In 2005, Aronson sought guidance from a consulting firm to assess the nonprofit’s structure, and, on the consultant’s advice, reorganized the staff and board. She is the executive medical director. She makes all decisions related to what services to provide and where, but the bulk of the day-to-day planning and execution falls to a chief programming officer and a new executive director. If anything were to happen that put Aronson out of commission, the executive director and board of directors would assume her tasks.

BOBBY SHRIVER uses retail as a vehicle to sustain his philanthropic goals. He and rock star Bono started (RED), a project with the goal of raising money to combat AIDS in Africa.

As a long-term solution, with more senior managers and a more active board now in place, the charity can potentially forge ahead without Phillips as well. Nonetheless, both he and Aronson are devoting even more time to building stronger connections for the Worldwide Orphans Foundation. By creating symbiotic relationships, the pair can underscore the long-term need for and impact of their foundation in the closely knit community of nonprofits. Aronson is now working in collaboration with the Clinton Foundation in Ethiopia, whereby the organization of the former president provides office space for her charity. Clinton’s foundation also helped Worldwide Orphans obtain free antiretrovirals from the Ethiopian government. Aronson is also working on programs that involve partnerships with local governments.

These types of collaborative arrangements, in fact, can prove as important as fundraising in terms of ensuring a charity’s sustainability. David La Piana, a nonprofit consultant based near San Francisco, reached this verdict in a Ford Foundation-funded study, Real Collaboration: A Guide for Grantmakers, published in 2001. Examining grant-makers who wanted to be more collaborative with their grantees, La Piana wrote: "A large-scale initiative, an effort at ‘systems change,’ or any other complex social undertaking, usually requires coordination of efforts among multiple parties."

Charles Raymond, managing director of Citigroup’s Global Wealth Management practice, has served as president of the Citigroup Foundation, commissioner of the New York City Department of Homeless Services and managing director of the New York City Ballet. He grappled recently with the idea of multiple-party coordination with a client focused on helping a village in Africa. The Spanish woman had vacationed in Tanzania and was so moved by the plight of starving individuals in a village there that she proceeded to fund the construction of several buildings, including a mosque, church and a hospital, to which she flew in Spanish doctors to provide treatment. Raymond looked at all she had done, and informed her that her tremendous generosity was endangering the community. "She sort of just stared at me," Raymond recalls. "She was successful and was having a great run." But she had unwittingly created a situation in which the town became completely dependent on her largesse.

Raymond says the donor needed partners in order to create a sustainable legacy. He began introducing new options to her last fall. Since then, she has considered launching a collaborative effort with a medical school in Tanzania to create a residency program rather than flying in doctors from Spain. She and Raymond will also begin talking with other interested donors about developing more joint efforts and will begin creating a long-term plan this year, he says.

Bobby Shriver recently helped launch one of the most popular and visible philanthropic collaborations in recent years. Shriver, a scion of the Kennedy-Shriver clan, is chairman of DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), which he cofounded in 2002 with rock star Bono to fight AIDS. But rather than funding these causes himself, Shriver worked with Bono to create a retail campaign to not only raise awareness of his pet issues, but to also raise money for the Global Fund, which seeks to combat AIDS in Africa.

Dubbed (RED), the project has some of the world’s largest retailers creating specialty products, with celebrities such as Steven Spielberg and Penelope Cruz serving as models. In the program’s first five months in 2006, sales of (RED) products generated $10 million for the Global Fund, five times the revenue raised by the nonprofit in five years, Shriver says. Today, the Global Fund claims to provide 50 percent of worldwide donor funding for malaria, two-thirds for tuberculosis and roughly 25 percent of all philanthropic money to fight HIV/AIDS in the developed world.