What staying actually looks like
Unity Care nearly didn’t make it.
The Californian foster youth organisation had grown from a single foster home with five boys to 23 programs, 200 staff, and $20 million in annual revenue. By 2019, the organisation was operating at full stretch. Then they overextended into a state program they weren’t resourced to deliver. Their provisional license wasn’t renewed. A newspaper article was damning. And the CEO, André Chapman, stood up in public and said: we simply failed.
What happened next is the part most funding relationships would never have survived.
Unity Care was already part of PropelNext, a three-year intensive capacity-building program implemented by Learning for Action and incubated by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, with co-investment from the Hewlett, Packard, Sobrato, and Heising-Simons foundations. The program combined unrestricted funding with expert coaching, peer learning, and data systems support, and was independently evaluated by Engage R+D. When the crisis hit, the funders faced a choice. They could protect themselves, cite the organisation’s failure, pull the grants, and move on.
But they stayed. They required an improvement plan, held the organisation to genuine commitments, and kept the relationship intact.
Most funding relationships are structured around the funder’s need for assurance: reports, milestones, deliverables. When things go wrong, that structure collapses, because it was never really built on trust. PropelNext was different. The accountability was real and demanding. But the relationship held precisely because it had been built on something more than compliance.
“The people we worked with at PropelNext gave very, very clear direction and they held the organisation accountable to it. But at the same time, no one ever felt like the people at PropelNext weren’t in the organisation’s corner.”– Unity Care board member, quoted in Engage R+D case study, 2021
By 2020, Unity Care had gone from 23 programs to three, from 200 staff to 50, from $20 million to $5 million in annual budget. And yet, by every account they emerged stronger, clearer, and more impactful. The theory of change framework PropelNext provided didn’t sit in a drawer as a compliance document. It became the live instrument through which the organisation decided what to stop, what to double down on, and what to hand over to a better-placed partner.
The evaluation identifies three things that made the difference: adaptive leadership willing to name failure publicly; genuine organisational realignment around core strengths; and funders prepared to sit with uncertainty rather than exit when things got hard.
Learning as infrastructure, not simply reporting
PropelNext didn’t ask Unity Care to report on learning. It built the capacity to learn: a Learning Culture Survey, data dashboards co-designed with staff, peer cohort sessions, coaches who stayed in relationship across the whole program.
The distinction between learning as infrastructure and learning as reporting is everything. Most funders say they want learning organisations. But the structures we typically build work against the conditions that make genuine learning possible, including the safety to say out loud: We got this wrong.
“Navigating a crisis shouldn’t be about survival but about how we come out on the other side. What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before? And that question applies equally to when you win the lottery or when you are evicted.”– PropelNext coach, quoted in Engage R+D case study, 2021
That question doesn’t only belong in times of boom or bust. It belongs in every funding conversation, from the very beginning.
When the theory is the problem
There’s a version of this that plays out here in funder-grantee relationships, and it rarely gets named. A funder holds a theory of how change happens and they fund organisations that can fit that theory. When the theory doesn’t hold up on the ground, the default assumption is usually that the organisation failed to deliver, not that the theory was wrong or should be adapted.
As outlined in Shaping & Fuelling Change, the new report on philanthropy’s role in Australia’s social enterprise ecosystem, for years, one of the working assumptions behind social enterprise funding was that a good enterprise should become self-sustaining through trade, with funding treated as short-term help to get there. But then COVID tested the assumption.
Work Integration Social Enterprises, or WISEs, create jobs for people shut out of mainstream employment, and carry costs most employers don’t: training, mentoring and wraparound support built into every role. COVID exposed how vulnerable that made them. Once they couldn’t absorb those costs any longer, the assumption that they should simply become self-sustaining through trade didn’t hold. A group of funders and intermediaries, including Westpac Foundation, White Box Enterprises and Social Enterprise Australia, formed the WISE Hub in response, to advocate for governments to fund the impact costs these enterprises had been absorbing alone.
Now, that’s a version of staying.
Funders who stay when they could leave usually don’t make the news. What happened at Unity Care didn’t turn on a single dramatic moment: not the public admission of failure, or the decision to downsize by 75%. It accumulated. A CEO was willing to stand up. Funders were willing to stay in the room. A coach kept asking: so what’s possible now? Together these actions were necessary for this organisation to evolve to be smaller, more focused, and serve young people more effectively.
Unity Care and the WISE Hub represent the same choice: stay long enough to question the theory before questioning the organisation in front of you.
This blog is part of our continuing series What the Evidence, Expertise and Experience Says. Written by May Miller-Dawkins and Jo Taylor, edited by Courtney Collins.
Image: Wykymania, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons