Paul Vandeventer

Paul J. Vandeventer is a cheerleader for the little guys: those with great ideas about how to make the world a better place. He serves as president of Community Partners, a nine-year-old organization that serves as an umbrella for 124 nonprofit start-ups. Projects include everything from the Unique People’s Voting Project (getting out the vote of L.A.’s disabled citizens) to the Sisters Breast Cancer Survivors Network (an information clearinghouse and support group for breast-cancer survivors in South Central) to Writers Bloc (bringing writers to Los Angeles for lectures) to the Off-Ramp Beautification Project (landscaping freeways in the San Fernando Valley).

At the Community Partners annual holiday party, project leaders were asked to stand up and describe their organizations’ raisons d’etre. By the end of the speeches, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Here was a roomful of red-eyed optimists, vowing to fight on for a better future.

Vandeventer may be the most optimistic of the bunch.

He is the father of two young boys, and his wife, Mary Melecha, also is in community service: She works as a speech pathologist in local elementary schools. Vandeventer, 47, got his first taste of community at age 15, working as a YMCA camp counselor in Big Bear. It was the year his brother died, a time, he says, when he was hungry for a sense of connectedness.

Years later, a stint as a stringer for the Pasadena Star News gave him the chance to see government and the educational system--two building blocks of community--at work. Vandeventer ended up as a program officer and an executive vice president at the California Community Foundation, one of Southern California’s leading philanthropic organizations. And then came Community Partners. Vandeventer spoke with The Times in a Pasadena cafe.

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Question: How would you describe Community Partners?

Answer: As a civic intermediary and incubator organization that provides sponsorship and developmental assistance to people who have ideas for community change and who want to translate the change into sustained action.

Q: How did Community Partners come about?

A: I kept seeing community organizations, people struggling to make change in their communities, the heated, intense competition for the philanthropic dollar and the frustration that I felt at seeing so many talented people out there who wanted to create for themselves--and the folks they cared about--the possibilities for change and growth and development and empowerment. And yet, we [at the California Community Foundation] couldn’t respond as an organization in most cases because the philanthropic dollar that we had to give out was limited. I wanted so much to find ways in which I could engage with those people in a different way. . . .

A fellow named Albert Rodriguez came to me, a lawyer at Latham & Watkins, with this idea for something he called the Foundation for Emerging Philanthropies. He’d seen it from the point of view of a lawyer for a long time. He was getting hit up for pro bono assistance all the time--the law firm was--and he was having to incorporate a lot of groups that he didn’t know whether they had the remotest chance of success. And he kept asking himself, “Isn’t there a better way to do this?”

Q: Does Southern California have particular need for an organization devoted to mini-nonprofits?

A: We are in a big sea change as a community, I think. The mix of established political powers in the community--at the neighborhood level, and at the broader civic level--is in a state of profound flux. That flux is really a product, I think, of the immigration of the last 20 or so years; and it’s a product of a changing leadership environment, as well. . . .

The challenge of public leadership in the next millennium is to provide a vision for how this region will embrace and value its future and the kind of practical, ground-level organizing that will allow neighborhoods and businesses and the agencies of government to come together around that vision. It’s a tough task, but there is the possibility of public leadership out there that recognizes that there are coalitions that can make things happen. . . .

There are a lot of people out there with ideas for ways to make things different and ways to make this change work at the neighborhood level, at the organizational level and at the broader civic level. What we exist to do is provide the stage on which those folks can bring their change, anchor it and sustain it long enough to where it can either “take” in the charitable and civic marketplace--or fail cost-effectively.

Q: How many of your clients can be categorized as “failures?”

A: We probably expect that over time--say, a five-year period--that about 60% of the ideas are not going to take. . . . That falloff can happen for a variety of reasons. The idea may be too far ahead of its time. The leader may be unable to sufficiently market that idea to the right sources or get the access to those sources in a timely enough way to translate the idea and its power into funds and resources to support it. That can be a problem.

The failure can be because the person with the idea wasn’t the best person to put the idea into action in the first place. . . . There’s no perfect way to predict what ideas are going to anchor themselves in the civic marketplace until they’ve had a chance to percolate a little bit.

Q: Is lack of funds the primary reason for failure?

A: Fund-raising is absolutely a big part of it. But more than fund-raising, it’s convincing the right folks at the right time that this is the right idea and then building a constituency for the change such that it becomes undeniable that this is in fact the right thing to happen in the community. . . .

They have to be civic entrepreneurs in the best sense. They have to be consistent in their message, they have to be ready to respond to opportunities. Even then, there’s no guarantee of success. And that’s the challenge. Amazingly, small amounts of money in the right hands at the right time can leverage enormous effectiveness with organizing on the ground to get a service developed or something going in the community. One of the great things about the project leaders I see is that they are marvelously adept at being able to use a $2,500 contribution and extend the value of that deeply. It’s only when they get fat and happy as an organization that they begin to waste money and need to be reminded of their early roots.

Q: Is burnout a factor?

A: If you were out there for months on end in pursuit of something that you believed deeply in, and even if you had convinced people around you . . . , and you weren’t getting the responsiveness from the folks who could give you the seed funding or the capital to put that idea in place, your frustration level would grow. We see that.

What we are able to do to help ameliorate some of that is to provide a supportive environment to folks who are all suffering the same start-up pangs, who are in that high-entrepreneurial mode, who are seeking that niche that they’ll root themselves in eventually. What we can provide is a supportive environment for folks to talk to one another about what the difficulties are, what the challenges are, and what we find is that that supportive environment often helps ease some of the frustration level.

Q: What’s the role of philanthropy in this mix?

A: Philanthropy in Los Angeles needs to see the ways in which it can create and sustain organizations that play the role of a civic lobby. Which means lobbying for the greater interests of the whole of Los Angeles and linking neighborhoods and providing catalysts for action. And I think philanthropy has tended, in Los Angeles, to focus on . . . easily understandable subject areas like “youth” and “families” . . . , all of which are deeply important. Philanthropy needs to take a somewhat broader view in building in the nonprofit sector the civic lobby that can counterforce the bureaucratization that happens through government and the politicization that happens there and the resolve to pure economic interests that happen in the business sector.

Q: Where do all these things fit into the notion of community?

A: I see the nonprofit sector, and the motivations that cause people to create responses that are then built in the nonprofit sector, as the place in our society that allows for experimentation, allows for a compassionate but very practically oriented response to the complex problems of urban society. The sector is an essential expression of what community is all about. Community is about being able to create an organized response to the way in which people around you live their lives and build that response in a way that involves them and engages them in solving problems that they’re facing.

I think what happens in the nonprofit sector too often is we take the orientation that we’re simply out there to provide a one-way kind of service rather than a two-way kind of engagement with people who in many cases have the capacities to determine their own future. Our systematized approach to delivering service ignores that, minimizes it or, in some cases, completely obliterates it. I think we lose something in that interaction between institutional-service delivery and the people who need a step up.

Government has always, in the last 50 years, relied on nonprofit organizations as a service-delivery mechanism. A lot of that comes about because we distrust government to deliver services directly, and the nonprofit organizations, with their connections to neighborhoods and their direct connections to the people who are served, end up being the outlets for that public service. One of the problems that large nonprofits have is that they begin to look a lot like government, and bureaucratic prerogatives take over. The notion of not just delivering a service but empowering a person and dealing with helping them build their life fades into the background. It’s a problem.

Where I tend to see more innovation is in organizations that respect their role as deliverers of government-funded services but also make a concerted effort to find flexible funding from other sources--private individuals, businesses, foundations--that allows them the autonomy to experiment with new ways of engaging people in communities in solving their own problems and counterbalances an institutional momentum toward bureaucratizing service.

Those organizations that deliberately seek a balance between what they do with government funds and what they do in the pursuit of private funds that give them flexibility and autonomy, they are by far the more creative, innovative entities out there. There are many government-funded organizations of rather large scale in Los Angeles that have become islands. And they become islands isolated not just from other service-delivery and nonprofit organizations in their community, but from the very people that they serve. They become beholden to political interests, and they crowd out the possibilities of innovation on the next block over. And that’s a problem in Los Angeles that is replicated in cities throughout the country.

In some ways, it goes with the territory. In other ways, if there were a deliberate approach by government to think about seeding innovation in a very deliberate way, looking more at the grass-roots, emerging community groups that are not yet proven but have good leadership and good, capable people working for them, government money could fund a new kind of vitality in neighborhoods.

Q: What does it take for people to stop complaining and start doing something?

A: In many cases there are people who have felt, seen, in some way internalized a wrong or an inequity and thought to themselves, “I want to and can change that.” Now, some call those people idealists. I would call them, in many cases, people of action, people who believe that action changes things. . . .

The best people who I see going into community work today are the people who believe in the fundamental decency of other folks and who, despite all the contrary evidence that gets expressed in youth crime and shootings and poverty, are bullheaded enough to push through and who realize that they don’t have anything to lose in that process and are willing to take stands that are often controversial. And to be themselves a cheerleader for a more civil place to live. . . . It’s in all of us, in one way or another. *