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Grantee Network

The Great Bay Foundation understands it takes more than money to support social entrepreneurs and their missions. In addition to funding, the foundation pro-actively networks on behalf of its grantees to provide access to intellectual capital and other resources to increase grantees’ program support, organizational capacity, visibility, and sustainability. At the same time, Great Bay creates opportunities for its grantees to network among one another as well as outside resources. This ongoing building of a system of networks, leads to the self-reliance of organizations as well as clients served. Great Bay’s networking components include:

•  Grantee to Grantee (sharing resources, experience, insights, and wisdom)
•  Great Bay to Grantee (providing access to non-financial resources such as business experts or technical consultants)
•  Grantees to other Funders (Great Bay leveraging additional funding from nonprofit and private for profits for grantees and/or Great Bay collaborating with other funders to support grantees)
•  Great Bay to Academics (identifying research initiatives and academics who could include Great Bay grantees in their case studies to enhance the grantees’ visibility and credibility)
•  Great Bay to National Awards’ Opportunities (nominating grantees to enhance their visibility and credibility)

Our Grantee Network includes annual conferences for all our grantees (past and current), potential grantees, and friends of the foundation; site visits; and roundtable luncheons where small groups of grantees and outside experts discuss issues and strategies that are of concern to all. For the past ten years, the Great Bay has hosted an annual, by invitation only, conference. Past speakers include such world renown experts as: Clara Miller, President and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund; Paul C. Light, Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service; Alex Nicholls, Lecturer in at the Said School of Business, Oxford University and Leader of the Skoll World Forum Social Entrepreneurship; Catherine Clark, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University Business School where she created Columbia’s graduate MBA course on social entrepreneurship, and is Founder and Director of Columbia’s Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship (RISE); Billy Shore, Founder and Executive Director of Share Our Strength; and Rushworth Kidder, author and founder of the Institute for Global Ethics. Their interactive presentations are designed to help attendees: better understand social enterprise history and theory: evaluate innovative initiatives in a broad context; and assess their programs' legitimacy and social impact. For the past two years, we have also added a segment on the possibilities of virtual networks for social enterprise led by Victor d'Allant, Executive Director of the Skoll Foundation's online portal Social Edge.

Then, too, Great Bay has a tradition of inviting potential grantees, other foundation officers, social enterprise gurus, business and financial experts, and just plain interesting people to attend our forums (real and online) where they are encouraged to share their experience, insights, and wisdom with our grantees.

Today, we are delighted to have the opportunity to extend those resources to a broader online network via our website so that others might learn from our experience and so that members of this virtual community might contribute new insights to our network. We will be posting updated information about all of these forums - past, present and future - and new "friends of the foundation" videos here regularly. 

Alta Fleming, Senior Vice President of Sovereign Bank in Boston and frequent guest at Great Bay's conferences and roundtables, shares some of the reasons why she and her organization are engaged in social enterprise.

Jim Middleton, President of Employ‐Ability, Inc, in Massachusetts, an organization dedicated to the idea that "work is good" for everyone, discusses how social enterprise sustains his organization's mission to provide career empowerment for people with disabilities. 

Independent Consultant and Network Builder, Carole Martin

Marty Zanghi, Director of the Youth and Community Engagement programs at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, discusses some of the challenges and the joys inherent in youth related research, practice, and public policy.