Improving the City of Denver by Encouraging Nonprofit Collaboratives

Denver, CO

The Opportunity: Forging Connections among Organizations in a State with One of the Largest Nonprofit Sectors Per Capita 

Shortly after taking office in 2003, Mayor John Hickenlooper founded the Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships (DOSP), utilizing his nonprofit background to bring much-needed changes to the City. With a $70 million budget deficit, the city government knew it would have to enlist the help of its nonprofit sector, which ranks tenth in per capita size out of the nation’s 50 largest cities . There are about 12,000 nonprofit organizations in the Denver Metro area. The DOSP forges public-private partnerships, connecting nonprofit and city agencies to reach more people and make the city more competitive in accessing federal funds. Since the office’s inception, DOSP director Mike Roque has overseen these initiatives, constantly adapting and improving them based on new ideas and best practices from similar offices throughout the country.

Public Innovation in Action: Encouraging Collaboratives as a Means of Reaching More Constituents and Receiving More Federal Funding

One of the key objectives of the DOSP is to teach nonprofits and city agencies to work together. The office strives to move organizations away from the mindset that resources are finite. Roque explains: “By working together, the pie gets bigger for everybody.”

The City has maintained a contract with a grantwriting firm as a way to increase city agencies’ ability to apply for competitive federal and national foundation grants. The DOSP took over managing the grantwriting contract about four years ago and expanded it to work with nonprofit organizations and private-public partnerships. The DOSP created a cohort of six City agencies and ten nonprofit organizations to build internal capacity and make them more competitive in seeking Federal grants. The office has also built several collaboratives of like-minded nonprofits to increase their impact in the following key issue areas for the city: supporting at-risk youth, preventing teen pregnancy, expanding affordable housing, and improving energy efficiency. Through these collaboratives, the participating organizations identify common challenges, resource inefficiencies, and potential ways services can be combined to form comprehensive programs for the community.

Another key to the office’s success is its workshops. For city agencies, the DOSP offers issue briefings and trainings on working with nonprofits. Nonprofits can take workshops that explain key city agencies, teach them to work with these agencies, and build capacity to contract with the city. In addition, the DOSP provides energy efficiency workshops and hopes to encourage the creation of multi-tenant nonprofit centers. Both initiatives aim to decrease nonprofit operating costs so that the organizations can provide more and better services to additional people.

The Results:

A number of the biggest successes of the DOSP have resulted from its issue-based collaboratives. The DOSP’s Youth Mentoring Collaborative (YMC), which focuses on at-risk youth, identified resource inefficiencies and overlapping services, increasing the number of youth served by 25 percent, while decreasing the annual cost per youth by $400. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Partnership (DTPPP) consists of nine nonprofits and city agencies, which have teamed up to run a comprehensive teen pregnancy prevention pilot program in three at-risk schools. More recent collaboratives include the Denver Transit Oriented Development Fund (TOD), which will provide 1,000 new affordable housing units in transit corridors, and the Neighborhood Energy Action Partnership (NEAP), which educates neighborhoods about and provide energy saving upgrades to homes. Each of these collaboratives combined resources from several nonprofit organizations and city agencies to bring more comprehensive service to communities in need.

The DOSP has also succeeded in bringing in a significant increase in competitive grants. The City of Denver and local nonprofits received $17 million from 52 federal agency and national foundation grant proposals in 2008, up from just three grants totaling $250,000 four years ago. This funding surge is a direct result of building internal capacity in both City agencies and nonprofit organizations, doing a better job of researching and writing grant proposals, and encouraging collaborative grant seeking efforts between City agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Keys to Success:

• Be prepared to invest the time to make collaboration work. “People under-estimate the amount of time that it takes to collaborate,” Roque explains. It is important to recognize that collaborating will require time and effort, but the large potential payoff often makes that time worthwhile.

• Focus on training collaborators outside of government to navigate red tape. There’s no denying that working with government often requires navigating bureaucratic processes. The DOSP is realistic about these challenges and dedicates resources to introducing nonprofits to government systems and timelines, which has helped to ensure the success of their collaboratives.

Conclusion:

Roque has succeeded in carrying out Mayor Hickenlooper’s vision of sustained, cost-effective change to Denver, and in the process has made the DOSP a perfect example of public innovation at work. The DOSP has demonstrated that a small office of innovative thinkers can systemically change the way government interacts with other sectors. The office has fostered an environment that encourages collaboration, catalyzes partnerships, and rewards successful collaboratives with funding and growth opportunities. The Mayor’s championing of the issue has given the office the credibility and influence it needs to carry out its mission of enabling government and nonprofits to have greater impact by working together.