PropelNext: An Approach for Smaller Organizations Editors’ note: PropelNext is one of the next generation of capitalization initiatives at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF). In this interview, Lissette Rodriguez, managing director of PropelNext, describes the EMCF approach with organizations in early stages of development. While the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation is committed to its strategy of supporting very large organizations with evaluated program models and business plans that ready them for growth on a national or regional basis, it also recognizes that much excellent work in youth development is done by smaller organizations, and is very local. Because it was clear that the hunger for solid performance measurement and building increased evidence is intense among many of these groups, EMCF, in 2012, began a new initiative aimed at helping propel these smaller youth-serving groups to the next stage of organizational sophistication. This initiative works with organizations with annual budgets of between $1.5 million and $10 million over a three-year period. And increasing impact is the point, says Lissette Rodriguez, who was responsible for developing and now for implementing the program. What PropelNext does with its grantees is “grounded in leading with strong programming and helping them strategically use data to inform and to make meaning out of what’s happening.” But the approach includes a look at the organization as a whole. “We approach [this capacity-building] work in a way that we hope will encourage our grantees to connect with what they were originally hoping to achieve. What was the ultimate aspiration? Is this program achieving that aspiration, and if not, what might I need to change?” NPQ: So PropelNext is not focused on growth necessarily? Lissette Rodriguez: PropelNext is all about depth and quality. Some of these organizations are going to grow locally, some regionally, and maybe even a few are looking at national expansion. But, basically, this pilot is a response on the part of EMCF to get to organizations who are doing good work on the ground with promising programs, but who haven’t had the wherewithal or the resources to develop their own performance-management capacity—let alone one day possibly be able to conduct any kind of external evaluation—because they hadn’t done the internal work to prepare for that and needed the organizational capacity to do both to eventually grow and scale. NPQ: Can you sum up whatPropelNext does, for those readers who may not know? LR: Our program is three years long. We are in the first eighteen-month phase, and right now we have a cohort of fifteen grantees. Each grantee gets a cash grant of up to $200,000 and one-on-one consulting support valued at about $150,000 to $200,000, as well. We also have a set of peer-learning activities to tackle common areas that grantees are struggling with as they sharpen their programs, like creating strong performance-management systems and creating the organizational infrastructure to support this work. We are adding an online platform to help to supplement the learning and keep people connected. Ultimately, our goal is to be responsive to the stage of development that each organization is in. NPQ: So you are using capital to increase impact but in a different way. LR: Yes, I think that people are beginning to play with depth as a scaling concept. Before an organization grows, how do you make sure that its programs have the depth needed to achieve impact? And how do we make sure that program evaluation is such a part of the organizational culture that it informs and guides the work on a daily basis? These are some of the questions we and the grantees are playing with as we do the work. NPQ: It sounds like you are in experimental mode. LR: We still have so many questions. We are only completing the first year of implementation. The project reminds me of that Rilke quote about living the questions patiently, because whatever data you get is generating additional questions. We have a design for PropelNext and we have a set of assumptions, but ultimately our grantees are helping us to test those assumptions. I’ll give you an example. For the second phase, which is the second eighteen months, we originally thought that we would help grantees do business planning. We are spending the first eighteen months helping grantees revisit their theory of change and program design and then helping them align metrics with that revised design. We initially believed that while that work would continue, they would also be in a position to do business planning in the second eighteen months. NPQ: That sounds rational. LR: It sounds very rational, but we know now that 1) the work takes much longer than we anticipated, and 2) it’s not business planning that these grantees need now. Instead, they have to really look at what organizational structures need to be shored up so that what they’ve done programmatically is institutionalized. So now we’re working with grantees, having them give us suggestions for the design for Phase 2, and asking them what they need next. In the end, it is not our timetable to own. It is work we are doing together. We must learn from and with our grantees to be effective and respectful funders in this realm. Our grantees have been incredibly successful in their own rights, and they are confident but not so overconfident as to prevent them from examining and deconstructing their own work. In that process they’re going to make some changes—some of that they’re going to get right and some of that they’re not. But, in the context of raising money, how do people who’ve had a lot success in their communities talk about the fact that they’re willing to rethink some of what they’ve done? This is a dilemma the foundation has to share with our grantees. NPQ: There must be a way to begin to talk about this idea of a constant testing of assumptions as being almost the ideal form of practice. LR: I think that that would be great. It would just open up such innovation and creativity to get us away from this need to produce slam dunks every single time—which, of course, we don’t anyway. I think we all have to try to open up the space for continual learning a little bit.