In early April, Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger grabbed the attention of sector organizations by announcing his province was set to provide “stable funding and less red tape” for nonprofits.
He’s beginning by launching a two-year pilot project designed to evaluate and establish the best methods to provide one-stop government funding.
It’s been more than a month since that announcement and 35 Manitoba nonprofits have now been chosen to participate in the project. The aim is for both the sector and the government to learn how the grant application process can be streamlined through government and figure out how nonprofits can be released from onerous administrative processes to better focus on their missions.
The master plan
In an April 8 release, the province laid out its “four-point” strategy for this project:
- Piloting multi-year, multi-program funding with a representative group of nonprofits with proven track records of success. Additional groups will be added after the pilot is evaluated.
- Launching a single-window application process with a target of spring 2012 for an online nonprofit web portal.
- Eliminating duplication in reporting requirements for organizations dealing with multiple provincial programs while strengthening accountability standards.
- Helping organizations save money by sharing services such as legal, human resources and accounting functions with other organizations.
While all the objectives are laudable, it’s the single application process that has many in the sector excited at the prospect of eliminating redundant application processes that eat up time and money.
Speaking to CharityVillage® last week, Kerri Irvin-Ross, Manitoba’s minister of housing and community development — the ministry charged with implementing the project — said her government was fully committed to the initiative.
“We rely a lot on nonprofits to deliver all sorts of services…and we’ve met with these groups. They’ve talked to us about the burden of red tape, whether it’s applying for grant funding or doing evaluations,” she said. “There’s no streamlined service to ensure that they are giving us the information. [Nonprofits] were telling us that rather than spending time working on the front lines [in the communities], they were chasing finances.”
Irvin-Ross said that because of this, the idea to implement multiple-year funding arrangements with nonprofits became more appealing to her government.
“This could allow nonprofits to better deliver their services,” she said, adding that while the government is committed to this pilot project, there are still more than 500 nonprofits in Manitoba, and not all will benefit from the pilot project in the short term.
“We need to start with the smaller sample and figure out a way to best deliver services to them. Then we will roll it out to the broader province.”
Irvin-Ross said her ministry is now in the phase of meeting with the selected nonprofits to be in on the pilot and of “understanding where they get their financing.”
It’s an art
One of the nonprofits selected is Winnipeg-based Art City, a nonprofit community centre dedicated to providing free art programs to its clients.
Cam Forbes, executive director for Art City, said she relishes the opportunity to help her organization — and by extension other colleagues in the sector — by providing input to the government about the hurdles she faces yearly in her grant application processes.
“Currently Art City applies to over 25 project grants a year to sustain our programs. This funding model creates an unnecessary amount of administration expense and strain on our organization,” Forbes said. She adds that her organization relies on five of these grants to come from the province. “So if Manitoba’s initiative is successful it will help increase our sustainability. We will be able to plan better and use a larger amount of our budget on programming rather than administration.”
However, she adds, the reality is still that at all levels of government, and within private funding programs, the trend is “to fund as many initiatives as possible on a small level. This project-funding model helps serve the funders own strategic reporting statistics, more than it helps the community it is meant to serve.”
If the Manitoba initiative is successful, it would hopefully lead to funding bodies “working together to provide real and sustained investment in the communities, through a new collaborative model,” Forbes says. Hopefully, this would lead to funders pooling their resources so that “community organizations can apply to one centre for their core programming strategies, rather than to 25-plus small funding initiatives.”
The savings could be enormous, she says, and would allow nonprofits to plan out longer term strategies to best serve their communities.
The federation weighs in
Martin Itzkow, a founder of the Manitoba Federation of Non-Profit Organizations, said he is pleased at the direction the province is going but cautioned there was still a lot of work to be done and much to be overseen.
“To have a universal application is a brilliant move,” he said.”This means that internally, and across various [governmental departments] they will have to adapt their systems and understand what is required. Ultimately, it means the government wants to make an application system that is as simple as possible and less onerous [than it currently is].”
Itzkow acknowledged that his federation is helping the government make some decisions on whom to involve in the project and indicated that his organization intends to hold the province’s feet to the fire on promises made for this initiative.
It’s all about accountability and putting effective processes in place, he insists. And looking forward, Itzkow realizes that there’s a provincial election scheduled for October, potentially jeopardizing the plan if the government changes.
“We want to actually see the plan and get the exact metrics the government wants to use on how best to evaluate” the success of the project, he said. “But as of now, we’re still waiting to find out which departments will be involved in the project and who the main players will be and then how sector organizations will learn from this. [The election is] an issue for us too. How do we ensure that there is some crossover to the next government if it changes?”
Irvin-Ross has been liaising with Itzkow and various sector organizations since the announcement.
Itzkow said he and others are currently working out an agenda with the minister to figure out when, where and how often they will be meeting to move this item forward.
But if that’s the case, it was news to Forbes last week.
Aside from knowing Art City was chosen for the project, Forbes said she has not “heard anything more thus far on how the initiative will unfold. The province has not been in contact with us yet.”
Savings all around
While there are no quantifiable data available as far as how much time and money the province’s sector stands to save via this project, Itzkow believes it will be an “amazing” amount, if done right.
“Think about this going forward,” he enthuses. “If there’s a project that has 10 funders within the province of Manitoba, just think about the amount of time it takes for an application to be drafted. I’m thinking [there will be] incredible hours [of savings] on both sides of this process. More importantly, the stress of organizations in terms of reporting back…this will save incredible time and anxiety so that organizations can focus on their work. This will be a tremendous saving for boards and for staff.”
Again, that’s “if” this is all done in a manner that makes pragmatic sense.
Itzkow cautions that if the province wants to create a universal application for nonprofits, that it should go the full 10 yards and make it “as simple as possible and as universal as possible.”
In addition, he says that whichever internal governmental mechanism is chosen to administer this application for the province, it should know how to use this new system and be able to “make judgments and decisions quickly on grant applications.” Otherwise, the whole process is for naught.
“On the other side, when organizations receive the money, they need to know how to report back…so that it satisfies the needs of every governmental department as well as their own,” he says. “What I understand is that there will be one lead department that will accept the report and then will be responsible to report out to the other funders internally.”
On this point Irvin-Ross echoes Itzkow, saying that her ministry intends to streamline application processes both for nonprofits and for the governmental departments involved in funding them.
“We need to sit down as an interdepartmental group and understand how we best fund nonprofits and make sure we make a commitment to that funding for multiple years,” she said.
A potential national third sector boon
While all parties involved agree that it’s still early days in the consulting and planning phase of this project, the minister notes that if all goes well, 2012 could represent the dawn of a new, simplified funding application process for Manitoba’s nonprofits, one that could eventually transcend the boundaries of the province and impact others.
Irvin-Ross believes her province is on a “pioneering” path with its plan to cut the sector’s red tape and looks forward to sharing what it learns with the rest of the country. She said at this moment, she is unaware of any other province testing out similar strategies to help out their nonprofit sector organizations.
“Once this project is underway and if proven successful, Manitoba will be open to consult with other provinces on it and offer its experience for those who want to do the same thing. As we proceed, we will be more than willing to share [our results] with any other jurisdiction,” she said.
Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.
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