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Local affiliates of Habitat for Humanity are looking to share mortgage servicing, pre-construction services, advertising, public-relations and other functions. The Charlotte Rescue Mission and United Family Services are building facilities for women on the same site. They’re also studying ways to trim their expenses by working together in developing the tract.

And an initiative known as Project Hope has brought together four agencies to help individuals living in long-term poverty find affordable housing.

Those efforts represent what community leaders believe can become a broader re-engineering of the Charlotte region’s nonprofit sector. And they hope to speed that process by making strategic investments in nonprofits’ innovation and collaboration.

Such collaboration would be funded through an initiative called the Community Catalyst Program.

The program will invest in nonprofits that aim to find ways of working together to create efficiencies and better address local needs.

The Leon and Sandra Levine Foundation has seeded the effort with a $1 million challenge grant that will kick in when local leaders raise $4 million.

“The point is not to create a series of isolated mergers,” says Laura Meyer, executive vice president of Foundation For The Carolinas. “The point is to build connections that will create ‘a-ha’ moments for the nonprofit community to reinvent how business is done.”

Working in collaboration with United Way of Central Carolinas Inc. and the Arts & Science Council, the foundation will provide technical and administrative support for the initiative. The foundation is waiving its administrative fee for managing the fund.

A 17-member committee chaired by Cathy Bessant, president of global corporate banking at Bank of America Corp., will raise money to meet the challenge grant from the Levine Foundation.

The Spangler family and C.D. Spangler Foundation already have made a $250,000 gift to help meet the match, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Community Foundation affiliate of Foundation For The Carolinas has contributed $500,000.

The move toward increased collaboration and innovation grew out of talks among leaders in the local charitable community. Most charitable groups here have seen a spike in demand for services and a decline in contributions.

To track that impact, Foundation For The Carolinas this year enlisted The Bridgespan Group, a Boston-based consulting firm, to study the nonprofit community. Bridgespan found that among roughly 4,000 nonprofits in the region, total revenue for the 769 largest organizations exceeds $1 billion. (That group excludes hospitals and large colleges and universities.)

In the fiscal year that began July 1, that revenue is expected to fall by as much as $180 million because of reductions in corporate, private and government funding, as well as declines in investment returns.

Bridgespan also identified key local nonprofit subsectors. Those subsectors are after-school and youth development; arts, culture and humanities; health care, excluding hospitals; housing and shelters; human and social services; and work-force development.

Bridgespan found 40% of the region’s largest nonprofits provide health and human services.

Based on significant investments by local foundations, partners in the Community Catalyst Program also identified social capital and land trusts as high-priority subsectors.

Brian Collier, senior vice president for community philanthropy at Foundation For The Carolinas, says the new fund aims to make investments to help nonprofits become more effective and efficient through collaboration, coalitions and mergers, and to promote innovation.

A big focus of the new fund’s investments will be “educating nonprofits about the value of and how to go about collaborating and innovating,” Collier says.

Meyer says a primary goal will be to “drive real results in support of long-term sustainability.”

Organizers cite Project Hope as an example of the benefits of collaboration. The Homeless Services Network, a group of more than 20 agencies working to promote affordable housing, spearheaded Project Hope’s creation in July. The project has received $1.6 million in federal stimulus funding through the city of Charlotte. And now it operates as a partnership of four groups: Crisis Assistance Ministry, the Workforce Initiative for Supportive Housing, Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont and the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services.

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