Business Commons^™

Project Renew Worcester, Danni Yue, Amy Zhang, Jing Han, Omid Ashrafi, Yiming Xu

School of Professional Studies

n The client for this capstone project is RENEW Worcester which is a fledgling solar power project whose main goals are to bring renewable energy in the form of solar power into local, primarily low-income communities and are committed to the mission of making the transition off of fossil fuels to clean, renewable power. Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, they are a local chapter of Co-op Power which is a consumer-owned sustainable energy cooperative (co-op) made up of numerous different local chapters all over the New England area as well as the state of New York. The problem that we will …

A Partnered Approach To School Change In A Rural Community: Reflections And Recommendations, Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Mary Fant Donnan, Dianne Garcia, Melinda Snead-Johnson, Eugene Kotulka, Lia Sandilos

The Foundation Review

With so many education policies and practices made at the local level, community-based foundations are in a unique position to support their local school districts in taking a comprehensive, systematic approach to improving the lives of young people. This article describes a research–practice partnership designed to produce school improvement in a rural community in western Virginia and reflects on a three-year collaboration among The Alleghany Foundation, two school districts, and the University of Virginia.

The partners identified challenges and strengths within the school districts and the community; gathered and analyzed existing district data and new findings from interviews and surveys …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Community Navigation As A Field Of Practice: Reframing Service Delivery To Meet The Needs Of Communities’ Marginalized Populations, Joby Schaffer, M. Julie Patiño, P. Barclay Jones, Ladawn Sullivan

The Foundation Review

Community navigators help individuals and families access local services and assistance through a combination of referrals and interpersonal support. The Denver Foundation launched the Basic Human Needs Navigator Learning Community in February 2014 to help navigators working with local organizations and community members practicing navigation independently improve their practice and identify similarities and differences in their approaches.

This article discusses the multiyear, peer-learning project, including the general lessons the foundation learned about both navigation and the use of a learning-community approach to reach its field-building goals.

Reports from participating organizations and community members over four years suggest the efficacy of …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

A New Tool For New Times? Using Geographic Information Systems In Foundations And Other Nonprofit Organizations, Jeffrey L. Brudney, Christopher R. Prentice

The Foundation Review

The literature on nonprofit organizations exhorts them to understand and develop their communities’ strengths and capacities. Yet, identifying those communities, appreciating the conditions that affect them, and integrating organizational stakeholders can pose difficulties for any nonprofit, including foundations.

This article examines how a tool relatively new to nonprofits — geographic information systems — can be used to support community building by bringing together different stakeholders. A geographic information system is designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data, thus allowing an organization to map its community and share that visualization with its stakeholders.

This article …

Creating Habits For Inclusive Change, Pennie Foster-Fishman, Erin Watson

The Foundation Review

The act of transforming community outcomes requires diverse stakeholders across an array of settings to become actors of change. While this movement to action lies at the heart of effective community change, it also remains one of the most challenging aspects of collective work.

Drawing from the ABLe Change Framework systems-change model, this article presents four processes used in numerous communities across the United States to effectively engage diverse stakeholders in taking actions to improve local systems. These processes prioritize the voices of the most disadvantaged within communities and engage them as key actors in the change process.

This article …

An End To Business As Usual: Nurturing Authentic Partnerships To Create Lasting Community Change, Jeffrey Sunshine, Bernadette Sangalang

The Foundation Review

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation created Starting Smart and Strong, a 10-year place-based initiative in three California communities, to develop and test solutions that support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare young children to be healthy and ready for school. The initiative brings together public and private partners to create comprehensive early-learning systems and ultimately scale what works.

This article offers key insights into the foundation’s experience, three years into implementation, with managing this complex initiative and how program officers were compelled to think differently about the best roles staff can play to support grantee communities and amplify …

Book Review: The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence For The Social Sector, Veena Pankaj

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Equity For All: Building The Infrastructure For Change Through Community-First Funder Collaboratives, Ellen Braff-Guajardo, Kaying Hang, Leslie Cooksy, Monica Braughton, Fontane Lo

The Foundation Review

Foundations increasingly recognize that improving conditions in many communities requires addressing inequities in access to rights and resources. Yet there are challenges to effective investment in underresourced regions, especially when foundations have limited familiarity with the region and may assume limited local capacity to leverage philanthropic investments.

This article discusses how Sierra Health Foundation partnered with other California and national foundations to establish the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund, a collaborative whose grants focus on strengthening the capacity of communities and organizations in the Valley to advance policy and systems changes that promote health and racial equity.

This article highlights …

By Us And For Us: A Story Of Early Childhood Development Systems Change And Results In A Rural Context, Lisa Payne Simon, Kirsten Scobie, Phoebe Backler, Catherine Mcdowell, Charles Cotton, Susan Cloutier, Clare Nolan

The Foundation Review

Since 2007, the Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund — a donor-advised fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation — has invested in early childhood development in Coös County — New Hampshire’s largest and most rural and economically disadvantaged county. Community providers from a range of disciplines formed strong professional relationships and agreed on common goals and evidence-based strategies to improve services for children and families.

This article describes how local community members joined forces with the fund to create an integrated early childhood development system for Coös’ children and families. It provides background on the investment and initiative strategy, summarizes …

Thriving Communities: A Model For Community-Engaged Grantmaking, Mary Francis, Colleen Desmond, Jeffrey Williams, Jennifer Chubinski, Jennifer Zimmerman, Ashlee Young

The Foundation Review

Interact for Health is a health conversion foundation serving the three-state region of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio. Its current community change initiative, Thriving Communities, is a community-learning model that helps embed health promotion and advocacy work in communities while those communities build an equitable infrastructure with stakeholders to more rapidly spread evidence-based practices.

This article explores the three tools developed for the Thriving Communities initiative: Success Markers, the Developmental Pathway, and Relationship Mapping. Interact for Health has found that these tools build core competencies and confidence among grantees as well as a process for community engagement that produces results at the …

Fostering Change And Fresh Voices: Vancouver Foundation’S Youth Engagement Journey, Trilby Smith

The Foundation Review

Since 2011, Vancouver Foundation has invested significant time, energy, ideas, and money in bringing together immigrant and refugee youth and young people with lived experience of the foster care system in British Columbia.

Through its Fostering Change and Fresh Voices initiatives, the foundation has listened and worked in partnership with these young people to address the issues that affect their lives, and important progress has been made in the forms of meaningful policy changes and improved political engagement. The foundation is now in the process of returning these initiatives to the communities that inspired them.

This article describes the roles …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Decolonizing Wealth, Juan Olivarez

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Viability Of Zero-Based Budgeting Methods In The City Of Albuquerque, Justin P. O'Shea

Shared Knowledge Conference

This project’s objective is to study and propose an alternative budgeting method for use by the City of Albuquerque’s municipal government. Zero-base budgeting (ZBB) is a modern government budgeting process that allocates funds starting from a base of zero for operating units and requires annual justification of all resource and service items in the budget. Although traditional ZBB is rare in practice, local and state governments in the United States are starting to utilize elements of ZBB and are incorporating ZBB methods into their current budgeting process. Interannual variability in economic standing and resultant municipal revenues has prompted the City …

Creating A Workplace Culture Of Civility And Respect: Preventing Unlawful Harassment And Discrimination, Rose Davenport

Shared Knowledge Conference

This research project identifies a plan to study best practices addressing unlawful workplace harassment and discrimination in New Mexico-based hospital healthcare systems. Initially, this project focusses on Presbyterian Healthcare Services and the University of New Mexico Hospital, with the possibility of including other local healthcare systems. In light of recent developments from “#MeToo” and “Time’s Up” movements, the issues of unlawful sexual harassment and discrimination are hot topics in today’s society and need to be more openly addressed by all levels of an organization, in order to identify these issues head-on and hopefully prevent them from continuing to occur in …

Riding The Seesaw Between Artist And Administrator, Elise L. Kieffer Phd

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

The road toward arts administration often begins with art practice. This can be problematic, as artists are educated and trained to be practitioners of their art form. Experience and education in the requisite administrative skills is too often learned on the job, as one is thrust into a new role with entirely new and separate responsibilities and different priorities. This disparity can lead to confused priorities, disorganization, and lack of professionalization of administrative services. Beginning with an examination of classical pragmatism and its historic emphasis on plurality, coherence and integration, moving into the contemporary applications of pragmatism as a mediating …

Impact Of Payment Technology Innovations On The Traditional Financial Industry: A Focus On China, Meifeng Yao, He Di, Xianrong Zheng, Xiaobo Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

With the rapid advent of e-commerce in China, the technological innovation of third-party payment has experienced explosive growth. This important technological innovation, initiated by emerging Internet companies, is helping the traditional financial industry's payment business-represented by commercial banks-expand in both depth and breadth. Meanwhile, there is also a large degree of substitution, competition and crowding out among these banks in terms of the traditional financial industry's basic payment and settlement functions, potential customers, deposit and loan services and traditional intermediary business. This paper explores the impact (episodic and long-term steady-state) of the technological innovation of payment on commercial banks. It …

From Charitable Giving To Strategic Impact: The Fremont Area Community Foundation, Carla A. Roberts

The Foundation Review

In 2011, the Fremont Area Community Foundation launched a community investment strategy, focused on education, poverty, and economic development, that shaped corresponding aspirational goals aimed at improving the quality of life for residents of rural Newaygo County, Mich.

While there had been significant community involvement and input into foundation planning for a number of years, the announcement of these strategic goals and their implementation created some apprehension among the local nonprofits. The new funding paradigms were a big change, and it took several years for many of the grantees, with assistance in the form of backbone services and tools to …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Bringing Legacy To Life: How Video Storytelling Inspires Multigenerational Involvement In Family Philanthropy, Kelly C. Medinger, Debbie M. Brodsky

The Foundation Review

Most family foundations go through some sort of process to define donor intent and formalize their values, whether at the beginning of their life span or after their founders’ passing. Video is a powerful tool in that process, vividly bringing stories to life for family members, older and younger alike. So how can video help foundations capture the important story of their donor intent and legacy, and use it to inspire future involvement in their mission?

With the experience of the Marion I. & Henry J. Knott Foundation serving as the backdrop, this article examines how a donor legacy video …

Editorial, Michael Moody

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Leading With Values: Grants Management And The Case For More Consistent, Effective Grantmaking Practices, Elizabeth Myrick, Nikki Powell, Tonia Bain

The Foundation Review

This article identifies and explores a set of philanthropic priorities and aspirations that are widely shared by grantmakers today, and examines how the notion of shared values might inspire a fieldwide pursuit of more consistent, effective, values-driven grantmaking practices.

To study the relationship between grantmaker values and grantmaking practices, a survey of more than 300 organization members of PEAK Grantmaking, a national association of specialists in grants management, asked how the respondent foundations’ values influence their work. The results of the survey not only provided an overview of common values, but also captured reports from grantmakers on how their organizations …

A Visionary Organization: From Donor Intent To New Horizons Of Race And Gender Equity, Carolyn Chernoff, V Varun Chaudhry

The Foundation Review

This article documents the unique trajectory of the Leeway Foundation and its transition from sole-director family foundation to an independent foundation. Over 25 years, Leeway shifted in structure and grantmaking, yet has remained in line with its founder’s original mission: to fund women artists in the Philadelphia region.

This article focuses on the shift from the founder’s initial intentions to what is now an organization informed by models of racial and gender equity, funding women, trans, and gender nonconforming artists working for social change. Leeway thus serves as a case study for examining transformational shifts in mission, vision, and constituency …

Unplanned Donor Legacies: How To Avoid Them, And How One Family Foundation Corrected Course With An Evaluation, Saphira Maude Baker, Kelly Chopus, Casey Cox, Anita Mcginty

The Foundation Review

As funders turn to community change, intentionally addressing the unique power differential between funder and grantee partners and structuring ways to mitigate this imbalance is essential to honest communication. Funder relationships with their grantees impact the legacy of major community initiatives. This article explores this relationship and its effects through the lens of the recent evaluation of one family foundation — the Robins Foundation in Richmond, Virginia — and its follow-up actions.

Through a participatory evaluation process, we derived three principal approaches for this donor, and others, to consider in contemplating funder-grantee partnerships and the way these may influence the …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.