How Nonprofit Programs Scale Up: Findings From The Wallace Foundation
Sometimes, when one reads the phrase “getting to scale,” it feels a little bit like the nonprofit equivalent of reaching for the Holy Grail. Back in 2011, Casey Family Programs even titled one of their reports, “Getting to Scale: The Elusive Goal.”
The Wallace Foundation’s latest report, “Strategies to Scale Up Social Programs: Pathways, Partnerships and Fidelity,” is the latest entry in what the Wallace Foundation itself calls the “field of scale-up studies.” And they are not kidding! Just two weeks ago, another foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors—working in partnership with the Skoll, Draper Richards Kaplan, Ford, and Porticus Foundations—released its report on scaling, titled “Scaling Solutions Toward Shifting Systems.” Interestingly, the preface of the Wallace report echoes Rockefeller’s title, declaring, “Scaling what works is a crucial component of systems change.”
The Wallace Foundation, which derives its corpus from donations by De Witt and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of Reader’s Digest, has over $1.5 billion in assets and concentrates its grants on support for education, youth development, and the arts, with a focus on helping disadvantaged children in U.S. urban areas. Their report—authored by two Michigan State faculty, assistant dean R. Sam Larson and communications department chair James Dearing, along with the longtime former president of the nonprofit Human Interaction Research Institute, Thomas Backer—analyzes the efforts of 45 nonprofits to rapidly expand operations in three fields: education (10 nonprofits), health (18 nonprofits), and youth development (17 nonprofits)...