Case Studies
Administrative Consolidation

Women’s Crisis Support – Defensa de Mujeres

Based on interviews with Celia Organista, Executive Director of Women’s Crisis Support – Defensa de Mujeres, and Martina O’Sullivan, former board president of Women’s Crisis Support

Background

Women’s Crisis Support (WCS) was founded in 1977 to serve abused woman and their children in Santa Cruz County, California. In 1988, a group of employees left WCS in response to the organization’s perceived insensitivity to the needs of women of color. In 1990, these women established a new organization called Defensa de Mujeres (Defensa) in Watsonville to serve the needs of Latinas in the southern part of Santa Cruz County.

In 1997, WCS and Defensa both found themselves without an executive director. Celia Organista was hired as the new E.D. at Defensa, at which point the board of WCS contacted Defensa’s Board of Directors and proposed that the two organizations come back together. WCS and Defensa began merger negotiations and voted to rejoin as one organization, taking the name of Women’s Crisis Support – Defensa de Mujeres.

In 1999, the two organizations “merged” under an administrative consolidation. Though they remain two legally separate nonprofit agencies, Women’s Crisis Support and Defensa de Mujeres operate their programs under one set of management. Thus, while they both offer similar services, their capacity to offer those services countywide has been greatly enhanced. For example, Defensa was forced to close its emergency shelter in Watsonville, CA, after a significant loss in funding, but has been able to continue offering that service to clients through WCS. Likewise, the majority of funding for domestic violence prevention services is through Defensa, but clients of WCS are able to access those services because of the agency’s relationship with Defensa.

The partnership represents the rejoining of two agencies with a long history of acrimony and suspicion. To implement the consolidation, the leadership needed to overcome a high level of tension amongst the staff, an overall lack of trust, the involvement of a union, and a geographical and client split. The organization used some well-known strategies as well as other highly creative approaches — including open management committee meetings and an annual merger anniversary party — to achieve what is now seen as a successful merger.

Implementation Challenges

Because of their tumultuous history, there was a deep-rooted sense of mistrust and misperception among the staffs of the two organizations. “That was the biggest problem,” acknowledged Celia Organista, the pre-merger executive director of Defensa de Mujeres and current executive director of Women’s Crisis Support – Defensa de Mujeres. “The two organizations really hated each other.”

Martina O’Sullivan, former board president of Women’s Crisis Support, said that the organizations never let go of the past conflicts. Managing that tension, explained Martina, required a lot of time and attention. “Stories about the other agency had been passed down through staff turnover and changes. Many of the same issues that we were dealing with in 1988 and 1989 — when the agencies originally split — were still the issues that were the most challenging. Small agencies generally have a high turnover, so what that said to me is that those stories got passed on, even as people left.”

Another layer of staff tension was created by the fact that the non-managerial staff of WCS had been unionized before the organizations began merger discussions. Martina acknowledged that was a unique situation. “That was an unusual thing for a small nonprofit, and there were many, many questions as to how or why that happened.” Not only did joining a union create more complications for the Defensa staff, it also required another series of negotiations and conversations with labor attorneys.

“In general,” Martina said, “there was a lack of trust. There was a lot of suspicion on both sides about how services were provided, how clients were treated, and so forth. This was a very difficult part of implementation — building trust between two staffs and creating one new culture/organization.” People are change-resistant, Martina noted, and “we had to be patient.”

Not only did the leadership need to blend the staff, but also the programs had to be merged and the focus redefined. Although it is one single county, Santa Cruz is often referred to as separate areas — North County and South County — due primarily to the different cultural make-up of the areas; the South, centered on Watsonville, is primarily Latino. Before the merger, WCS focused its services on the North County, while Defensa, based in Watsonville, focused on the Latino community in the South. As Celia said, “I think that Woman’s Crisis Support had a different philosophy than that of Defensa in Watsonville.” It was decided that Celia would lead the post-merger organization, and she commented that, “the fact that I am Latina and very committed to services to Latinas created a lot of resistance within WCS.”

Building the New Organization

To overcome these obstacles, the leadership of both organizations worked hard to assuage fears and build support for the process. “I think it all comes from the fear people have when they are not included in the discussions from the beginning. You need to get buy-in and allow people to say what they need to, and then work hard to assure them.”

First and foremost, Martina said, there was a focus on the mission. “People came to the table with the intent that these two agencies be one. There was an acknowledgement that this consolidation was important, not just for these two groups, but also for the community. There was agreement that this needed to happen, and it was the perfect time for it.”

Two-way communication was very important throughout the process. Celia kept the staff informed and made herself accessible in order to build support. “I found that the more I communicated with staff, the more they trusted me,” Celia said. She found that good listening was important. “They know that I want their opinions because I sit and I listen to them. The staff needed me to hear what was going on from their perspective.”

Celia’s leadership style allowed her to take on the critical role as champion of the process while building support for it. Martina explained that there were leaders in both camps: “Women’s Crisis Support had a management team, and Defensa had a team. And so it was important that those teams first evolved into leaders of the integration process. That’s where the trust-building begins, and that’s what Celia focused on — trying to bridge the leadership in both agencies. Once that had been done, their leadership and their behaviors would flow down to the rest of the staff.” Celia described this as management modeling: the leadership team acts as a model for the rest of staff. As Celia said, “the focus is always on how we work together.”

There was a conscious use of team building to create one entity and one culture, even though the organizations remain legally separate corporations. “We did it with counselors, we did it with separate teams, we did it together, and we did it with just managers and just staff. It was very important and it was very necessary. And what ultimately happened was that the people that were most resistant to the change left. They eventually had to leave because what they saw was that they were not going to accomplish their goal, which was to have us not work together.”

To encourage the even flow of information and demystify the process, Celia invited staff representatives to participate on management teams. For example, she created cross-level teams — including board members through line-staff from both of the partners — to modify the personnel policies and develop short and long-term strategic plans. She felt that once people saw and heard what went on, they realized that decisions were made by a group and felt that they could trust the process. “We really are all working together.”

The consolidated organization retained both sites, a factor which presented another challenge to the leadership as it worked to develop a sense of a single, unified organization. In addition to bridging different cultures and integrating practices of the former organizations, the management team needed to reach across distant locations that represented the cultures and service approaches of the former organizations. Management was careful in the language it used, always identifying the offices as “sites,” as opposed to distinct organizations. Staff members regularly interchange among sites and meet jointly for all team and staff meetings at alternating locations.

The management team developed other creative strategies to build a sense of oneness. For example, there were lots of parties, including a merger birthday party. At the first meeting after the merger, and then again on the first anniversary, the staff celebrated with a cake. By the third year, it didn’t seem necessary to commemorate the merger because the two organizations seemed well integrated, but there were still a number of parties and social gatherings planned by committees with representatives from each of the sites. “We try really hard to do a lot of fun things together. There was a surprise party for staff one year and it was such a great time.”

Lessons Learned

While the two organizations were able to overcome many of the obstacles, Celia realized that the implementation process could have gone more smoothly with even more communication. “I probably would have had staff meetings every other week and let staff ask whatever they wanted. Sometimes I got caught up in my own world, and I forgot that I needed to communicate with people — and that’s difficult for someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

Celia said that she would have tried to be even clearer to build trust. “It has to be clear what you are doing, what the vision is, what the goal is, what’s true, and what’s not true. I’ve always had an open door policy, and I’ve always told them that, but not everybody knew me. And they didn’t trust me, and they didn’t trust each other.”

Today, Celia makes sure to meet individually with every new staff member to explain the structure of the organization, its mission and traditions, and the accepted methods of conflict resolution. This enables her to orient them to the organization’s culture and norms, and explain that they are operated and identified as one unified entity.

Once the consolidation between Women’s Crisis Support and Defensa de Mujeres had been completed, another nonprofit organization approached Celia to talk about merging. Celia recommended against this merger to the board, however, because the other organization’s financial situation was too dire. She also felt that the programmatic fit was not appropriate for WCS-Defensa.

With the first experience under her belt, Celia gave the following advice: “Make sure you have all of the information. Then analyze it and be really clear if this is going to work or not. Look carefully at all the possible outcomes, and don’t go into it until you have clearly identified the obstacles. Even then, there is no guarantee that the process will be easy.”