In 2005, Nancy Roob became president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF). She has since played a major role in developing and implementing a grantmaking strategy of large, long-term investment in the capacity and proof points of nonprofits that have the potential to improve the lives of America’s most disadvantaged youth. She pioneered a coordinated form of funding that to date has engaged 45 co-investors, pledging nearly $279 million to help 16 grantees.

Katie Smith Milway: What are the philanthropic aims of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation? 

Nancy Roob: For the past 13 years, we have concentrated on trying to help economically disadvantaged youth in the United States become successful adults. We do this by investing in and trying to expand the pool of organizations with evidence-based programs that help these vulnerable kids get an education, get a job, and stay out of trouble.

Our grants are somewhat unusual, in that they are pretty big bets—generally ranging from $5 to $15 million over 3 years—and they are not restricted to delivering services. That is to say, a grantee can use the money to build organizational capacity or infrastructure, undertake a rigorous evaluation—anything the grantee is confident will help it grow, improve the quality of its programs, and sustain them on a larger scale. While our funds are unrestricted, payout is tied to performance metrics that grantees set in collaboration with us.

EMCF has been a pioneer in aggregating huge sums of funding to address a given issue. What led you to this strategy?
Gradually we began to feel frustrated with the slow progress grantees were able to make toward realizing their full potential, even though they offered our nation a solution to pressing social challenges—they were serving more kids, but they did not have enough capital on hand to reach more than a small percentage of those who could benefit from their programs. We invested heavily in Youth Villages, for example. Our $6 million grant helped it expand its innovative approach to serving troubled youth and strengthening families across the state of Tennessee, achieving a long-term success rate twice that of conventional programs, and at one-third of the cost. But still it was benefiting kids mainly in Tennessee.

As big as our bets seemed at the time, they weren’t big enough to propel even the highest-performing nonprofits to scale. To do that, we realized, would take more resources than we, or any single funder, could possibly muster.

So in 2007 we launched what we called the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot (GCAP) and helped raise, with 19 other funders, $120 million—$39 million of this from EMCF—to support Youth Villages and two other outstanding grantees: Citizen Schools and Nurse-Family Partnership.

Read the full article about aggregated funds by Katie Smith Milway at Stanford Social Innovation Review.