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).
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Paul Vandeventer
LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW
A Big Idea Among Nonprofits: Thinking About the Small Stuff
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?"
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