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On Wednesday, Aug. 26, the Samueli Foundation notified 44 nonprofit leaders involved in 10 different projects that their groups will be getting grants through the foundation’s newest charitable giving program: OC+ Fund .
Those numbers – 44 groups and 10 projects – tell a two-part story. Part one is about the Samueli Foundation’s latest foray into open-call philanthropy.
Over the past two years, the foundation has backed two separate “ Breakaway ” funds, giving money to dozens of nonprofits to cover things that other donors might not finance – such as accounting services or new office equipment.
The wishes might’ve seemed mundane, but several nonprofit leaders have said Breakaway checks helped their organizations stay open and even grow.
The foundation also has offered one round of financing for a much smaller world of nonprofits working on real estate projects, a fund called “Build OC.” The newest fund, OC+ – the one going to 44 nonprofits working on just 10 projects – is the first to try to leverage the idea that innovation can come when lots of brains are focused on a single question or idea.
“Philanthropic capital is the greatest and last best risk capital we have in this countr y. We have to take big swings here,” said Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Family Philanthropies.
“No one else is trying to support collaboration at scale. So why wouldn’t we try it?
Why not us?” Nonprofits are being forced to evolve, sometimes at hyperspeed and not always happily, during an era when federal politics and the end of emergency pandemic spending have meant less money for charity.
Yet, even as money has gone away, the economy – particularly years of persistently high inflation and, more recently, a sluggish job market – has driven up demand for a lot of what nonprofits provide, including basics like food and shelter.
Those headwinds are prompting consolidation or closure for some of Orange County’s roughly 9,000 active nonprofits. For others, it’s meant collaboration.
In all, foundation officials said the first-ever OC+ Fund, financed by Anaheim Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli, will distribute nearly $5 million to finance a range of collaborative projects.
Breastfeeding programs, software for nonprofits, streamlined legal aid for lower-income clients; all are among the ideas being executed in a fashion that is starting to emerge in the nonprofit world – w orking in tandem.
“The idea that nonprofits don’t like to work together is a myth, I think,” Spindle said. “But they haven’t had funding for collaborative projects.
That’s part of why we chose to do this.” In the weeks after the foundation announced it would finance collaborative projects, earlier this year, Spindle said her organization received applications from 265 partnerships involving 758 different groups.
Collectively, those groups were seeking $94 million, and more than half (56%) of the projects they wanted to pull off were already in development. That suggests a lot of nonprofits already were banding together, or at least trying to, before the OC+ funding scheme was announced.
Though nonprofit leaders and workers tend to share core values – ranking the desire to help others over, say, the desire to drive a Maserati – they haven’t, historically, worked together.
Everything from geography to financing to ego can make it tricky for nonprofits to collaborate, even among groups that vehemently agree on specific goals. Also, as Spindle suggested, funding for such work historically has been rare.
Now, that’s changing.
In April, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles issued a repo rt, “Unlocking the Power of Sustained Collaboration: A Guide for Nonprofits,” that detailed why and how charities are starting to work together while maintaining separate leadership, donor lists and mission statements.
And some of the nonprofit leaders contacted Wednesday said they’ve been working collaboratively, or trying to, for some time.
Kate Marr, executive director of Community Legal Aid SoCal, the lead nonprofit for a project funded Wednesday that will streamline legal aid services for lower-income clients in Orange County, said her five-organization partnership got started as a result of a 2023 photo shoot.
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