By: Marci Lu, Senior Program Officer
The William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Foundation believes in the transformative power of a whole-family approach to uplift those caught in the cycle of generational poverty.
“Narrow strategies invariably stumble against the complexity of the world.”
– Jacob Harold, The Toolbox
In 2018, the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Foundation (Foundation) launched a two-generation (2Gen) Deep Impact Grantmaking strategy to promote intergenerational family prosperity and well-being. The 2Gen or whole-family approach recognizes that the futures of children and parents are intertwined – when every family member is stable, healthy and supported, the entire family thrives.
Our 2Gen journey began after a year of listening to our community partners. They told us that families facing complex issues needed holistic services, but the systems and financial incentives for supporting adults and children were siloed. Most programs and funding streams were structured to address individual needs, rather than the family as a unit.
Our listening sessions fueled our interest in 2Gen as a commonsense strategy, but it also gave us pause. Could we, a smaller family foundation, step into this space and have an impact? Funders, not surprisingly, are often hesitant to take on complex, intersectional work. It doesn’t fit neatly into one grantmaking program and it requires re-aligning systems, which is not quick fix work.
The good news—which we hope will resonate with our philanthropic peers—is we discovered there is a place for all types of funders to successfully fuel 2Gen approaches. This is true even for smaller, remote operations like ours that spread limited dollars across multiple locations.
Even though we fund in many places, we are not a place-based funder. We knew we didn’t have the luxury of concentrating our capital on just one community to engage deeply with its entire family-serving ecosystem. Instead, we told ourselves that we’d plant a lot of seeds and learn together with our grantee partners about what works.
We began the work with intention, purposely offering flexible, multi-year funding with supports beyond the check to organizations who were committed to designing or deepening a whole-family approach.
Our grantee partners used the flexible funding as critical philanthropic “risk” capital to test new ideas and innovations. They told us, frequently, the long-term investment was also key to their success.
Together we learned that shifting organizational culture and systems takes more time than expected, even without the added challenges of a global pandemic that disrupted plans and required hard pivots.
Funders interested in getting to 2Gen outcomes need to be patient and ensure the following elements are in place:
“One noteworthy accomplishment is the reduction of silos within our programming, ensuring that all clients have seamless access to our services through our No Wrong Door approach. This commitment signifies a transformative shift in how The Centers deliver services, moving away from traditional compartmentalization toward an integrated experience for clients, regardless of their entry point into our continuum of care.”
Through the receipt of planning and implementation grants, The Centers, located in Cleveland, OH, has transformed its intake process, designed a tracking system, and implemented several programs that address the needs of multiple generations. The Centers used Foundation funds to:
This robust 2Gen approach includes meaningful changes in organizational processes, which are linked to improved outcomes for clients.
In terms of financial capital, the Foundation provided a mix of planning, implementation, and continuation grants. Planning grants, when needed, proved very helpful to enhance impact.
“The planning grant allowed our team to thoroughly explore evidence-based program models, select a model that fits our needs, and position ourselves for success.”
After a comprehensive planning process, the UH Rainbow Ahuja Center for Women & Children is implementing the first HealthySteps site in Northeast Ohio, providing support to families where they are most likely to access it – the pediatrician’s office.
Having resources for planning enabled UH to temporarily reassign doctors and hospital staff from billable care to form an interdisciplinary team. This team met biweekly to develop a vision and work plan for onsite dyadic care. A well-developed plan helped attract additional funding, which, combined with an O’Neill Foundation implementation grant, is now supporting the expansion of the HealthySteps model from pilot clinicians to all physicians in the practice.
The integration of the model into existing workflows has been relatively seamless, thanks to pre-launch planning efforts that established clear communication channels and defined staff roles and responsibilities. The 2Gen program has exceeded expectations by screening patients for child development, maternal depression, and family social needs. It also provides guidance and connects families to mental health services, home visiting programs, food assistance, and WIC.
From the start, we engaged leading experts in the 2Gen field and aligned our strategy with the 2Gen framework of Ascend at the Aspen Institute. This framework is guided by 5 core principles:
These guiding principles provided a unifying thread across our diverse portfolio of grants, encompassing 20 different 2Gen approaches in six states. Our grantee partners, including single agencies and multiagency partnerships, supported families in various settings such as hospitals, affordable housing, and neighborhood centers. Understanding how our grantee partners put these principles into practice allowed us to learn, track progress and identify areas where additional support was needed.
Along with providing financial capital, we aimed to nurture the intellectual and social capital necessary for adopting 2Gen best practices. To this end, we organized a 2Gen Learning Community, open to grantees and their community partners. This group met periodically, engaging with field experts and each other to build the knowledge and networks needed to accelerate learning across communities. Additionally, the Foundation provided annual funding to Ascend at the Aspen Institute to advance its national and state level field-building efforts to create broad-scale lasting change.
We learned alongside our partners, working through challenges and celebrating successes together. We listened to families and heard what mattered most to them. Despite our relational approach to grantmaking, aggregating the non-linear, individualized progress of families across a diverse portfolio of grants was tricky. Foundation staff experimented with various ways to package progress and insights. We combined data and storytelling, created detailed annual dashboards, and funded 2Gen videos to help grantees partners amplify their stories.
Eventually, we sought an impartial assessment, contracting with the evaluation firm James Bell Associates (JBA) to clarify our learnings and impact, and to inform next steps. We are excited to share JBA’s final report and a highlights brief, which affirmed that our strategy was influential in shifting organizational mindsets and helping establish 2Gen approaches across communities with positive impacts on organizations, systems and families. Among the many outcomes, the top changes included:
Rutland County Parent-Child Center and Sunrise Family Resource Center used Foundation funds to develop, pilot, and implement a new approach to streamlining services that elevates family voice and helps families build social capital. It brings family members and their navigators, or service providers, together for a meal once a month to build and strengthen relationships, connect families to community resources, and gather family feedback on organizational policies and practices. Rutland’s and Sunrise’s focus on parent leadership has informed new approaches to working with families, in which family members feel like they’re on more of an equal playing ground and have something to offer. Service providers have also created connections across local agencies and report improved job satisfaction and client engagement.
One of the most exciting outcomes has been the unlocking of intellectual, human and social capital, creating long-term ripple effects beyond the grant dollars. Seven years later, we can point to a community of early adopters and true believers committed to whole-family approaches rather than siloed programming. We are incredibly proud of the persistence of our grantee partners and the families they serve. As one partner aptly put it, “We’re now looking at the whole family versus the whole person.”
The Foundation’s Deep Impact Grantmaking Committee, which oversees our 2Gen strategy, is currently reviewing the recommendations from the JBA study. We plan to incorporate the findings to take our work to the next level, likely with a sharper focus and fewer partners, for even greater impact. We are excited to potentially double down, for instance, on the 2Gen principle of elevating family voice, dignity and agency within a 2Gen approach, and impacting systems change to benefit more people.
About the Deep Impact Grantmaking Committee
The Deep Impact Grantmaking (DIG) Committee is comprised of more than a dozen O’Neill family members who work together across generations, geographies, and family branches to ensure comprehensive support for families. In partnership with the Foundation’s staff, O’Neill family members enjoy learning alongside their 2Gen grantee partners who are integrating child and adult programs and building cross-agency collaborations to create opportunities for economic mobility and family well-being Each initiative is tailored to the specific needs of the community and emphasizes the importance of family involvement in creating solutions that remove access obstacles, broaden services, and enhance social connections.
