Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

Mission Shift: Using And Evaluating Strategic Communications To Implement Organizational Change, Taryn Fort, Kelci Price

The Foundation Review

Strategic communications can play a role in implementing organizational change by reinforcing understanding of and advancing audiences to accept the changes that impact them. The Colorado Health Foundation uses strategic communications as an integral tool in achieving its organizational mission to improve the health of all Coloradans. Evidence reveals that it was critical to successfully announcing and implementing significant changes to how the foundation operates and invests.

This article profiles the strategic communications approach, from its inception through the application of learnings gathered from a subsequent evaluation. The success of the foundation’s “change” communications strategy was rooted in use of …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Integrating Funders Into A Multisector Transit-Equity Collaborative: Lessons From The Field, Davian Gagne

The Foundation Review

This article examines the efforts of Mile High Connects, a collaborative working to ensure that the Denver region’s $7.8 billion transit project benefits low-income communities and communities of color by connecting them to affordable housing, healthy environments, quality education, and good-paying jobs.

The collaborative, which includes local and national funders that have coalesced around the central issue of transit equity, has adopted a collective-impact model that has at its core two tools to measure and track its work and to show the social-impact outcomes achieved through its initiatives.

This article describes the collaborative’s approach to evaluation, reflects on its initial …

Tackling Big Issues Together: The Story Of One Funders Network Promoting The Mental Health Of Young Children, Whitney Gustin Connor, Colleen Church, Barbara Yondorf

The Foundation Review

In 2012, Rose Community Foundation and the Caring for Colorado Foundation supported an environmental scan on children’s behavioral health to better understand challenges and opportunities for philanthropic investment. In the wake of the report’s release they established the Funders Learning Network on Early Childhood Mental Health, an organization of more than 10 community, private, and family foundations, to develop shared strategies for promoting the behavioral health of young children and families.

This article examines the evolution of the network from a learning collaborative to an incubator for jointly funded initiatives. Among its collaborative funding efforts is LAUNCH Together, a five-year, …

Disrupting A Foundation To Put Communities First In Colorado Philanthropy, Nancy Csuti, Gwyn Barley

The Foundation Review

This article explores how The Colorado Trust confronted the fact that the lives of many Coloradans remained fundamentally unchanged after years of nonprofit-led grantmaking and, in response, developed a community-led grantmaking process aimed at achieving a new vision of health equity.

These shifts led to significant changes both within The Trust and in long-standing relationships with many nonprofits. The Trust dissolved its program department and replaced the program officer position with a team of “community partners” tasked with building relationships with residents in far-flung regions of the state. Resident groups were empowered to identify the needs in their own communities, …

How Do You Measure Up? Finding Fit Between Foundations And Their Evaluation Functions, Julia Coffman, Tanya Beer

The Foundation Review

As the number of foundations has grown, the philosophies and ways of working across the sector have diversified. This variance means that there is no one right model for how a foundation’s evaluation function should be designed. It is imperative for a foundation to think carefully about how the structure, position, focus, resources, and practices of its evaluation function can best fit its own needs and aspirations.

This article focuses on questions foundations can ask to assess that fit, and the specific considerations that can inform these decisions. It draws on 2015 benchmarking research conducted by the Center for Evaluation …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens, Ned Calonge

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Community-Based Versus Evidence-Based Philanthropy: A Case Study Of The Colorado Trust’S Early Initiatives, Douglas Easterling, Deborah Main

The Foundation Review

One of the dominant tensions in philanthropy involves the question of whether foundations should focus their grantmaking on projects that come from the community versus projects that have a base of scientific evidence. How a foundation answers this question leads to different strategic orientations.

This article describes how this tension was expressed and resolved during The Colorado Trust’s early years of initiative-based grantmaking. The community-based philosophy is illustrated through the Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative, while Home Visitation 2000 serves as an exemplar of the evidence-based approach. The Colorado School Health Education Initiative purposefully integrated the two philosophies.

The community-based and …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teresa Behrens, Vikki Spruill

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Knowledge As Leadership, Belonging As Community: How Canadian Community Foundations Are Using Vital Signs For Social Change, Susan Phillips, Ian Bird, Laurel Carlton, Lee Rose

The Foundation Review

The concept of “community” in community foundations is being reframed – less strictly tied to the specific locales that originally defined their boundaries and increasingly about a process of engagement and a resulting sense of belonging.

The greatest asset of a community foundation is not the size of its endowment, but its knowledge of community and ability to use this knowledge for positive change.

This article explores the Canadian network of community foundations’ use of the reporting tool Vital Signs to implement a knowledge-driven approach to leadership and how it is using this knowledge in more inclusive, engaged models of …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Strengthening Youth Leadership In A Metropolitan Region: Examining Lessons From A Multiyear Community Foundation Initiative, Katie Richards-Schuster, Katie G. Brisson

The Foundation Review

This article examines the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan’s launch of a broad-based, multilayered strategy to promote youth leadership in the region, and showcases what can be accomplished when foundations invest in such strategies.

In partnership with the University of Michigan School of Social Work and the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, the foundation helped develop comprehensive programs aimed at building the capacity of youth-serving organizations to engage youth as leaders, support a youth-driven research assessment and social-justice project, and provide funds for youth-run efforts aimed at strengthening the region’s schools and communities.

As …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Following The Money: An Analysis Of Foundation Grantmaking For Community And Economic Development, Keith Wardrip, William Lambe, Mels De Zeeuw

The Foundation Review

The article challenges the perception among some in the field of community and economic development that small and socioeconomically distressed metro areas do not attract a proportional share of grant capital from the nation’s largest foundations.

The analysis presented in this article reviewed nearly 169,000 community and economic development grants made by the largest foundations between 2008 and 2013 to identify metro- area characteristics that are associated with higher levels of grant receipt.

The density of nonprofit organizations and the presence of large, local foundations are shown to be consistently significant predictors of grant receipt. After controlling for these and …

Community Innovation Network Framework: A Model For Reshaping Community Identity, William P. Moore, Adena M. Klem, Cheryl L. Holmes, June Holley, Carlie Houchen

The Foundation Review

The REACH Healthcare Foundation created its Rural Health Initiative to encourage the development of innovative strategies to improve access to health care and reduce health inequities in three rural counties in Missouri and Kansas. The intent was to develop a systematic, sustainable, and coordinated approach to community change that would increase the odds of breaking through the persistent barriers to health care access for the rural poor and medically underserved in these counties.

This article discusses the foundation’s original approach to the initiative and how it adjusted that approach in response to its rural partners’ experiences. It reflects on the …

Foundation Support Of Immigrant Communities: Insights From A Survey Of Immigrants In Minnesota’S Twin Cities, Nicole Martinrogers, Ryan Evans, Paul Mattessich

The Foundation Review

Immigration brings both benefits and challenges to communities. This article provides insight into the needs of these communities and offers suggestions for how foundations can consider immigrant and refugee communities in their work.

This article combines information from Minnesota Compass, a foundation-governed social-indicators initiative, and Speaking for Ourselves, a study of immigrants and refu- gees in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metropolitan area that identifies the needs and strengths immigrants bring to our communities.

The results can help guide foundations and their grantees on how to improve a community’s quality of life for immigrants and refugees – to the benefit of all …

A New Domain For Place-Rooted Foundations: Economic Development Philanthropy, Deborah Markley, Janet Topolsky, Don Macke, Travis Green, Kristin Feierabend

The Foundation Review

This article suggests that economic development philanthropy is a new domain for place-rooted foundations, and highlights the important system-actor role that these foundations can and are playing to advance economic development that produces better outcomes for families and communities.

Economic development philanthropy requires foundations to play integrating or missing roles to advance regional economic development – that they act to fill gaps that other organizations and agencies in the community or region are not addressing. To ensure that a foundation is playing this value-added role requires identifying what others are doing and the outcomes they are seeking or achieving – …

Partnering For Impact: Developing The Mcknight Foundation’S Carbon Efficiency Strategy, Gayle Peterson

The Foundation Review

This case study challenges us to redefine our definitions of community and philanthropic practice as we tackle global climate change — one of the most Wicked Problems facing our planet and our people. Driven by a deep commitment to “walk the talk,” CEO Kate Wolford and McKnight Foundation leadership committed $100M of the foundation’s endowment to find solutions to global warming. This bold step required building a new type of partnership with McKnight’s team of financial advisors — Mellon Capital Management, Mercer, and Imprint Capital (now Goldman Sachs). McKnight and Mellon Capital had to build a new cross sector partnership …

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Getting Real With Strategy: Insights From Implementation Science, Douglas Easterling, Allison Metz

The Foundation Review

Foundations are increasingly coming to appreciate the importance of strategy. But simply having a strategy – even an explicit strategy – does not guarantee that a foundation will actually achieve its goals.

To implement a strategy effectively, a foundation needs to operationalize it in the form of specific functions that staff will carry out and needs to create an organizational infrastructure that supports the strategy. The field of implementation science offers a set of tools for helping foundations address these tasks.

After introducing some general principles of implementation science, this article describes in depth the concepts of practice profiles, which …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teri Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Partnerships, Paradigms, And Social-System Change, Patricia Jessup, Beverly Parsons, Marah Moore

The Foundation Review

Social systems structures stem from underlying paradigms that are made up of beliefs, perspectives, and assumptions. Changing paradigms is a powerful way to change social systems. Such change is difficult and old paradigms keep pulling systems back to their former state.

This article examines three types of partnerships that focus on these deep structures and paradigms, and that go beyond implementing a project or initiative to create fundamental, lasting change in the underlying beliefs, perspectives, and assumptions on which such systems are grounded.

The functions of each type – project focused, formal-systems-focused, and community-grounded partnerships – are identified, along with …

Building A Field: Blue Shield Of California Foundation's Strong Field Project Leaves A Legacy And Valuable Lessons, Hanh Cao Yu, Jennifer Henderson-Frakes, Lucia Corral Peña

The Foundation Review

Relatively few comprehensive evaluations have assessed the principles, elements, and impacts of philanthropic organizations’ field-building endeavors. To help fill this gap, this article shares the results of a five-year evaluation of a large-scale field-building initiative: Blue Shield of California Foundation’s Strong Field Project.

The project’s goal was to strengthen the domestic violence field by equipping it with a critical mass of diverse individuals and organizations to lead a stronger movement to end domestic violence in California. Its approach aimed to strengthen field leadership and organizations, and to create vibrant collaborative networks.

Evaluation data show that the project achieved much of …

Developing A Framework For Grant Evaluation: Integrating Accountability And Learning, Shelley Scherer

The Foundation Review

Despite broad consensus among foundations on the value of capturing grant outcomes, there is no consensus on what to evaluate and how to define success, which makes it difficult for staff and grantees to navigate and apply multiple interpretations of evaluation “best practices.”

This article presents three questions designed to help foundations develop a framework for grant evaluation that reflects their beliefs about accountability and learning, balances evaluation costs and benefits, acknowledges the diversity of grants within the foundation’s portfolio, and allows their grantees to understand the foundation’s expectations for evaluation reporting.

A key takeaway from this article, drawn from …