same year, Cincinnati Children’s CEO Michael Fisher was the Campaign Major Gift Chair, and through his efforts the number of United Way $10,000 Alexis de Tocqueville donors doubled from 100 to 200.

Representing the business community and contributing close to $1.8 million annually in recent years, the United Way has been ECS’s largest private-sector donor. We were careful over the years to respect the interwoven relationship between ECS and our partners who had their own fundraising activities. We kept what we were doing relatively small and did not interfere with how they were raising money. Several times we mounted campaigns for something specific—the Avondale community engagement, books for our families, or matching a grant from an especially generous donor. Each time we openly discussed the campaigns with our partners. But typically, over the years, we deferred to their decisions and always were deeply appreciative of their generosity. There were no legal regulations that committed support from any one of the partners to ECS, yet we delivered on our promise, and they delivered on theirs. The collaborative relationship among the three organizations is an excellent example of the new kind of organizational structure required to produce the best outcomes and use resources most effectively.

As the managing partner, Cincinnati Children’s provided in-kind services that our auditors valued at approximately $300,000 per year. We were housed at Cincinnati Children’s, and were able to use their accounting, budgeting, financial planning, office support, human resources, and research infrastructure, rather than purchasing those separately ourselves.

Philanthropy and Fundraising Efforts

Over the years, as Bill Shore explains in his beautiful and mesmerizing book The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men, funders have begun moving from just investing in programs to investing in operations that are able to address complex social problems—the social determinants of health versus simply immunization for measles, for instance, or the implication of one’s birth ZIP code as opposed to a kindergarten readiness score. Shore emphasizes that investments need to be made in operations, capacity, and leadership, prioritizing sustainability and scale—what he calls a horizontal, not a vertical, strategy—one that enables nonprofits to get to scale and sustain themselves instead of depending on philanthropic subsidies. That is exactly what ECS endeavored to do (Shore 2012). Shore’s book is built around six lessons which should be embraced by every nonprofit:

1. Invest in bringing existing solutions to scale rather than discovering new ones. Make existing solutions affordable, scalable, and sustainable.
2. Most failures in life are failures of imagination.
3. It’s the economics. Have an organization that is sustainable.
4. Create new markets and generate wider public support to solve big problems.
5. Solve not salve. Do not just ameliorate problems.
6. Have the soul of a competitor. Collaboration has merits but it is in the soul of competition that we get better.

Shore urges nonprofits to believe in the superiority of our vision even when no one else does, and he ends with a statement that could be the descriptor for ECS, “There is no such thing as unreasonable when it comes to a mother doing what is necessary for her child.”

As ECS worked toward sustainability, understanding that our philanthropy needed to be diversified, out of necessity we embarked upon three distinct private fundraising efforts. These new campaigns focused on what we already did and on dollars that could help ECS scale, or so we thought. We focused on new dollars and new donors.

The first, entitled Let One More Child Succeed, was initiated by Walker and launched in 2005, asking donors to pay for ECS services for one high-risk, ECS-eligible family for one year. The idea was to raise incremental funds to “sponsor” a child for one to three years, and although we were operating with a waiting list, open up a space for a Let One More Child Succeed child, thereby making a direct connection between the donor’s gift and a new family receiving the service.

We explained to United Way that this campaign would likely bring new dollars and new donors to ECS as we targeted churches, civic associations, small businesses, the ECS board, board associates, and foundations. We maintained this would bring new groups and individuals into the United Way sphere of influence. The United Way would, by extension, be offering a new branded charitable “product” to a broader audience.

In the second campaign, we set out to raise money for the special program for the Avondale community. At that time, we had a waiting list for program enrollment and were hesitant to encourage new moms to join the program, when we knew we couldn’t serve them in a timely way. With the infusion of funding for Avondale, however, we were able to make a different decision for Avondale moms in the community where both our offices and Cincinnati Children’s were located. We knew that the community needed help. Through philanthropy and leadership from two ECS board members, Carter and Walker, and one senior corporate executive from Federated, Thomas Cody, we were able to raise just over $1 million to serve any program-eligible family living in Avondale. The results were exciting, as 85% of eligible moms joined us and were able to record positive outcomes (Every Child Succeeds 2016).

Another philanthropic fundraising campaign, Every Child Is Me, was initiated in 2018, when the Walker family made a $1 million grant to ECS. The couple suggested that this donation be used as a challenge match to raise funds to serve more families and take advantage of the opportunity to leverage state money with private money. The Walkers saw this strategy as a way “to multiply the impact of their gift and to help to ensure that every child in our community has an optimal start.” They were clear in their intention to see this money put to work in the community in the next few years after the funds were received. They were not interested in creating an endowment fund and wisely let us know that they understood that “grant” money like this is always welcome but also presents management issues because it is one-time money rather than an ongoing source of funding.

We used an external-fundraising consultant, Ignite Philanthropy, whose mission was to work with private donors and nonprofits to leverage their resources and ideas to leverage their impact. Our senior ECS staff and board team were able to launch the Every Child Is Me campaign in late 2019. We raised a total of $4 million, ending just weeks before the pandemic hit.

Finally, and most importantly, we created Bringing Books to Babes to ensure that every single child in our program would have a library of age-appropriate books. Led by two longtime ECS board members and early literacy advocates, Mary Ellen Cody and Digi Schueler, we were able to raise over $400,000 in 10 years, allowing us to purchase books for our children, books that were delivered by the home visitors. This expanded our early literacy initiative with books that every family received every month, books that often were the only books in the home.

We had other smaller fundraising initiatives and in-kind contributions over the years for specific projects or programs. Through all of these fundraising activities we discovered one important reality. Typically, funders like to provide support for specific, mostly visible activities. They do not, nor I believe should not, provide operating capital for the organization. We received extensive media attention from Time Warner, large contributions of products for our warehouse and parent aid bags from a variety of large Cincinnati-area corporations. We received help to buy books and provide limited services for families from Cincinnati Bell, Fifth Third Bank, and Cincinnati’s Underground Railroad Freedom Center. We were able to generate seed money for new ideas, all the money coming from the private sector.[pull quote]

But it is the public sources of funds that must support ongoing basic operation for programs that have been shown to be effective, and the programs must buttress that support with a reporting structure that is transparent and verifies effectiveness. It is important to try to build upon what is working rather than duplicating efforts or not taking advantage of what has been learned.

It is true that whether the money is coming from a public or a private source, the funders make decisions, because as they support one initiative or another, they provide room for that initiative to grow. They make choices. It is hard work because funders must be aware of not only the immediate outcomes of what they support but also the possible unintended consequences for community expansion and/or coordination. Further, they need to be brave, because so often it is easier to say yes than no, and too often holding organizations accountable comes with significant challenges.

The unstable nature of funding itself is compounded by communities that, over time, select or launch new programs rather than building on those that are operational and have been shown to work.

Beginning early in our development, and with guidance from our private-sector board chair, we prepared a simple piece for our ECS board and for the community to explain how we were making a difference and to demonstrate that the investment in ECS produced results and delivered on its promise as a good, strong prevention program. Our reports, as case statements too, listed those results and then explained how ECS was different from other good programs:

1. It was a unique collaboration of public and private resources, securing more than $1 in private money for every $3 the government was investing.
2. It used a business approach and applied accountability to the delivery of a social service, which meant measuring everything, continuous quality improvement, and process management.
3. It had the support of Cincinnati Children’s for evaluation and research management, scientific rigor, and community credibility.
4. It used clearly defined measures and dashboarding to let investors and the community see and know that this program was working.

We typically continued by listing our special initiatives (e.g., Avondale community partnership, maternal-depression treatment, connecting to pediatric care, and emerging literacy). But many of these innovations and successful pilot projects ended due to lack of continuing funds. We explained that in how we addressed several key issues facing Cincinnati, including poverty, benefits were needed for two (and maybe three) generations. Measured outcomes were needed, and collaboration with our provider agencies and with our community was necessary for the use of private money to draw down public dollars for greater Cincinnati.

We offered not only the reason to believe but also the facts to support it. However, even with outstanding results and documentation, low overhead, and addressing a recognized need, ECS was not able to grow to serve more families who are eligible for the ECS free and voluntary service.

The “Going to Scale” Jeffrey Bradach piece published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (2003) described an issue that ECS has faced almost since its inception: “The failure to replicate social programs is usually attributed to problems of strategy and management. Much of the time it is simply a problem of money. The fact that dollars seldom follow success is one of the most vexing problems nonprofit leaders face.”

New ideas are advanced; someone wants to try a new program and dollars are reallocated, siphoned off to another program or another idea. The opportunity to grow what is working is lost.

Several years after we were launched as a program and we were demonstrating that we were delivering on our promise to the community, another early childhood program was brought to greater Cincinnati as part of a national initiative. We saw opportunities for our program and the new program, also sponsored by the United Way, to collaborate. Our focus was the prenatal period and services for children from birth to age three; theirs was childcare, school readiness, and continued child development. Over time, however, they did not seem to be endorsing home visiting as a key strategy, and we couldn’t understand why—it felt divisive and competitive. Conversations with leadership helped to ameliorate the differences, but we should not have needed to have those conversations at all. What was going on? Was it turf issues, control issues, lack of awareness, absence of confidence?

As complementary and competing programs popped up, the funders and the public became confused. We needed to make it easier for funders to focus and cooperate, not harder. At one point, a local public official who was vying for “share of voice” diluted our opportunity to make our case, strengthen public endorsement, and secure additional funding. As we had seen in the past, needs are infinite while resources are finite. It is imperative that programs producing quantifiable results are funded and that nonprofits are held accountable for promises made and outcomes delivered. Sustainability, consistency, and predictability are key, keeping in mind that point-in-time interventions need continuity for long-term effects.

Blended and Braided Funding

It is obvious that a primary challenge for any nonprofit is to keep itself funded, and in the case of ECS, we had our public dollars—local, state, and federal in Ohio and Kentucky—and our private philanthropic dollars from a variety of sources, including the United Way. In addition, we sought additional outside funding that included research and other program support.

Using calendar year 2006 as an example, in addition to public monies from the states of Ohio and Kentucky for direct service delivery, we were able to generate funds from various public and private funders for special projects and enhance our administrative skills for blending and braiding funding.

• Retention study grant: federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau research funds, $1 million over four years
• Maternal-depression pilot: Cincinnati Health Foundation, $270,000 over four years
• Maternal-depression treatment program: National Institute of Mental Health, $450,000 over three years
• Assuring a smoke-free home (ASH): Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation, $1.45 million over four years
• Infant mortality study: Cincinnati Children’s, $30,000
• Let One More Child Succeed/Avondale expansion: individual donors, $620,000

Other support came from the RAND Corporation for a cost-benefit analysis to investigate how their services for young mothers could be improved with the inclusion of a home visiting component, from Ethicon Endo Surgery for our University of Michigan intern and from the National Center for Family Literacy in Louisville, Kentucky, to help us create a model for emerging/early literacy beginning in the prenatal period.

Funding Beyond the Home Visit Itself

Identifying funds to support our evaluation and research activity was not easy because we, like many organizations, required financial support to be able to hire people skilled in measurement, development, marketing, and government relations. With an emphasis on low overhead for nonprofits, funders who supported us were willing to pay for our home visiting service but rarely to include salaries for other parts of the infrastructure. Our affiliation with Cincinnati Children’s has allowed us to buy time from faculty at the Research Foundation and to supplement staff time using private dollars. Successful grant budgets allow portions of salaries to be funded through the grant. But it is a constant and unfortunate balancing act, which ultimately caused us to miss many good opportunities for learning because we could not afford to hire people to do the work.

The problem has a second angle. As we uncovered compelling findings that we wanted to incorporate into our work with families, we found ourselves knowing what to do but unable to identify funds to actually do it. There were many such situations over the last two decades: deploying the early literacy LENA strategies; continuing the focus on executive function highlighted during our pilot work with Ellen Galinsky, then chief science officer at the Bezos Foundation, and founder and director of Mind in the Making (Galinsky 2010); continuing our effective community engagement opportunities based on our Avondale experience; integrating the successful shortened perinatal engagement identified through StartStrong.

Our continual quest for funds had two broad objectives: first, the quality delivery of home visits and second, anything beyond basic service that was important to helping families achieve the best possible start for their children. Sometimes I described the situation by saying disparagingly that Diogenes looked for an honest man while I just looked for money. It was a sentiment not unique to me. Here are two examples of what typically happened:

Example One

ECS was able to obtain grants for the research that allowed us to develop an in-home treatment for the maternal depression that affects roughly half of all moms enrolled in ECS. Maternal depression was a problem that we were eager to address on two levels—to help the mom herself and to help the child. Research let us know that if the mother suffers from depression, she has little left to give to the child—care, attention, stimulation, and bonding are all reduced. Developmental opportunities for the child are truncated, as are the foundational relationships. This is at least a two-generational concern. Following the research and development work, we sought and received a large philanthropic grant to make Moving Beyond Depression available, but only for ECS mothers and within certain time and dollar limits. We made numerous presentations to legislators and policymakers asking for public monies to offer Moving Beyond Depression statewide through their home visiting programs, Help Me Grow (MIECHV) in Ohio and HANDS in Kentucky. We were not successful. As the philanthropic grant was ending, Ohio Medicaid agreed to pay for the service under certain conditions but at a rate that we could not afford. Fortunately, one of our Ohio provider agencies was willing to take over program administration and could accommodate the reduced payment using its own funds to bridge the reimbursement shortfall. ECS agreed to continue to train the therapists and assist with data collection and analysis. We were not able to identify a similar situation for Kentucky, and moms in Kentucky do not have access to Moving Beyond Depression.

Example Two

We knew that what home visitors were being asked to do on a daily basis was complex and stressful. We hired good people for these professional positions and trained them using our own resources along with training opportunities provided by Ohio and Kentucky. Yet we also knew that there were few guidelines to define the important role of home visitor. There was not a certification process or even a set of specified skills that a home visitor would need or could work to achieve. The term home visitor was nearly generic, so someone called a home visitor could be a nurse, a social worker, a home health aide, a community health worker, a health navigator, a child-development specialist, a teacher, or an interested person without any of those designations who wants to work with perinatal women and young children in their homes. There is not a single, uniform description of what a home visitor, with a certain set of specialized skills, delivering an identified curriculum, needs to be able to do—what is expected of them? We believed that home visitors deserved an opportunity to have their skills recognized and certified, adding to their professional designation. We talked of career ladders, time for classes and curriculum development, internships and strategies for transferability of experience if a home visitor relocates to a new community. However, other than what states provide to fund their own training opportunities, there is not a source of money to pay for career development for home visitors, although several states are working on plans: most notably, Virginia, with its Institute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals.

If we require a well-trained, professional workforce for home visiting, then we need to recognize that we must have funds available so that learning and certification may occur. The hairdresser needs a license. Doesn’t the person working with our highest-risk families and their children deserve the same consideration? As of this writing, no funds exist for this initiative.

Money needs to be allocated where it will have the largest impact, where efficacy can be validated. Funders need to be diligent about requiring clear evidence of success as well as the behaviors they incentivize through funding support.

Lessons

1. Work to achieve a public-private funding mix augmented with entrepreneurial revenue when possible. Understand that long-term sustainable programs cannot be built on the shoulders of either government or philanthropy alone; rather, multiple funding resources are required.
2. Keep budget and mission aligned. The budget is the policy of your organization. Funding choices often require bravery while remaining focused on the core mission activities.
3. Accept that for both public and private-sector funders, the nonprofit organization must provide information about fiscal management, program operations, and outcomes. Be accountable and transparent with fiscal data and budget realities. Work with funders to establish which outcomes will be used to validate success. Report progress on a regular basis and consider creating a dashboard.
4. Keep in mind operational money may be the most difficult to secure. Philanthropic investments are generally attracted to innovation or a specific project rather than ongoing operations.
5. Aim to generate income. Without income, nonprofits continue to be reliant on government and philanthropic dollars alone and rarely become self-sustaining. Income from products or services can fund operations which are rarely funded by public or private dollars.
6. Recognize that despite long-term commitments, the priorities of funders shift over time. New ideas or concepts can be compelling and attractive to funders. Be prepared to tell your story well, to make your work relevant in the current context.