A grant from Levine Impact Lab is helping Southside Blooms expand its work bringing hope and healing to places plagued by violence and poverty.
Neither Peter Levine nor his brother Gary had nonprofit experience when they ventured into philanthropy. However, their partnership with Southside Blooms is just one example of how their 20+ years of experience in venture capital have helped the groups they fund in more than just financial ways.
Levine Impact Lab, founded by Peter, exemplifies trust-based philanthropy. Peter not only provides a significant multi-year financial gift to each grantee but also offers advice, connects grantees with his business network, and strengthens their operations. This project was established through the Honnold Foundation, the philanthropic foundation established by famed rock climber Alex Honnold (whose ropeless scaling of El Capitan is documented in the gripping documentary Free Solo).
One of the lab’s four initial grantees is Southside Blooms, founded by Quilen and Hannah Blackwell, who were inspired by their Christian faith to bring hope to Chicago’s inner city and healing to places plagued by violence and poverty. Southside Blooms creates jobs for vulnerable youth in the floral industry by growing sustainable flowers, ultimately transforming lives and rebuilding the neighborhood. The lab has helped them streamline and expand their operations and logistics and, in turn, Southside Blooms has furthered the lab’s mission to achieve sustainability and help communities flourish.
Capacity Building
In an ideal world, a capacity-building grant helps nonprofits go from good to great. A donor underwrites a pressing infrastructural need rather than giving a programmatic gift. Maybe an organization is struggling to track its donors and desperately needs a database. Perhaps their mission needs to be better represented on an updated website. These kinds of grants target the pain points of an organization to bring it to the next level. But there is a right way and a wrong way of making these kinds of investments.
For a capacity investment to meaningfully change the trajectory of an organization, funders need to address their grantees’ challenges directly. A one-size-fits-all workshop on management best practices might provide insight to a CEO and help address certain struggles (like time or personnel management), but it’s unlikely to transform an attendee’s organization. Peter Levine understands this and uses the Impact Lab’s capacity-building grants to address root causes limiting grantees’ growth, not just more superficial issues. In his approach to giving, Peter treats grantees like they’re customers.
“What's top of mind is customer service and really connecting with the people who matter: your clients. What can we do to make their experience better? So, it was almost like we took the whole notion of ‘nonprofit,’ and we threw it out the window,” said Peter in an interview.
Funders who walk alongside their grantees by being fully available as the organization levels up—i.e., providing access to additional resources, helpful business connections, customized coaching, and one-on-one time—will see incredible results.
As an example of this, Peter connected Southside Blooms to Berlin Packaging, which helped them realize a strategic goal of providing nationwide shipping for Mother's Day, one of the largest sales days for organizations in the floral industry (some estimates say that this one day accounts for 24% of annual holiday sales). This time-sensitive goal was only achieved through Peter’s willingness to go above and beyond to leverage his personal connections for Blooms.
Beyond the quantitative benefits of such partnerships, Quilen emphasized the profound positive impact of having a close relationships with a collaborative partner: “The Lab does have that neighborhood community feel and less of a ‘hey you have to play by our rules and check these boxes.’ It’s one of the reasons why we do thoroughly enjoy our time working and Peter and Gary.”
Conclusion
Southside Blooms is expanding its work through a capacity-building grant from Impact Levine Lab. This approach demonstrates the best way for funders to give: from an attitude of service, continually asking, “How can I best help you achieve your mission?” Capacity building, like all good giving, not only supports the grantees, but provides community to the grantmaker as well. We hope to see more such partnerships arise across the nation as the need for capacity-building support continues to rise in the post-Covid world.
