The Forbes Funds

I am applying to The Elevate Prize as President and CEO of The Forbes Funds, a philanthropic organization in Pittsburgh that builds the capacity of our local nonprofits to serve the community. If selected as the winner, I will use the Elevate Prize funding and support to cultivate an intergenerational regenerative ecosystem that targets transition points within the Social Determinants of Health and Equity platform. Building on our existing “Just Practices”, the resources would help foster Transformational Leadership cohorts that work collaboratively to cultivate leaders who are agile, iterative, and inventive in their approach to community solutions. The Forbes Funds integrates learning cohorts and collaborative learning for local nonprofits throughout our ecosystem and believes wholeheartedly in the power of the collective to create change. Mentorship and cohorts provided through The Elevate Prize would allow us to share our work with other likeminded innovators and learn from them, creating a transnational network that we believe will create impact new ecosystems. We see and hear firsthand how these types of relationships result in catalytic community change; the advantage of the support provided by the Elevate Prize is that it would elevate our work and create more opportunities for impact across the sector

I am a product of the public school system in Pittsburgh. Today that system is confronted by a myriad of challenges that limit academic success for students and families residing in resilient communities, challenges that have existed for generations and have been exacerbated by the pandemic. For over forty years, philanthropy has fostered a single point of contact approach to solving social phenomena, often taking on the roles of local government to address social issues. This shift has placed new complexity within the nonprofit sector requiring a need to explore new pathways of problem-solving approaches.

My vision is to reimagine new community futures through a racial equity lens using existing community assets and grassroots co-creation models driven by deliberative democracy. COVID has decoupled traditional nonprofit standalone practices, forcing all organizations and institutions to reconsider their purpose. Reduced and limited resources are requiring the sector to explore succession planning, strategic collaborations, and alternative platforms to diversify fundraising. This need looks different in BIPOC led organizations and institutions. Our goal is to build culturally competent cross-sector cohorts that address key indicators of wellness through a racial equity lens, fostering more culturally relevant responses that are authentic, regenerative, and intergenerational.

Pittsburgh has always had a high number of nonprofits for a city of its size, almost 13 nonprofits per person, which often results in overlap in missions and populations served, as well as increased competition for funding dollars from local foundations. We also know from our Needs Assessment that many nonprofits are operating with limited capacity across four key indicators – leadership, adaptive, organizational, and management. Thus, we have identified a critical need for nonprofits to increase their individual and joint capacity to better serve their communities.

The Forbes Funds is addressing this by increasing the effectiveness of individuals, groups, and human service and community-based organizations in an inclusive, collaborative, and thoughtful manner. Our work focuses on building the capacity of individuals to lead through our collaborative and place-based grantmaking programs; through our executive coaching and learning cohorts; and through our community engagement programming that focuses on addressing critical issues of our time, like anti-racism, Black equity, and artificial intelligence innovations in the nonprofit sector. Through this ecosystem, we are building the capacity of leaders, particularly leaders of color, female leaders, and other marginalized leaders, to serve their communities in a way that is more inclusive, collaborative, and innovative.

Our work is innovative because we are creating a supportive ecosystem that promotes strategic alignment and impact investing strategies, which requires new thinking and the use of technologies that concurrently preserve the consciousness of the community. Over the last thirty-eight months, The Forbes Funds has been successful in optimizing existing resources to create more effective and efficient delivery systems.

Central to our mission are our key tenets: that we convene partners, coordinate, and build capacity. We help nonprofits convene, through our Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership; through our learning cohorts, and through our weekly Calls for Community Solutions. We coordinate partners with similar missions or who are working in the same neighborhood through our collaborative and place-based grantmaking programs. These grants provide support for strategic planning and capacity building to encourage nonprofits to explore how they can work together and better serve their target population. We believe that by empowering community-based nonprofits and human service organizations to explore potentials for partnership we can help increase their impact on our community. We also frame all our work through a racial equity lens because we know that Black Pittsburgh has historically been left out of these capacity building efforts and conversations. 

Our work is impacting humanity because we are empowering a new generation of community leaders who are agile, iterative, and inventive. These leaders learn through our cohorts and community forums how to align strategies across communities and sectors with other organizations and leverage their comparative strengths for maximum impact in their community. Our model of investing in leaders produces $7 of capacity building resources for every dollar that we invest, amplifying the value of funder dollars. All our work is filtered through our racial equity lens, ensuring that our largest impacts and investments are in resilient communities that have historically been marginalized by foundation leadership in Pittsburgh.

Our 2018 pivot under my leadership moved us from investing in systems change to ecosystem cocreation which uses a human centered design approach and prioritizes investing in leadership and individuals to drive community and organizational change. This paradigm shift enabled our organization to make our grant-making more than money, adopting more diverse approaches to broaden our reach while concurrently deepening our impact. We are working with communities to provide them the resources and training that they need to collectively identify and solve their own unique problems.