Nesting to Achieve Impact: Lessons for Family Funders from the Annie E. Casey Foundation

(Published by the National Center for Family Philanthropy)

Family funders are regularly seeking opportunities to amplify their impact in the communities in which they live, work, and serve. Although they may not always have the scale or scope of larger national foundations, all family funders can still draw many lessons from larger funders about how to anchor their giving at the community level.

TCC Group evaluated the Anne E. Casey Foundation’s Family-Centered Community Change™ (FCCC) initiative, a long-term effort to support local partnerships in high-poverty neighborhoods across the country. This work was intended to shift local anti-poverty programming from working with adults and youth separately to focusing specifically on families. FCCC aimed to create a family-centric lens across organizations working in a given community, so that any organization that worked with a given family could share data and understand what was happening with the family as a unit. Our findings are summarized in a recent report, “Innovating Place-Based Grantmaking: An Evaluation of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Strategic Co-Investor Approach.”

Although Casey’s scope is national, the lessons we learned about this approach—and specifically, about “nesting” investments within existing community infrastructure—are valuable for any family funder seeking to amplify the impact of their giving. Watch our video Q&A with the Casey Foundation about lessons learned from the Strategic Co-Investor Approach.

Read more on the NCFP website.