Center for Social Innovation

Published: March 03, 2009

After 14 successful years helping foster children, A Home Within was at a crossroads. The San Francisco nonprofit organization was growing, but needed a plan to ensure that in future years it was reaching its audience in the most effective, strategic ways possible. For advice, Executive Director Toni Heineman turned to the Stanford Alumni Consulting Team. The group, also known as ACT, is made up of Graduate School of Business alumni who provide pro bono business expertise.

Heineman founded A Home Within in 1994 with a single purpose—to help provide foster children with sustainable and nurturing relationships. It connects foster youth with volunteer psychotherapists who work in conjunction with the child’s caregivers, teachers and social workers. Started by psychotherapists in private practice, Heineman realized the organization needed business expertise that she and the other clinicians didn’t have. “We were growing organically, “Heineman says, “but organically is a nice way of saying hit and miss and totally disorganized. We were doing very well working with the children, but as we were growing, we didn’t really have the skills, capacity or the know-how to manage the business or administrative tasks.”

She added: “I think we had outgrown my capacity for developing an organization. I am a clinical psychologist, not a business person. At some point we needed to be more strategic, and Stanford was very helpful with that.”

A Home Within needed clarity, both with its message and its organizational structure. For starters, Heineman approached ACT for advice on how to better structure the relationship between the local chapters and the national organization. She quickly realized that answering one question wasn’t going to transform the organization.

“It’s very typical, particularly for young nonprofits, to approach ACT saying this is the project I want you to do with me,” she says. “The team then comes in and says, ‘That is the project we can get you to, but here are all the other things you need to do first.’ The analogy that comes to mind is … I was there with my nail and hammer and some wood, and I wanted to build a deck. Maybe we should design it first. Maybe we should draw a blueprint of what we should do so it doesn’t fall down.”

Over several months, she met with ACT volunteers Lana Guernsey, Kristina Omari and Susie Helfrey to discuss issues such as marketing and organizational structure.

They crafted a new mission statement and articulated the vision. ACT also suggested a new logo and new message—“Continuous Connections.” The team also suggested a decentralized organizational model for the chapters.

Heineman recalls a phone conversation with Guernsey who told her, “Toni, you are not going to keep trying to get bigger and bigger. You are going to have lots of little chapters, and you are going to give them lots of control over what they do.”

Guernsey modeled her advice on a book by Stanford alums Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s called the “The Starfish and Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.” They say that starfish organizations are based on very different principles than traditional ones and have ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Like a starfish, if you cut off an arm, it will grow a new one. Spider organizations are centralized—if you cut off its leg, it is left with one less and is weaker.

Guernsey, the project leader, describes how A Home Within implemented ACT’s suggestion so it was less of a top-down hierarchical organization and could provide more opportunity for local chapters. “In order to do that, Dr. Heineman thought through the structure of the entire organization and how each chapter would fit with another as well as with the national office. In doing so, she created much more of a starfish model in which the individual chapters were able to grow more naturally and on their own.”

She adds, “I think the most successful partnerships are those that take our recommendations and figure out how best to implement them consistent with the culture and individuals they are serving.”

Today, more resources are available to the chapter directors. Long-term viability has increased, and A Home Within is scaling up in a much more efficient manner, thanks to the new, decentralized structure.

Another result from the consultations with ACT is the creation of a clinical fellow program that gives psychotherapists opportunities to volunteer and become involved in the organization. “It gives them a leadership opportunity in their own local communities to start a chapter of A Home Within,” Guernsey says. A set number of new chapters are established each year in association with the fellows. “It also allows a lot of camaraderie with each class of new fellows that comes through—they are able to rely on each other, as well as the national organization, in setting up local chapters.”

Since the initial consultation, A Home Within has secured numerous grants and expanded its reach. Brafman and Omari have been appointed to the board and ACT has partnered with the organization a second time. This time the assignment is to create a campaign to more effectively recruit therapists.

These ongoing interactions with ACT have helped A Home Within develop continuous connections—connections that strengthen the organization and provide support for its future development.

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- Sheela Sethuraman