Report – Change Capital Fund

Innovations: Ideas to Make NYC Neighborhoods more Livable, Sustainable and Resilient

Karen Oh — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:00:34 +0000

Change Capital Fund found a treasure trove of forward-looking ideas to make New York City neighborhoods more livable, sustainable and resilient in the proposals submitted from New York City organizations and agencies to to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Change Notice of Funding Opportunity. The submissions tackle issues at the heart of the community development agenda—safe, healthy, and affordable housing; economic opportunity through job training and creation—while integrating features to enhance the livability of neighborhoods, from a public health, quality of life, and infrastructural resilience perspective.

Download the report Innovations: Ideas to Make NYC Neighborhoods more Livable, Sustainable and Resilient

Essential Yet Invisible

Karen Oh — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 14:52:36 +0000

As New York City absorbed the shock that the raging COVID-19 virus would necessitate the city’s shut-down and schools and businesses locked their doors, so, did the staff of community-based organizations head home. Just as an inequitable world was becoming unimaginably worse for the city’s poorest, the lights in community centers went out and, in an instant, thousands of English learners had no classes, children had no afterschool, teens no summer work, job seekers no way to access training, immigrants no kind English-speaker explaining a path to citizenship… It was as if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had shown a glimpse of an ugly future in a scary present.

Read the Essential Yet Invisible report online

Download the Essential Yet Invisible report

This report is from the Change Capital Fund (CCF). We are funders who have pooled our resources to support neighborhood-based, community development corporations for twenty-five years. Our long-term relationship with our grantees affords us an opportunity to get to know them well and we are grateful for their dedication, adaptability, and resilience. Born in crises, New York City’s community development corporations (CDCs) formed to rebuild homes and revitalize their neighborhoods, renovating over 100,000 apartments as affordable housing and putting thousands of buildings back on the tax rolls. Today, they remain essential emergency responders that work directly with residents to soften the blows of crises, call attention to the experiences of low-income people, and advocate for public policies that support them. Our grantees were behind successful organizing campaigns that are preventing hundreds of thousands of evictions and that will provide relief for undocumented workers.

CCF Donors Respond to MDRC Final Evaluation Report

Change Capital Fund — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 22:11:56 +0000

CCF appreciates MDRC’s final evaluation report and the feedback we have received as part of a formative evaluation of our first cycle (2014-18).

View the MDRIC Final Evaluation Report

CCF’s goal is to build the capacity of community anchor organizations to increase economic mobility among low-income people living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Our approach is to provide flexible funding combined with technical assistance to enable our grantees to use data to set their directions, improve their programs and, ultimately increase the scale of effective efforts.

CCF is undertaking this work at an inflection point in the community development field, a time when the purpose of community development is, perhaps, not as well understood as it was when CDCs were the developers of last resort in a city literally scorched by disinvestment.

CCF’s first four-year cycle reaffirmed our premise that these organizations, which combine housing, organizing and services, are meaningful change agents in their communities. CDCs:

dramatically improve living conditions for low-income residents through the provision of affordable housing and neighborhood investments;
increase economic mobility through education, social services and workforce programs; and,
empower residents, giving them a voice in determining the fate of their communities and citywide policies through community engaged planning and organizing.

The findings of the first cycle affirm our decision to focus on building grantees’ performance management capacity. At the outset of the first cycle, each of our grantees was tracking data – sometimes the same information – in multiple systems without being able to use it to analyze their overall success. As MDRC’s report confirms, with CCF funding and technical assistance, our grantees have built systems and altered their internal practices and culture to become more deliberate learning organizations: able to more critically evaluate their own results across programs and able to use this information to improve their programs and to demonstrate their success. This capacity helped the organizations win new funding to grow. The four organizations have raised over $21 million in new funding in their first four years and both the number of people served and the outcomes improved over the four-year cycle. In some case, new streamlined, cross-program data systems generated efficiencies that allowed staff to focus more time on services rather than data entry.

An insight gained through the evaluation and practice is that improving grantees’ ability to use data strengthened their ability to partner. The report cites examples of St. Nicks and New Settlement reviewing data together with their school partners, causing the schools to increase their investments in the partnership and creating a virtuous cycle of increased data sharing enabling more children to be served more effectively.

We learned that the work of honing performance management skills is more labor intensive, more expensive, and more time consuming than we initially believed. We changed the way we provide technical assistance to enable the organizations to work individually with quality consultants. That internal work, along with their ability to hire full-time evaluation staff, generated the majority of the internal capacity improvements. Thus, our new cycle will see more streamlined application of this approach.

A meaningful, unexplored question is which services are most effectively delivered by CDCs as opposed to city-wide, regional, sectoral or other types of nonprofit organizations. That is not a question which MDRC investigated though CCF gleaned some insights:

In addition to housing development, our grantees were effective, knowledgeable housing advocates. Several innovative citywide housing policies legislated during the four year cycle were spearheaded by CCF grantees, for example, the Right to Counsel Campaign and anti-harassment provisions to protect tenants. These organizations have knowledge and credibility in the housing policy arena shared by few other NYC nonprofits.
During the course of the CCF initiative all of our grantees engaged their communities in major planning efforts, some in response to planned rezonings or other major land use changes, demonstrating their critical role in empowering residents to shape the future of their neighborhoods.
Educational services stood out as a high-impact intervention. CHLDC and NSA have developed public schools and college access programming with extraordinary success rates. A pilot afterschool program at St. Nicks demonstrated dramatic results in improving reading.
In the workforce sector, grantees’ greatest successes related to their roles as on-ramps to effective training. FAC recruited and then helped place underserved residents of public housing in quality sectoral training. They created remedial classes to enable participants to pass threshold requirements to employment programs where they went on to achieve the same success as other participants. Similarly, CHLDC provides recruitment, case management, and retention services for a Carpenter’s Union Apprenticeship program.
Grantees report that the connections they establish with residents through provision of direct services strengthen their organizing and advocacy efforts.

As the report notes, grantees value CCF’s flexible, multi-year funding that enables organizations to become more data driven, a rare niche in the funding community. CCF received 34 proposals to join our initiative in the second round and we turned down many worthy proposals. We think that many more place-based nonprofits would benefit from this kind of investment and are looking forward to continuing our work with our first cohort and four new grantees.

Smart Organizations, Strong Neighborhoods

Change Capital Fund — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 18:26:21 +0000

CCF is helping the community development field measure better and scale what works. This report explains what our donor collaborative and grantees did and offers examples of innovative programs that demonstrate public benefits far in excess of cost.

Investing Together: Promising Strategies from a Donor Collaborative

Change Capital Fund — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 16:52:30 +0000

MDRC, the nation’s preeminent social policy research organization dedicated to learning what works to improve programs and policies that affect the poor, is evaluating the CCF initiative. This brief is the fifth in a five part series by MDRC. It highlights the benefits of donor collaboration and explores two key issues these entities must address in order to work effectively to meet shared goals.

Read the full brief here.

Using Data as a Performance Management Tool

Change Capital Fund — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 18:02:16 +0000

MDRC, the nation’s preeminent social policy research organization dedicated to learning what works to improve programs and policies that affect the poor, is evaluating the CCF initiative. This brief is the fourth in a five part series by MDRC. This brief focuses on how the CCF initiative has altered staff perceptions and uses of data, moving from data collection to using data to improve programs and outcomes for participants. Over the past three years, CCF has provided technical assistance to support grantees in their efforts to build their capacity to track and use data for performance management. To date, grantees have implemented and customized data systems and made program improvements based on data analysis.

Read the report here.

Delivering Coordinated, Community-Based Services by Putting Networks into Action

Change Capital Fund — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 02:38:53 +0000

MDRC, the nation’s preeminent social policy research organization dedicated to learning what works to improve programs and policies that affect the poor, is evaluating the CCF initiative. This brief is the third in a series by MDRC. This brief describes how CCF grantees’ service coordination efforts have helped to place individuals without extensive work histories in higher-wage jobs, to encourage first-generation college students to enter school and stay enrolled, and to get academically struggling students back on track, among other outcomes. Besides drawing on interviews with the grantees — St. Nicks Alliance, the Fifth Avenue Committee, New Settlement Apartments, and Cypress Hill Local Development Corporation — and quantitative data on outcomes from the grantees’ reports to the funders, this brief uses an analytic tool called social network analysis whose basic unit is the relation, rather than an individual or organization.

Read the report here.

Addressing Challenges in Community-Based Service Coordination

Change Capital Fund — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 16:27:13 +0000

MDRC, the nation’s preeminent social policy research organization dedicated to learning what works to improve programs and policies that affect the poor, is evaluating the CCF initiative. This brief is the second in a series documenting the implementation of an economic mobility initiative by New York City’s Change Capital Fund (CCF).

This series highlights issues for practitioners and funders involved with comprehensive community initiatives. The first brief described CCF in detail; introduced the initiative’s five grantees (New Settlement Apartments in the Bronx and St. Nicks Alliance, the Fifth Avenue Committee, Community Solutions/Brownsville Partnership, and Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation in Brooklyn); and shared the organizations’ ambitious work plans and start-up efforts. This second brief describes two pervasive challenges to service coordination and the ways grantees have responded to them.

Read the full brief here.

The Promise of a Community-Based Approach to Economic Opportunity

Change Capital Fund — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:08:35 +0000

This brief describes the grantees’ neighborhoods and their strategies to fight poverty and highlights some of the early lessons from the initiative. The brief illustrates how community organizations are uniquely positioned to undertake economic opportunity initiatives by reaching underserved populations and mobilizing high-quality services for them. The brief also identifies what sets CCF apart from other place-based initiatives.

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