“Ultimately, great things happen when you leave the old way of doing things behind,” says Arti Freeman, program manager at the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF). Since co-founding an innovative collaborative called Youth Social Infrastructure in 2009, OTF has moved from the role of a typically reactive funder to a hands-on partner in youth engagement.

Responding to what Freeman says grantees were reporting as a gap in the youth sector, OTF partnered with the Laidlaw Foundation and Tides Canada to explore ways of supporting youth engagement and grassroots youth organizing beyond simply giving dollars. After gauging interest among their respective networks, in March 2009 OTF and Laidlaw funded an initial convening of leaders in youth engagement and organizing from across Ontario. The assembled group agreed that a coordinated provincial model was needed to address the gap in youth social infrastructure and to sustain the sector’s recent surge of interest in youth engagement. The meeting led to the birth of the Youth Social Infrastructure (YSI), guided by a fluid core team of, at any time, roughly 10 to 12 youth-led and youth-serving organizations and funders. In May 2010, OTF and Laidlaw funded a second gathering to include a broader range of stakeholders, including policy makers.

For the past two years, the YSI has met, communicated and established clear goals and strategies. They have learned concrete tools regarding hosting, facilitation, participatory leadership and social innovation. In December 2011, Freeman, together with OTF’s senior policy and research analyst, Viola Dessanti published an article explaining what they, as funders, have learned from this innovative process.

For funders or organizations looking to approach large sectoral issues collaboratively, or to tackle fundraising and granting less conventionally, the following key tips, gleaned from Freeman and Dessanti’s experiences, as well as from the perspectives of two participating YSI organizations, should be considered.

Start a conversation

Innovation of this sort cannot begin with a funder’s unilateral initiative, says Freeman. Rather, it can be fostered by engaging stakeholders in frank discussions about issues and looking at possible solutions. “It’s about allowing space for conversations to happen, to allow space for whatever it is that’s going to come out of the conversation to come out of it.”

With the YSI, an initial conversation allowed stakeholders to identify common problems and a core group to claim responsibility for addressing them. “In another setting, you could have a conversation, and what might emerge is a totally different model,” Freeman maintains, stressing that the process must happen organically.

Dessanti adds that it is crucial for funders to listen to what emerges, to “be ready to listen to it, name it and follow it.”

Say the organizations:

Catherine Dyer is project coordinator at The New Mentality, a nonprofit that engages youth and mental health professionals to improve mental health services and reduce stigma around mental illness. Her organization is a member of the core YSI team. Having received funding from both Laidlaw and OTF for programs in the past, The New Mentality was invited to attend the initial gathering in 2009, where Dyer says she was inspired to join the core YSI team.People were encouraged to commit to the YSI however they could, be it “cheerleading” from the sidelines or undertaking direct involvement.

“I found it really meaningful the way in which we were invited to step into that volunteer commitment. I found it to be quite authentic, so I jumped in,” says Dyer. She adds that having an inter-sectoral conversation about youth engagement bolstered her confidence in the work she has been doing. “I had typically only worked with mental health agencies, and the YSI was bringing lots of different types of organizations to the table. I knew that would really help with my work.”

Abe Drennan is coordinator at the Celebrate Youth Movement (CYM), a hub for youth-serving organizations in North Hastings to share resources and collaborate on youth-led projects.

A member of the YSI core team since day one, Drennan says the collaborative is working towards enhancing youth engagement, connecting the sector and creating online platforms for sharing information and networking. He says that conversation has been integral, though now that the ball is rolling, the YSI does not meet to talk at regular intervals, but rather, only when “there’s something we need to do together.” When a particular issue or opportunity is identified, the group chooses whether to call a meeting to address it. “We develop a purpose around the need that the collective identifies.”

Accept unexpected outcomes

Because innovation cannot occur without taking risks, it is inevitable that funders and other stakeholders cannot anticipate where a pioneering initiative will lead. For instance, although the OTF is a core member of the YSI, the foundation has no obligation to award the money to the collaborative, which functions as a fully independent unit. It is possible then, that the work will not lead to a grant.

Dessanti and Freeman emphasize that this is simply part of the process. “You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going, as long as everyone has a shared understanding and shared values — that’s enough to create shared purpose,” says Dessanti.

Both maintain that supporting the YSI collaborative was a big risk for OTF, and that things have remained largely unknown every step of the way. “This kind of funding is incremental, it’s not like, here’s the solution, here’s money for it…we don’t know the solution yet, we just know what our next step is…” says Freeman.

In funding the YSI project piecemeal, Dessanti says OTF adopted an intentional learning method, yielding successful results in the sense that they discovered ways of having greater impact through higher engagement.

After working collectively for more than two years and heading several stakeholder engagement meetings, the YSI has formed a community of practice with a distinct vision and a clear strategy for moving forward.

Invest beyond dollars

When a gap is identified in the sector, organizations and funders alike may benefit from funder support that goes beyond a simple grant. Freeman says that the sector’s recent influx of funding for youth-serving and youth-led groups was not being sustained by appropriate infrastucture; there was no community to provide mentoring, training, advocacy or policy development around youth engagement. It was clear that dollars alone were insufficient.

OTF and Laidlaw have supported YSI gatherings through convening dollars, in-kind support and a grant to initially set up the YSI. “It was really important for us to recognize that…there are tools [other than money] that give leverage for creating impact in communities. Through our knowledge sharing and convening, especially, we can be a catalyst for change.”

Say the organizations:

Dyer says YSI gatherings typically consist of participatory leadership training, networking and planning for future stakeholder meetings. In addition, the YSI is working to develop an evaluation framework by which to first evaluate themselves as a collective, and eventually, to offer to organizers and youth-serving groups to apply as benchmarks to their own work. Dyer says she has already brought tools learned through the YSI back to her own organization.

“The YSI works with tools like the Art of Hosting and World Café to explore barriers to youth engagement, as well as social technologies that allow meetings to occur differently, so when young people are at the table, their voices can be more effectively heard.” Dyer has embedded these practices into a provincial training program that The New Mentality runs for mental health agencies and mental health workers serving youth.

Drennan credits the YSI to connecting him to a larger community and opening up doors for Celebrate Youth Movement. “It was a profound shift for me. I was working up in Bancroft, Ontario, and I didn’t really know until I started to attend these [YSI] gatherings how isolated I was.” The expanded network and hosting methods enabled Drennan to hold a YSI gathering in Bancroft in 2010, organized in part by local youth and attended by 80 delegates from across the province.

“I felt it was important to have a rural voice represented, and to invite people here to actually experience what it’s like for rural youth — to have those important conversations in the context that we live.”

Further, Drennan says as the core team works to complete their OTF grant application using a communal process of review through a public Google document, the skills they have learned over the course of YSI’s evolution are further solidified. “People don’t tend to go off on tangents or hijack a portion of the project — we’re part of a collective, and the more we work together, the more ingrained it becomes.”

Dissolve power structures

A unique element of the YSI initiative is the way in which it seeks to break down traditional power dynamics. While previously roughly 37% of OTF funding had gone towards youth, Freeman says that funding the emergence of YSI and actively engaging in the process — rather than what Dessanti says is a traditional funder dynamic of, “we give the money and we walk away” — has positioned them as a partner with youth. He says that as the YSI evolves, their role becomes more of a supporting one.

Members frequently lend their personal insight, expertise and resources to the collaborative, with funders like OTF and Laidlaw tending to contribute knowledge about evaluation and proposal techniques. “Being a funder doesn’t mean you have the answers…sometimes the youth were mentors to us…it was really give and take.”

Say the organizations:

Drennan says he has been fortunate in that his team at CYM recognizes the broader value of YSI, and has supported his devoting time to work on it. Lately, Drennan has had time to contribute to the grant application, but he acknowledges it can, at times, be tricky to balance YSI projects with his own work.

“When I’ve got the time to put into YSI work, I put it in, and when I don’t, I step out. That’s understood collectively. Sometimes I may be taking on more than someone else, but when I need to step out…I know someone will pick up the slack.”

Dyer says collaborating on equal terms with other members is a meaningful experience, but concedes that the process of trying to mobilize a core group of about 11 on specific issues can be quite slow. “Meeting deadlines is hard.”

Allow for fluidity

One of YSI’s key principles is being completely open and transparent. Core members are able to move in and out of the project depending on time and interest, and the harvests from each meeting are available online.

For OTF, YSI has in part contributed to increased flexibility regarding their granting policy. Previously, OTF only funded groups that were incorporated as a nonprofit or registered as a charity. They have reviewed their application process to allow unincorporated groups or individuals — youth or otherwise — to apply for a grant when it is through a collaborative or a shared platform model.

While fundraising innovation cannot be broken down into a simple formula, it is clear that certain conditions can help pave the way for change. By taking into account the lessons learned by OTF’s Freeman and Dessanti, as well as the impact that YSI has had on various member organizations, it may be possible to apply certain methods to different parts of the sector.

Though the outcome may look extremely different from the YSI, initiating a simple conversation may be all it takes to trigger innovation beyond what any existing funder or group has yet imagined.

Jodie Shupac is a Toronto-based freelance writer. She contributes to a range of publications, covering culture, urban issues, health and the environment.

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