Bart Harvey
Former Chair & CEO
Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. (1993-2008)

The fact that any collaboration can celebrate 20 years of productive work, let alone one with major foundations, nonprofits, and financial institutions with all their centrifugal force, is astonishing in its own right. Furthermore, this collaboration had principals in the room of fiercely independent and different types of funding organizations for much of its early deliberations and two vying community development organizations at its center in the early years along with the federal government.

The premise that led to the development of Living Cities was foolhardy—engage the major intermediaries in community development around a common agenda to build scale and impact in the field; bring major funders into collaborative effort around a common funding stream; have the core implementing institutions collaborate, compete and be accountable for the results; and bring the federal government to the table as one partner of many, navigating its special set of restrictions. Bookies would bet the Cubs would win a World Series before success of this odd arrangement. Few would have predicted such an effort could succeed. Enter Peter Goldmark of Rockefeller Foundation and many other leaders in the effort.

The success of this seemingly odd venture changed the way people think about scaling efforts, the viability of commingled funding, the virtue of coordinated efforts, the exchange of ideas between funders and those using those funds, the methods of accountability and measurement in a social field, addressing public policy, and private/public ventures with the federal government. The governance issues of the collaboration were difficult but possible even given the autonomy of the participating organizations and their different statuses as foundations, corporations, nonprofits and government. In fact, the focused debate around the table spawned collaborative efforts outside of Living Cities around common subjects of interest, heightened the understanding of systemic issues and potential solutions, and focused theories of change in the operating environment. In short it made the operating entities and the funders better at their respective tasks.

This effort forced the team at Enterprise Community Partners to think smarter and more comprehensively, to be explicitly accountable, to change the measurements we felt less useful to our work and argue why, and to think and communicate clearly. Personally, I carried away many friendships and relationships I simply wouldn’t have had the chance to have otherwise, was able to open up to funders about the risks and issues our organization had in ways that weren’t possible without trust, and carried away deep respect and authentic admiration for so many in the room. And the moments of humor will last a lifetime—they frame our hopes and aspirations, our frustrations and dejections, but most of all a large group of people working together to try and achieve a great aim.

Happy 20th Anniversary.