How can nonprofits do more with less? Try addressing multiple issues at once

In an era when needs are growing while funding is harder to come by, nonprofits are feeling the pressure to do more with less. One potential tactic is “multisolving” or addressing multiple interconnected issues from different sectors, with one program.

Multisolving can mean having a wider-reaching impact, but it involves more than just tacking additional goals onto an existing program. To get it right, organizations need to identify where their work can make the greatest impact, secure flexible funding, and work closely with the communities they serve.

What multisolving looks like

In Tucson, Arizona, Iskashitaa Refugee Network multisolves through food initiatives.

Each week, refugees connected with the organization harvest around 3,000 pounds of produce that might otherwise go to waste: fruits and vegetables from residential trees, community gardens, and other public property. Some of that produce goes home with the refugees to help stave off food insecurity, while the rest is preserved at monthly workshops and then sold in an online shop. The proceeds are then reinvested into the harvesting program. With one action, Iskashitaa addresses food waste and food insecurity, while also helping refugees connect with each other and with the broader community.

“The common denominator is food, and the local food system is a vehicle toward a feeling of belonging and regaining a foothold in a completely new society,” explained Barbara Eiswerth, executive director of Iskashitaa. Eiswerth was originally a research geologist and environmental scientist, but after spending time in Africa for her dissertation, returned to Tucson where she was shocked at the amount of local food waste.

Her original idea was to create a project that helped youth improve their neighborhoods, using her expertise in geospatial information systems to locate untapped food resources. After an anthropologist colleague suggested she invite Somali Bantu youth from local refugee communities to participate, the focus shifted to helping refugees through food. She founded Iskashitaa in 2003 and came to see food as a common language. “It didn’t matter if you spoke Maay Maay or Kiswahili or English, you had a language to focus on, engage, and learn from each other,” she said.

Addressing multiple needs doesn’t mean addressing every need; for multisolving to be successful, it has to be intentional.

This program also met another need: helping refugees create community ties. “The whole point is for refugees to meet other residents,” Eiswerth explained, “and this was the perfect way to do it because there were thousands of pounds of fruit to harvest.”

Along the way, she discovered that the refugees had built-in knowledge to share, including food techniques, ways of looking at food, preparing it, and preserving it.

That knowledge included how some program participants took locally growing mesquite pods—more typically ground into flour—and sucked on them to reduce hunger and thirst. Eiswerth recalled she was also mystified by the amaranth plants that grow in Tucson after monsoons until a Somali Bantu kid took the plant and “rubbed it through his hands and showed me the little grains. And I was like ‘wow.’”

Multisolving requires focus

Addressing multiple needs doesn’t mean addressing every need; for multisolving to be successful, it has to be intentional.

Over the years, Eiswerth experimented with other ways to help refugees in Tucson through Iskashitaa, such as offering swimming lessons for refugees, as many had past traumatic experiences with water. This taught her that sometimes trying to “do too much” takes resources away from where they’re needed.

“We had to stop that [swimming program] to focus on the mission,” she said. “We learned we couldn’t be the be-all end-all for refugees.” Instead, Iskashitaa focuses on food, and then refers refugees elsewhere for other services. “The needs are never-ending, you have to focus on what you can do best,” Eiswerth said. “It has to be interwoven; it has to make sense.”

This concept applies to a broad range of nonprofit structures and community programs, including the work of Audra Watson, a school system veteran who has led the youth programs at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (C&S) for almost 17 years. Thanks in large part to a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, the program sponsors teams of young people (the average age is about 16) to start community projects, with mentorship in civic responsibility.

The program has so far funded 171 teams in all but four states, including projects like a community garden in Alabama, an election and legislation tool in Ohio, and a food insecurity project in New York during the federal shutdown.

“The needs are never-ending, you have to focus on what you can do best. It has to be interwoven; it has to make sense.”

One of the challenges is helping kids identify where the need is. Watson said that some projects have expanded into registered 501 (c)(3)s, but not all of them necessarily should, “Because we’ve got a lot of those already.”

Instead, the focus is finding ways to make the greatest impact. “They need to figure out who in their community is doing similar work,” Watson explained, “so there’s not a redundancy of effort.” The program encourages young people to “figure out what the value is you’re going to add.”

Flexible funding

Another important part of taking the multisolving approach is finding flexible funding. “I thought great ideas were just automatically funded,” Eiswerth recalled with a laugh. “I didn’t think that you had to scrape for every penny.” For Iskashitaa, part of securing funding was honing down their mission and getting clear on the scope of their impact, which has gotten the organization to the point of having six full-time employees who aren’t grant-dependent.

In some cases, the task of finding flexible funding falls on foundations. Dee Baecher-Brown, president of Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands (CFVI) since 1996, told NPQ:  “Our entire operational model has been based on the multisolve mindset.” CFVI has a seven-person team that serves around 87,000 people living on St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John.

The foundation has about 100 open grants and is in regular contact with about 150 of the islands’ 300 nonprofit organizations. Its role is to match donor interest with nonprofits that have relevant missions. It then supports those nonprofits with what Baecher-Brown called “handholding,” or guiding grantees throughout the grantmaking process and offering reassurance along the way, which she said is “labor-intensive.”

Another core tenet of multisolving is keeping the community at the core of the program.

Funds go to support projects that address multiple community needs at once. That includes the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, which brought high school students together for a program that taught leadership, teamwork, and environmental restoration, while the students maintained over 20 miles of trails. Or Mangroves in the Classroom, led by the University of the Virgin Islands, which was responsible for the growth of over 400 mangroves. Students in the program learned about mangrove growth experiments and ultimately planted mangroves at a restoration site.

But CFVI’s approach to funding these programs is more than just making the connections and guidance. CFVI also seeks funding that gives room to explore ideas before a project is even ready for traditional grant support.

Since 1999, CFVI has reached out to its network to ask for donations of $500 or greater, which adds up to a couple hundred thousand dollars annually. The nonprofit can then use these funds from “angels” as it sees fit, usually to explore the viability of new projects. Baecher-Brown called this unrestricted funding “one of the engines” for multisolving.

Adapting based on community input

Another core tenet of multisolving is keeping the community at the core of the program. For Watson, that means listening to young leaders rather than assuming adults know better. “I work with my colleagues to center youth perspectives and see where young people can codesign with us,” she said, adding “they teach me a lot.”

In the case of Iskashitaa, Eiswerth says that means involving refugees and those with lived experience “at all levels,” from the board all the way down to the volunteers themselves.

Listening is key to multisolving, but organizations need to take it a step further and act on what they hear. Watson said she often tells her young mentees, “This work isn’t easy, and you’re going to pivot, but you need to persevere…You just find another way to do the work.”

For example, the team of young leaders in Ohio originally wanted to create a website that used a quick quiz to match young people with election candidates based on their priorities. They assumed this was relevant just to youth—but when the team spoke to the community, they discovered that older people also needed help making voting decisions. So, they broadened the scope of their project.

When multisolving works, it creates a win-win situation for everyone involved. But making it work means getting all the different factors to align. Much of the responsibility for that falls on the shoulders of organizations themselves, but funders also have a role to play. If grantmaking structures can evolve to support solutions that don’t fit neatly into a single issue area, funders can help nonprofits address interconnected needs without losing sight of where they can make the greatest impact.