The McKnight and Ways to Work Connections
For Carol Berde, the opportunity to be an impact player came early during her tenure at The McKnight Foundation.
“It was 1984. I don’t know if the term ‘economic self-sufficiency’ had been invented then,” she says. “Regardless, at the time the hallmark of The McKnight Foundation, as it continues to be, was using its financial and program resources to help make life easier for struggling people.”
The Single Parent Loan Program began as the result of a dinner meeting hosted by Berde’s boss (the CEO of McKnight), a professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of social work, and Berde. A dozen women were invited to join them. Each was a single, student mother.
“At that time you could still be on welfare and be a full-time student at a four-year institution,” Berde says. “But their welfare grants had been cut substantially; this was the first round of welfare cuts in the (President Ronald) Reagan administration. And the question we put to them was, ‘What do you and your family need to advance economically?’”
She continues, “Not surprisingly we heard that the answer was money.” But what was surprising was the form in which these 12 women said they wanted to receive that money: as a loan.
“No more handouts, no more grants, no more gifts. They wanted the dignity of a loan that they could repay,” Berde says.
That appealed tremendously to leadership at The McKnight Foundation, and thus the Single Parent Loan Program was born.
Later, the Alliance for Children and Families, then know as Family Service America, came into the picture in the form of its president and CEO, Peter Goldberg.
Berde says, “Peter led an organization that had, as members, several hundred organizations whose expertise was social work for just the kind of families that the Single Parent Loan Program had been helping.”
Berde recalls a neighborhood tour she participated in with Goldberg during a national funders’ conference. “If I remember the details … Peter (Goldberg) was sitting next to someone on the bus from the Bank of America, and the banker drew on the back of an envelope a little outline of how the program could be funded and expanded on a national level.”
Goldberg was enthralled by the expansion opportunity and the ability of the Alliance and its network of members to take the program to the next level under a new name, Ways to Work. As for Bank of America, it remains one of Ways to Works’ major supporters.
Initially, Berde says the thinking was that the funds for expanding the program would come from Congress. That didn’t happen, but The McKnight Foundation made a loan—later, in 2000, converted to a grant—of $5 million to Ways to Work to get the program started, along with support from other valued early funders.
McKnight also made some smaller grants to start the program at a handful of Alliance member organizations. Today, Ways to Work has been expanded so that it operates at more than 40 Alliance member organizations—and more growth is planned for the future (see article on page 18 of this issue of the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine).
However, the path to success wasn’t without challenges. “I think there has always been a very healthy tension in the program between the banking part and the social work part,” Berde says. “Our challenge is to keep a balance. Over all this period of time, it’s never gotten to the point where one overpowered the other.”
That’s largely, she says, thanks to strong stewardship of the program on the part of Ways to Work (and Alliance) CEO Peter Goldberg and Ways to Work President Jeff Faulkner, as well as former Ways to Work leaders.
“They deserve a lot of credit for making sure that the board was composed of people who represented both of those lines of thinking,” she says.
Berde has also had a stewardship role. She has been a member of the Ways to Work Board of Directors since 1999, and for seven years she served as its chair.
“As a generalist, I have been able to help maintain that delicate balance between banking and social work because I have just enough knowledge of social work and just enough knowledge of banking that I can’t get too deeply into either one of them,” she says. “And I can therefore appreciate that both are essential to the program.”
Despite the tensions, changing times, and new challenges, Berde says the Ways to Work mission hasn’t wavered. “I continue to marvel at how the mission of Ways to Work is identical to the purpose of the original Single Parent Loan Program,” Berde says. “It has not changed in 25 years.”
