Hub ONE, a nonprofit partner-led collaboration initiative based in Kalamazoo, was launched in 2018 with support from CMF member the Stryker-Johnston Foundation (SJF).

Hub ONE is comprised of four member nonprofit organizations in Kalamazoo, Prevention Works, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Urban Alliance, and Boys & Girls Club of Greater Kalamazoo, and share administrative and even fundraising functions through Hub ONE to help them save on operating costs, pay living wages to all employees and begin to address power disparities in funding.

As CMF reported in its 2021 Annual Report, Together on the Journey, SJF has grounded its practices in trust-based philanthropy, which started with conversations with Hub ONE.

“To us, trust-based philanthropy is a transparent, relationship-centered approach that prioritizes trust and ongoing partnership,” Yolonda Lavender, Grant Program and Partnerships director at SJF said.

The collaboratives saw common challenges with the process of securing funding. Hub ONE began to engage funders in conversations around trust-based philanthropy to reduce barriers facing nonprofit partners.

“We started talking about some of the challenges we were having in our sector, such as turnover, pay equity, relationships with funders and restrictive grants, and started to put together thoughts and solutions that we took to our philanthropy partners,” Danielle Sielatycki, CEO of Prevention Works said. “We worked with SJF to figure out how we could walk in partnership with one another to help alleviate some of these problems that we saw in our sector.”

Inside Philanthropy recently highlighted the work of Hub ONE and spoke with Sielatycki.

Hub ONE is housed within Prevention Works and the other nonprofits’ leaders comprise Hub ONE’s leadership team. Hub One has already been able to combine its members’ HR functions and save money by negotiating and contracting as a group with vendors and some insurance companies.

According to Inside Philanthropy, the member organization’s ability to spearhead the process is possible because SJF supported Hub ONE through a trust-based philanthropy process that allowed the collaborative to change course as needed.

A case study about the collaborative cites the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project’s approach as the inspiration for how SJF went about supporting of Hub ONE.

“We’ve discovered a lot about what trust does between organizations,” Sara Weishaar, CEO of Impact Collective, a Kalamazoo-based advisory firm working with both SJF and Hub ONE, told CMF. “It’s relieved some of what we call ‘the Hunger Games of nonprofits’ and has allowed organizations to really focus on the change they want to create instead of worrying about funding.”

Sielatycki shared with Inside Philanthropy that to build Hub ONE, “its members’ leadership had to be willing to bring down their walls and share their processes with each other—including the areas where they were already strong and the ones where each needed support.”

Other positive results of Hub ONE highlighted by Inside Philanthropy include:

• Each member organization has created detailed job descriptions and salary ranges for all of their positions — and each organization now pays, at minimum, the living wage for a single person in Michigan.
• The collaborative raises funds that are shared among members, with each member organization receiving support according to its needs.
• Each member has found success that they may not have enjoyed on their own. Prevention Works alone estimates that it has expanded its services by 30%, and while exact figures weren’t available for the other members, they’ve also reportedly been able to grow their services.
• Sielatycki shared that a benefit to the financial stability the collaborative seeks to help its members to achieve, is that it’s now easier for them to decide not to chase smaller and/or heavily labor-intensive grants.

Future tentative plans for Hub ONE include finding a way to save specifically on health insurance, providing fiscal sponsorship and back-end support to smaller area nonprofits, and contracting with diversity, equity and inclusion consultants.

Want more?

Read Inside Philanthropy’s full article on Hub ONE.

Learn more about SJF’s approach to trust-based philanthropy and its support of Hub ONE is CMF’s 2021 Annual Report: Together on the Journey.