New Perspectives on How Philanthropy Can Help Communities

The past few years have highlighted various flaws across the social, economic, and healthcare sectors. It also raised questions on the safety net, which provides support to individuals during a crisis. There are numerous ways philanthropy can help us minimize the risks and offer the opportunity to make a powerful community. One way is to support communities through technical assistance, offering grants, and encouraging capacity building to recognize their needs. It can also help determine the best ways to spend the resources offered through the relief fund packages. Philanthropy helps state, private, and local healthcare sectors that have experienced staff diminish during a crisis. It also helps discover opportunities and connect with different community groups along with the distribution of resources. For instance, foundations serve as mediators to ensure all resources are delivered to the communities on time.

From a vantage point, these foundations collaborate in resilience once they identify an interconnection among economic and community development. Such foundations seek a robust partnership role in improving more comprehensive economic development. Also, every fundraising organization wants to hold a complete set of tools, including all local investing. Moreover, place-focused foundations care more about the place. They are required to utilize their extra assets to ensure the community is resilient and inclusive.

Here are four takeaways based on ways philanthropy can help different communities. It includes building better mental health, becoming more resilient, and improving overall economic and financial development.

Philanthropy Helping in Community Mental Health

How philanthropy helps healthcare in different communities? What is community mental health? And why is it crucial to address this issue? It is essential to answer these questions to get complete insights into how philanthropy can support vulnerable communities.

Community mental health is an activity that helps improve mental health in different communities instead of promoting it in institutional settings. It’s crucial to determine mental health in communities to prevent suicides, drug overdose, substance abuse, and more.

Philanthropists’ willingness to act quickly, flexibly, and take enormous risks puts them in a better position to make a significant difference in community mental health care.

Recently, fundraising organizations have released a report regarding philanthropic grants for mental healthcare. It relies on surveys and in-depth interviews with various philanthropists.

This report explained the manners in which these philanthropists can handle traditional barriers regarding mental health. It mainly focuses on supporting people working to address the need in low to middle-income regions.

It indicates that emphasis is being given to developing capacity in the mental healthcare sector, collaborating with private sectors, public bodies, and improving evidence-based solutions.

However, there is a lack of collaboration between philanthropists because of the inadequate transparency regarding philanthropic money. That, in turn, makes it much harder for them to bring a required systemic development to mental healthcare services.

Foundations Engage More Community Partners

Foundations having limited experience in partnering with various development finance and economic development can now engage more community partners.

You can ask your community development sectors, economic development companies, credit unions, banks, and others about their financial assistance for small businesses and affordable housing builders.

Firstly, You need to dig a bit deeper to analyze who is more vulnerable. Is it women entrepreneurs, micro-businesses, nonprofit housing companies, or entrepreneurs of color? In such scenarios, most foundations explore opportunities to utilize funds differently.

For instance, utilizing grants to reduce interest rates on various affordable housing loans provides builders with the flexibility to delay or decrease rent payments for people affected by layoffs.

You can also opt for a long-term (low interest) loan from your grant to sustain the capital all local banks hold for lending.

Additionally, you can utilize your balance sheet to create an unfunded guarantee that enables the development finance partners to engage higher-risk borrowers in any crisis.

Switch From a Grant Approach to An Investment Approach

Many nonprofit grantees suffer significant financial disruption from terminated fundraising and various other events that bring much-required profit.

While grantmaking seems one of the most used tools in any foundation’s toolkit, the moment of any crisis still requires much more.

For the time being, a foundation can offer an interest-free bridge loan to hold a local nonprofit until important fundraising actions can be resumed. It is also possible when these nonprofit organizations receive federal refund dollars.

When serving any patient capital role, Foundations can give a long-term loan to the internet service providers, allowing them to extend their access to households. It should be regardless of the capability to pay at the moment when digital learning and work are so crucial.

Consider Utilizing Your Investing Capacity to Support Businesses

Every main street business, independent customer service organization, small farmers, and their workforce have already experienced great loss of demand and salary in a global crisis.

Most of these organizations do not have enough cash balances that larger businesses hold and are notably more at risk.

For instance, different Community Foundations have partnered with microenterprise lenders in their state to generate small businesses relief funds. These funds will give both technical assistance and investment to self-employed people and small businesses.

These steps might not be the only easy or right ways for every place-focused foundation. However, in an unprecedented moment, these foundations are witnessed to step up to solve the challenges in unprecedented manners.

Often, it is said that every crisis brings an opportunity with it.

For all place-focused foundations, it will be a great chance to recommit to the values of community leadership. It also provides you an opportunity to reconsider the responsibility of community philanthropy in safeguarding comprehensive economic growth and overall prosperity.

Moreover, it’s the right time to hold every tool at your disposal, inclusive of local funds, to support your community in recovering from the crisis and heading towards a more inclusive and resilient future.

Conclusion

Philanthropists work to help communities improve their businesses, build partnerships, and promote community mental healthcare services. During any crisis, a philanthropic approach can help different communities to tackle difficult situations. It can provide you with a better opportunity to rethink your strategy for better economic development and prosperity. You can also support your community with unique problem-solving approaches to their challenges.

Various foundations are working to assist communities in building small businesses, providing interest-free loans, and offering relief funds. These fundraising organizations partner with local authorities, private, public sectors to address community issues and help them with evidence-based solutions. It’s now absolutely transparent to all that establishing a more resilient and inclusive economy is always more than ever an important priority. To build a community with improved mental health, education, economic growth, and better career opportunities, philanthropic support from different foundations is significant.