Transcript of Remarks of Carol Thompson Cole, President and CEO, Venture Philanthropy Partners
The Phoenix Project’s
“Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in Virginia” Luncheon
July 25, 2007
Falls Church, Virginia
Good afternoon. Venture Philanthropy Partners is a philanthropic investment organization, and it was founded in 2000 with Governor Warner and technology entrepreneurs Mario Morino and Raul Fernandez. We work with great leaders and social entrepreneurs. They are leaders who want to transform their nonprofit organizations into high performing institutions that can have great impact on the communities in which they work. The VPP approach combines money, expertise and our personal networks for the portfolio organizations that we work with so all of them can improve the lives of children and youth of low income families throughout the Washington metropolitan area.
The challenges that we’ve found have already been spoken to, a shortage of talent and capital. I really want to talk about the kind of strategies that we focus on with the leaders. We really work to help them in terms of getting the capital that they need and provide the expertise in building these organizations. In terms of capital needs, we make sure that they have money that is committed to the organization, to building the organization, because program money is easier to get. We also feel that the expertise has to go really beyond technical assistance and it has to be strategic and that it really transforms the organization and the leadership.
In terms of the financial support, we want to make sure that it is long term, and it is something that doesn’t get renewed or not in a twelve month period. So that’s why the focus of VPP is on helping the leaders build strong boards, great management teams, develop business plans with clear goals and roadmaps to move forward with the work, and create systems to measure organizational accomplishments and outcomes. We want to make sure that they go beyond the anecdotal information that pulls at heartstrings and really have measurable results.
We work with the organizations on becoming fiscally accountable and increasing their financial sustainability. And we do this by multi-year commitments that are based on successful achievement of mutually agreed to milestones. It’s really not just applying business principles to an organization, but really working with them on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis on transformation. So for those of who that want to be social entrepreneurs, it’s the combination of leadership and management principles appropriately applied within the context of the nonprofit sector, the field of work, and the community in which the organization is working, that makes you successful.
I’d like to give you some examples of some evidence that we have of this working in this region. For example, there is the Child and Family Network Center that prepares children in Alexandria and Arlington in the poorest neighborhoods for kindergarten at eleven classrooms. The Center for Multicultural Human Services, which is in Falls Church, provides a range of mental health, social and educational services to immigrants and refugees in more than 30 languages, and they train practitioners throughout this country on culturally sensitive approaches. And then you have a leader like Maria Gomez with Mary’s Center who started an organization seventeen years ago in a cramped basement. As a nurse, she saw that people were not getting the kind of services that they needed, and now that has grown to a federally qualified health center serving more than 7,000 children and 14,000 clients overall and is growing.
So with VPP, we have twelve organizations led by social entrepreneurs that serve almost 45,000 children and youth in the region, and 17% of those are in Virginia.
[End of Transcript]