Such confidence drove David Lunsford, a 15-year veteran of Dell
Computer Corporation, to help found
Austin Social Venture Partners
two years ago. The group now boasts more than 100 partners, each of
whom contributes a minimum of $5,000 for a voting membership. Many
give more. But beyond writing checks, the members - among them Dell
managers, attorneys, public relations execs, and CPAs - stand ready
to invest their intellectual capital in the nonprofit agencies ASVP
decides to help. Some take seats on the nonprofits' boards, while
others help them set up benefit plans, develop PR campaigns, avoid
liability problems, or draft five-year business plans. The partners
have made numerous grants, typically ranging from $20,000 to
$60,000, to organizations working on education and health-related
issues.
Lunsford says that ASVP invests in "fixing the root causes" of
various social problems. He notes, for example, the troubling rise
in the incidence of
diabetes among low-income groups. Because many
cases of diabetes can be traced to poor diet, Lunsford says, ASVP
plowed money into an Austin-area nonprofit called The Sustainable
Food Center, which educates people about the relationship between
diet and diabetes, and offers information about buying and cooking
healthy foods.
"Promoting a good diet can significantly reduce the onset of adult
diabetes later in life," says Lunsford. "So you get out of this
cycle of just treating the symptoms. We think an investment in the
front end here will pay off tenfold or a hundredfold down the
road."
Lunsford and ASVP believe that venture philanthropy will help bring
what he calls "market sense" to the nonprofit world. In one
surprising move, ASVP even engineered a merger between two small
nonprofits that were working on different aspects of the same
problem. Handling the details was a former Disney executive.