Case Foundation: How did you begin CharityWorks, and why?

Leah Gansler: It began, in 1997 and 1998, when I was volunteering for the Women's Center in Northern Virginia and saw what a tremendous need there was in our community. I came away really wanting to do something.

I didn't want to just volunteer for the same organization every year. I thought that bringing donors and volunteers together and working together to select a different organization each year and then taking that organization to another level -- that would be the way to have an impact.

In September 1999, together with some friends, we came up with the concept of uniting community leaders, volunteers, corporate executives, and philanthropists to help local organizations change lives. The result was CharityWorks -- a high-impact organization creating positive change in the Washington Metropolitan area by helping break the cycle of poverty, enhancing education programs, and enabling families to overcome critical health issues.

Case: What was CharityWorks' first project?

Gansler: Our first grantee was Habitat for Humanity. We chose them because we felt strongly that, since we were a brand new organization ourselves, if we had to explain CharityWorks and we also had to explain the recipient, we were never going to get off the ground.

That first year, we were able to raise enough money to buy 20 plots of land and then build a home. All built by women, by the way.

Case: Was that "built by women" approach intentional?
 
Gansler: Not really. It all started with that core group of friends. All of us wanted to be involved and we were united in the sense that we just wanted to help families and children. That is how we started. Then we created a process.

Case: CharityWorks is proof of how one person's engagement, joined to that of others, can spark even more engagement. Can you briefly explain the impact of CharityWorks?

Gansler: In just seven years, CharityWorks has distributed over $6 million in grants that have been used to -- purchase land for Habitat for Humanity and to build a home for a single mother and her daughter; send 24 youths, from The Orphan Foundation of America, to college for four years; expand Everybody Wins literacy programs to more than 3,600 children each year; increase the impact of an after-school and summer program in Washington, D.C.'s Wards 6 and 7 and provide a safe haven to more than 200 at-risk children; help finance the opening of a second campus for The Maya Angelou Public Charter School; help Heads Up expand and open after-school and summer programs in 10 of the most under-resourced areas in D.C.; expand the Higher Achievement Program and give 500 low-income teens a chance to attend a top academic high school; and help Center City Consortium, a group of 12 schools, provide top elementary and middle school education to 2,400 children in Washington's most distressed neighborhoods.

Case: That's a remarkable list of accomplishments. Let's talk about the CharityWorks process.  It's really quite interesting the way CharityWorks operates, with an advisory board and volunteer board, and the way you go through the granting process. It seems to lead, year after year, to some truly remarkable partnerships.  

Gansler: My husband was very influential in coming up with the advisory board. He felt strongly that we needed to have a group of community leaders that would commit to helping us raise the money we needed in order to have the impact we wanted. We had the volunteers, who would be able to put on the event, to do the work that it took, but we saw that we would have a hard time raising the money to produce the scale and impact we wanted.

What we needed was a group of community leaders and people who had, if you will, the authority to approve money, but who would also be willing to do more than just write a check. We wanted them to help us select the organization every year and raise the money to support the organization. We felt that that way they would buy into it and go the extra step to support the organization.

Case: Well, that brings up an interesting point. You have an advisory board that any nonprofit would envy. You have a great mix of business people and community people, all very smart people, all of whom would be recognized as leaders. Can you talk a little about that? About how you decided what kind of board you needed and how you wanted the board to get engaged.

Gansler: What we wanted was a group of community leaders and people who had the authority to approve money but who would go beyond that.

So it started with people who are my friends. But we also went down the list of all the people and companies who do a lot in the community and we met with them. We met with the CEOs asking them to join our board, and they kept saying, "And you want my money?" Our response was, "No, we want more than your money. We want you to help us raise more money; we want you to get other people involved and bring their efforts to our mission. We also want you to come to a meeting once a year, listen to presentations from community nonprofits, become aware of what is needed in our community, and help us select the right beneficiary every year."

Case: I assume that as a result there is quite a bit of interaction between your board of advisors and your grant applicants. Can you talk a little bit about what you're looking to uncover about an organization and about the community's needs through the grant process?

Gansler: What we do is we have an application for anybody who is a nonprofit and benefits families and children. The first few years, the advisory board was asked to recommend organizations themselves, but after that first year we recognized we needed to open up the process and to learn more in order to find the best organizations.

We were also looking for leadership in those organizations. We seek out worthwhile organizations that are in need and will also be able to benefit from a push, and that would use that push to take the organization to the next level.

Our advisory board, by coming to listen to the final set of presentations, gets very involved with the organizations. In fact, quite a few actually go on the board of the beneficiary, bringing their expertise and commitment with them. The result is we help support organizations in many different ways during the year in which they are our grantee and then beyond.

Case: How do you and your board interact with your grantees through the grant process?

Gansler: We get very involved. Many of our advisory board members will go on the board of our beneficiary, as I said, so we can help them with setting up a development plan or execute on the plan or project we are funding. Really, whatever they need to make sure that the year they are with us is successful.

But we also want to make sure that the organization has everything in place to continue to be successful in the future because we feel very committed to our donors.

We make a promise to our donors that we will make sure the money is used effectively and efficiently. So we do whatever it takes during that whole year. We work with development, helping them come up with a development plan and a development strategy so that the level our process takes them to will be sustained.

Case: How do you decide what organizations are ready for and will most benefit from your support?
    
Gansler: There are three steps. For background, we have two boards -- the advisory board that helps raise the money and does the final selection, and a committee of volunteers that reviews applications.

The first step is having any interested nonprofit serving families and children apply. With some applicants, we start off by discussing any deficiencies there might be in their application or organization and why we are not going to ask them to move on to step two.  

Over the years we've found that the application process -- even if the organization doesn't move forward -- can be good for organizations. It gives them insight into their organization and helps them focus -- in some cases even spurring them to look inside and produce a strategic plan that makes them stronger and better prepared to come back the next year as an applicant.

Once we've made this first review, they move on to step two, doing an oral presentation to our volunteer board. And we have very specific questions    we are looking for information on their leaders, their board, their program information, their achievements, and then we listen to their oral presentations and select five.

Those five then come back and do a second oral presentation focused more on the program that they want CharityWorks to fund. Next, the volunteer board selects three applicants that are invited to come back and present to the advisory board. Finally, the advisory board selects the grantee.

What we find is that by this time the applicants are so strong, their presentations so well thought out, and the ideas so compelling that a lot of our advisory board members are very impressed. It's not unusual for a member of our advisory board to actually come out of a presentation committed to finding ways to support one of the three organizations on their own.

In one recent case, an organization not selected to be CharityWorks' partner received sufficient exposure in front of the advisory board that members of the board contributed over $1 million to help finance their proposed project. (Since the contributions were sent directly to the organization, CharityWorks does not include this amount in the $6 million we have distributed.)

We will do whatever it takes to make sure that our grantees, and even some who are not our grantees, can move on to the next level. Because of the effort the three semifinalists have made, and because of their high quality, even the two who are not selected receive a small share of the money raised that year.

Case: It's refreshing to hear someone talk about doing "whatever it takes" and committing to seeing an organization through hard times as well as simply doing what is needed to make a grant.

Gansler: Well, we believe that once someone is a partner, we need to step up and help them when there are problems or they have issues. Hopefully, our grantees know that they always have a place to come to, to talk through something or a problem or an issue that they might have. We don't abandon them once they are no longer our partner for the year.

Case: What does happen in that year in which someone becomes a CharityWorks partner?

Gansler: Well, one of the things that we also do is we try to get our membership involved with the partner. For the last several years, it has been a school or a school program, and so our volunteers do projects with the children. They become on a first name basis with some of the children and feel a connection to the program, and that helps us in fundraising, because our people are invested and feel the connection.

Case: Do you also focus to any extent on the individual leader within the grantee organization in trying to strengthen their leadership skills? Do you have board members who take a mentoring approach to the individual?

Gansler: We have done some of that. But we have also learned that a high level of leadership is something that needs to be in place before we can make a grant.

Venture Philanthropy Partners, VPP, has helped us a great deal in teaching us what we need to look for in terms of leadership already in place. Without it, it's hard to help an organization move to that next level, which is what we aim for.

Case: So what exactly does an organization need to bring to CharityWorks, other than a good plan and, as you have said, a leader or leaders in place?

Gansler: We are looking for more than just a vision or a visionary. We need to make sure that there is a plan in place to ensure that the organization is ready to thrive and survive, no matter what happens.

Case: Do you mean asking, "What is your succession plan?"
    
Gansler: No. We've never really asked the question directly, but we get to know. We ask the question sometimes during the oral presentations. What we are looking for is more like a strategic "business" plan. The fact is, even in our sixth-year we are still learning. We are learning what we need to ask, and things we need to do so that we can identify more information about more organizations that are at the point where our support can really help. For instance, last year in, 2006, we had fewer applicants that we wanted. What we learned is that our application process was so extensive, and we asked for so much, that smaller organizations had a hard time applying. So we divided the application into two parts. This year, we ended up with about 40 applications, much more like what we were looking for.

Case: What are your goals for CharityWorks? Both your specific goals and your aspirational goals, over the next two, three, five years?

Gansler: We want to continue to help families and children. We also need to take a page out of the playbook we give to our grantees and build a stronger CharityWorks organization.

So we are now in the process of hiring, for the first time, an executive director -- to date all our work has been done by solely volunteers. We'd like for CharityWorks to be more of an institution rather than founder driven. We realize that if we want to become stronger ourselves, we need to institutionalize the organization a little more, but not lose the "volunteer spirit."  Even with a staff person on board, CharityWorks will continue to be directed and driven by volunteers.

Our approach has been that our grantees get all the money we raise. We have not used that money to build a CharityWorks back office. We've focused every year on making sure that the organization we are supporting for that year gets all our attention and is in a position to achieve our shared goals. But, as we try to do more, we also want to make sure that there is somebody here from year to year to do the routine work. We just want to make sure that CharityWorks is in existence in 10 years. And, up until now, we have not had that sustainable infrastructure.  

Case: So that is a practical thing. To want to build a small, lean organization that focuses on making its grantees successful.

Gansler: It is lean -- one person    considering that we are raising almost $2 million a year.
    
Case: Well, beyond helping the families and children, which, as you've said, is your mission, what do you want? Are you looking for CharityWorks to begin disbursing tens of million dollars a year, or are you happy doing one organization each year?

Gansler: We take it one day at a time right now. Last year, we gave away $1.4 million in grants. What we also learned this year is that there are a lot of organizations that cannot use a million dollars. They cannot absorb it -- organizationally. We would be creating chaos, but $10,000 will make a huge difference for them.    
    
So we have just started a smaller grants program. This is the first year, and it will be up to $15,000, where organizations can apply for a small grant. So, if we continue to be successful, we can grow that grant program as well.
 
Case: So, for the future you'll focus on this small grants program and a single beneficiary that gets large, focused funding and all the expertise and volunteer energy you can bring to it.
    
Gansler: Yes, but to be clear, the three organizations that present to the advisory board each year all get something. The second place, the one with the second number of votes, gets $50,000. The other one, the third one, gets $25,000, and the beneficiary gets everything else.

Case: What has been your largest grant to date?
    
Gansler: A $1.2 million grant in 2006, and our goal is to do a little better each year.

As I said, this began as a group of friends having fun but wanting to do good for our community. We used to call it the Four F's: Friends having Fun, eating great Food, and raising Funds to help families and children.

Case: I think a lot of people would like to have that as their motto, no matter what they are doing.

Gansler: I hope so. And you know, not everybody has to have money to be part of CharityWorks. People help by contributing their time, asking friends to look into CharityWorks and considering getting involved. It's a combination, of being lucky enough to put all of that together, which has made us successful.

Case: So what makes CharityWorks different?

Gansler: For donors, CharityWorks represents a safe investment in the community. Before selecting a partner, CharityWorks undertakes extensive due diligence to ensure that contributions are a sound investment in meeting a social need. After an organization is selected, CharityWorks follows up to ensure the funds contributed are used effectively and in accordance with the original proposal.
 
For many organizations, a partnership with CharityWorks is the only way to finance a new project or a dream. For some, applying to become the beneficiary is a catalyst for change. The process requires applicants to review their programs, to implement plans to measure outcomes, to develop a business plan, and to become fiscally responsible.

So maybe the shortest way to say what makes us different is our focus on bringing the right people and right organizations together in the right place at the right time and presenting them with the right opportunity to make a big difference. That and the trust that having done our best and thought big, we and our friends and partners, together, can make that big difference real.