2018 Must-Reads

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What is something you read, listened to, or watched this year (regardless of when it came out) that impacted the way you think about your work? And why? We asked folks across the social sector for recommendations and were thrilled to see the incredible list they put together. Here’s what they said. What would you add? Comment below or tweet us.

Recommended by Kerrien Suarez (Equity in the Center)Lupe Poblano (CompassPoint)Dr. John Jackson (Schott Foundation), and Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group)

“’Decolonizing Wealth’ is brilliant and groundbreaking!” — Kerrien Suarez, Equity in the Center

Power Moves

Recommended by Jalisa Whitley (Unbound Impact) and Connor Daley (Talent Citizen)

“’Power Moves’ from NCRP reframed my thinking around leveraging and sharing power, and their webinar series was amazing.” — Jalisa Whitley, Unbound Impact

“’Power Moves’ from NCRP has been the most important resource for me this year! It has helped us understand our own power as a firm (a badly under-examined field) and provided our clients and partners with inclusive, equitable tools to gather feedback.” — Connor Daley, Talent Citizen

We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future

Recommended by Neesha Modi (Kresge Foundation)

“As an Indian American in this work, ‘We Too Sing America’ by Deepa Iyer has been personally profound.” — Neesha Modi, Kresge Foundation

The Mighty Miss Malone

Recommended by James Siegal (KaBOOM!)

“I read (with my 12-year-old daughter) ‘The Mighty Miss Malone’ by Christopher Paul Curtis. It’s a vivid, Depression-era portrait of 12-year-old Deza Malone, a girl with endless potential who is faced with challenges no kid should face – at the intersection of race, gender, class, and place.” — James Siegal, KaBOOM!

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Recommended by Lupe Poblano (CompassPoint)Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group), and Shawn Dove (Campaign for Black Male Achievement)

“Although I read adrienne maree brown’s ‘Emergent Strategy’ a couple years ago, it’s still active in my life and often in my suitcase!” — Elissa Sloan Perry, Management Assistance Group

“Introduced just this year to adrienne maree brown’s ‘Emergent Strategy.’ Been moving and marinating at a reflective pace! She says we should ‘see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.’” — Shawn Dove, Campaign for Black Male Achievement

Early Learnings from the Reframing Washington Empowerment Fund: Part 1 and Part 2

Recommended by Jalisa Whitley (Unbound Impact)

“I love the Weissberg Foundation’s blog, in particular their learnings from their Reframing Washington Empowerment Fund. It’s a great model of funder transparency.” — Jalisa Whitley, Unbound Impact

Entangled Roots: The Role of Race in Policies that Separate Families

Recommended by Alicia S. Guevara Warren (Michigan League for Public Policy)

“For me over the last year, I’ve done a lot of reading on the trauma caused by parental separation. I have been particularly moved by those who have been so courageous to share their stories—written and through video—to spur action and help people understand the impact the policy to separate families at the border was having. One report that I think is particularly helpful was from the Center for the Study of Social Policy called ‘Entangled Roots: The Role of Race in Policies that Separate Families.’ It helps to show all of the systems where we have policies that separate children and the roots of racism in those policies. It includes actions and recommendations, which is always important in policy work!” — Alicia S. Guevara Warren, Michigan League for Public Policy

Scene on Radio: Seeing White Series

Recommended by Nicky Goren (Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation)

“The podcast series from ‘Scene on Radio’ called ‘Seeing White’ should be required listening for white people, particularly those embarking on racial equity work in philanthropy.” — Nicky Goren, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation

“We need to correct and reframe our history.” — Nicky Goren, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation; Relevant recommendations from Nicky: Doctrine of Discovery (video) and Uncivil (podcast)

Does Collective Impact Really Make an Impact?

Recommended by Sara Gibson (20 Degrees)

“This piece really got at the [heart] of collective impact—how hard it is and how it really works, if you give it enough time and really involve the right people.” — Sara Gibson, 20 Degrees

Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State

Recommended by Colin Clemente Jones (Collins Foundation)

“My reading this year has really honed my thinking on power and place. For me, ‘Toward One Oregon’ from Oregon State University Press is at the top of the list. Definitely paradigm-shifting.” — Colin Clemente Jones, Collins Foundation

Additional recommendations by Colin: A Lot to Ask of a NameCity of Segregation: One Hundred Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles, and There Goes the Gayborhood?

“People follow you because of what you believe is possible, yes, for them as a team, and more importantly for each of them individually.” — MarkSteven Reardon, consultant; quote shared by Janice Johnson Dias, PhD (GrassROOTS Community Foundation) 

M Archive: After the End of the World

Recommended by Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group)

Raising Kings: A year of love and struggle at Ron Brown College Prep

Recommended by Dale Erquiaga (Communities In Schools) — See also this follow-up episode

The Need to Double Down

Recommended by Darell Hammond (formerly of KaBOOM!)

What Every BODY is Saying

Recommended by Andres Gonzalez (Holistic Life Foundation)

“It greatly enhanced my ability to read people and to better communicate with them based on some of their non-verbal cues.” — Andres Gonzalez, Holistic Life Foundation

Community-Led Change: A Capacity-Building Case Study

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“This is an excerpt of one case study in a suite of five focused on building grantee capacity. You can read the full case study on the GrantCraft website, and you can read an analysis and find links to all five case studies in our blog post “Five Elements for Success in Capacity Building.”

To make community change that sticks, the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation turns to those who know best what a neighborhood needs: community members themselves.

For more than 20 years, the foundation has invested in improving the quality of life for children and families living in low-income communities in Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The foundation works toward this goal by giving multiyear grants and capacity-building support to nonprofits that plan and implement neighborhood revitalization initiatives.

The foundation takes a robust approach to grantmaking that is long-term, resident-driven, and data-driven, integrating capacity-building support throughout partnerships with grantees that often last over a decade. This approach has resulted in significant development including new homes, strengthened commercial corridors, renovated community centers, safer parks, and more. The foundation has facilitated these outcomes by building the capacity of nonprofits and residents alike to continue to plan for and make lasting change in their communities even after the initiatives are complete.

Investing for the Long Haul

Long-term investing is in the foundation’s DNA. When two legacy banks—CoreStates Bank and First Union—merged in 1998, the endowed foundation was created to ensure that local communities didn’t lose the generous and focused support provided by CoreStates, which was known for its commitment to philanthropy and community development.

The merged entity was eventually acquired by Wells Fargo, which currently employs all five of the foundation’s staff members and carries on CoreStates’ legacy of community support.

WFRF initially experimented with different types of community development grants. The foundation knew that communities in their geographic footprint faced deeply rooted challenges like poverty.

“We knew that we were addressing a long-term problem, so we needed a long-term solution,” said Lois Greco, senior vice president and evaluation officer at the foundation. “You wouldn’t buy a house with a one-year loan. So why would you make a one-year grant to fund a 20-year solution?”

Head over to GrantCraft to continue reading.

To Go Further, Get Serious About Culture

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This blog was originally posted on the Collective Impact Forum blog. See the original post here.

We’ve all witnessed the importance of culture in organizations. Many leaders have seen their efforts fall apart because their team wasn’t aligned or power dynamics impeded their progress. On the other hand, others have been part of teams that built such a deep sense of trust that they took greater risks and ultimately achieved greater change.

Culture can speed up or slow down progress because, at the end of the day, we’re complex humans working with other complex humans. These same dynamics are at play in collaborative efforts such as collective impact initiatives. If we want to be successful at collective impact, stakeholders must define and tend to a shared culture across the collaborative.

While many of us can attest to the importance of culture from our experience working inside organizations, our research at Community Wealth Partners backs it up. When we examined various transformational initiatives that involved multiple stakeholders, including the anti-malaria movement and anti-smoking movement, in every instance, an intentional culture emerged as a necessary element in achieving dramatic change. And though each culture will be unique, the cultures in these change-making initiatives shared several characteristics:

  • A focus on outcomes
  • Transparency
  • Authenticity
  • Collaboration and partnership
  • Equity and inclusion
  • Continuous learning and improvement
  • Openness to risk and change

Whether your collective is newly formed or has worked together for years, you can take concrete steps to build, strengthen and maintain culture.

How to Build Culture in a Collective

Culture is defined as the “way we do things around here” or, more formally, the values (what we care about) and behaviors (specific actions to live out the values) that guide how we interact. Explicitly stating values and behaviors can help inform a group’s decisions and how individuals interact with each other. It can prove particularly important in moments of tension, grounding groups in shared values and helping them productively work through conflict.

A first step in getting intentional about culture is to start a conversation about what core values guide the group’s collaboration. You’ll want just a few values, ideally no more than five. The clearer and more concise they are, the easier they will be for members of the collective to remember. For example, one of the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance’s values is “respectful dialogue”—it’s short, sweet and easy to recall.

The next step is determining how these values can be lived out through behaviors. While many groups recognize the importance of clarifying their values, few articulate associated behaviors. Yet getting detailed on what, exactly, collaborative members can do to live out values is crucial to turning lofty ideas into clear action. When articulating behaviors, make sure to keep the group’s broader goals in mind and tie behaviors to the outcomes you’re seeking. Group members might start a discussion about behaviors by asking themselves: What are the behaviors I expect of my partners and to which I’m also willing to hold myself accountable? One of the ways the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance wanted to demonstrate their value of “respectful dialogue” was to “seek first to understand and then to be understood.” Aligning on these behaviors is important, but perhaps even more critical is building commitment among all group members to hold themselves and each other accountable to them.

Adapted from the Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture.”

These conversations provide a great opportunity to address power dynamics, which can limit a group’s progress. Power dynamics inevitably exist—between funders and grantees or around race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status and other identities. As a group, discuss structures that might help you recognize, equalize and manage power dynamics. For example, the Kauffman Foundation’s Early Education Funders Collaborative adopted a one-vote policy in which all funders, regardless of the size of their grant, would have the same decision-making power. Other collaboratives have created shared-leadership structures and rotating leadership roles.

How to Maintain Culture

Culture-building isn’t a task or onetime project. You must continually nurture culture and revisit it. It helps to create mechanisms to recognize when the culture is being lived out and when the group falls short. This might include shout-outs in meetings where team members recognize moments in which they’ve seen each other uphold the values or a space for team members to share feedback with each other. The culture will be tested as the group welcomes new members, shifts its strategies and responds to new dynamics. As new members join the collective, you’ll also want to give them an opportunity to shape and commit to the culture. It also helps to revisit the behaviors and ensure they’re leading to the collaborative’s desired results. We’ve found it helpful to go through the process of revisiting values and behaviors as often as every three years.

When it comes down to it, culture is often seen as a nice-to-have, yet we believe culture is critical if a group hopes to truly transform communities. To make the change we seek through collective impact initiatives, we have to do the hard and rewarding work of co-creating a strong culture.

For more resources on culture, take a look at the SSIR article “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture,” the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Culture Resource Guide and the Collective Impact Forum blog post The Culture of Collective Impact by Paul Schmitz.

To read the original post, head over to the Collective Impact Forum blog.

July Must-Reads

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Each month, we gather five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply and more effectively contribute to the change we seek. This month’s reads cover what went wrong in a global effort to reduce open-fire cooking, a conversation about the role of data and foundations in fighting racism, how organizations can create a strong culture, trends in charitable giving, and how collaborations can navigate challenges in sharing data.


1. Undercooked: An Expensive Push to Save Lives and Protect the Planet Falls Short

STRATEGY | ProPublica | 18-minute read

After eight years and $75 million, efforts by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves have seen only modest progress. The stoves distributed haven’t effectively reduced users’ risk of deadly illnesses, if they’re used at all, and the environmental impact of cooking fires has proven to be less harmful than initially thought. So what went wrong? And what can we learn from this effort? This article raises valuable questions we can ask ourselves as we seek to strengthen our own change efforts.

2. Conversation about Data and Racism

EQUITY | Chronicle of Philanthropy & Twitter Feed

Philanthropy’s Racism Problem Stems From Too Little Data

(4-minute read) To guide their actions on diversity, equity and inclusion, foundations need to understand the demographics of the organizations and communities they’re granting to (or not), say Michelle Greanias and Melissa Sines of PEAK Grantmaking.

Response from Jennifer Lentfer

(1-minute read) Yes, and while data is important, foundations must also question their power and how they might exacerbate inequalities in asking for this information, says Jennifer Lentfer of Thousand Currents.

3. How Leaders Can Strengthen Their Organizational Culture

CULTURE | Stanford Social Innovation Review | 7-minute read 

The social sector isn’t immune to toxic individuals and cultures. To counter that, we should not only hold ourselves accountable for what we accomplish, but also for how we accomplish it, argues Alexa Cortes Culwell of Open Impact. Leaders should ask four questions: 1) Are your organization’s values and cultural norms explicitly stated? 2) Does your organization have policies in place to ensure that everyone, especially top leadership, is held accountable? 3) Does your organization have policies in place to support diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels? And 4) Does your revenue model take into account fair and equitable employee compensation? For more on creating a strong culture, including 10 steps to guide your culture efforts, take a look at our article, “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture.”

4. 6 Signs of Trouble Ahead in Charitable Giving

SECTOR TRENDS | Chronicle of Philanthropy | 2-minute read 

Although charitable giving was at its highest in 2017, several trends suggest the future of philanthropy might be shaky. The percentage of Americans who donate is declining among every age group, income level and education level, leaving nonprofits to increasingly rely on wealthy individuals. At the same time, groups are getting creative in how they raise money.

5. Data Sharing Within Cross-Sector Collaborations

COLLABORATION | The BUILD Health Challenge | 51-minute read 

We know how important data is in collective efforts to improve community health, but we may not agree on how to use it. This report examines the five most common data challenges from the BUILD Health Challenge cohort: 1) HIPAA concerns, 2) logistics of sharing data across different data systems, 3) language differences between partners, 4) lack of experience with data, and 5) finding methods or metrics to evaluate interventions. It includes examples of how others tackled these challenges, takeaways, tools and best practices.

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Six Steps to Get Intentional About Your Partnerships

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As the social sector increasingly recognizes the importance of addressing the root causes of systemic challenges, it is becoming more critical to form strong partnerships. Partnerships have myriad benefits for individual organizations—from boosting efficiency to growing their influence—but the true potential of partnerships is transformational. If we can forge meaningful partnerships, we can help change systems.

Yet forming a partnership that effectively brings distinct groups together—each with its own culture and agenda—takes hard, deliberate work. We’ve scanned leading practices across several organizations with whom we’ve worked and uncovered ways that organizations can go about building a strong base for partnerships. The steps we describe here are most applicable for partnerships between two or a small number of nonprofit organizations working to design or implement a specific program or initiative. Each step must be adapted to the unique situation of the partners.

As you work to establish or strengthen a partnership, consider these six practical steps.

1. Build Trust

Many leaders with extensive experience developing and implementing partnerships agree: Trust is the most important factor in the success of a partnership. When a trusting relationship exists, both organizations openly discuss with each other what is and isn’t working. Staff foster interpersonal relationships with one another. Both partners are intentional about equitably contributing to the outcomes. Building trust is an art but it is also a science: there is a formula for trust and specific actions that can be taken to foster it. To weave trust into the fabric of the relationship, it is important that organizations establish partnership principles and align on the values and behaviors that will guide how they work together. Read more about how to create a strong culture through explicitly outlining values and behaviors.

2. Fundraise Jointly

Some organizations create new partnerships because they’ve already received funds to do so. For others seeking funding to support specific partnerships and initiatives, fundraising jointly can be challenging. It requires that partners establish clear expectations for each partner’s role, how much funding is needed, and what to do if they raise more or less than expected. It also requires partners to communicate about which funders they’re comfortable approaching and which ones are off limits.

3. Clarify Staffing

Successful partnership staffing ultimately comes down to clarity and simplicity. Don’t overcomplicate the staffing structure by involving people who don’t have a clear role or purpose. To clarify responsibilities, consider using the MOCHA model. At the beginning of the partnership, have an honest conversation about the time and skills needed, and then commit to dedicating what is necessary. Staffing challenges will inevitably arise no matter how well-planned the staffing structures. Create space to evaluate what is working and not working, and adjust accordingly.

4. Ensure Good Governance

Establish clear and transparent processes to govern the overall partnership. You can do this by agreeing upon objectives, outputs and outcomes and communicating these within partner organizations and to external stakeholders. It also helps to proactively develop processes for resolving conflicts between partners and for making changes to, or dissolving, the partnership. Managing finances is another crucial component of governance. It is important that both organizations can understand and articulate how funds will be used to achieve the partnership goals. Create accounting, budgeting and reporting mechanisms and, to ensure accountability, make them subject to external review.

5. Create Communications Processes

Get clear on how to communicate the purpose of the partnership. Each organization generally has four sets of stakeholders: their employees, their board, their partner organization and external parties. To start, create a comprehensive communications strategy to share information with your employees, your board and your partner organization. Create messaging that is easy to understand. This will then help in developing public-facing messaging that clearly and succinctly communicates the value of the partnership—messaging that will help garner buy-in and support from external stakeholders. Before releasing any public messaging, determine a process for how partners will approve and publish external messages.

6. Learn and Evaluate

In contrast to creating a measurement and evaluation strategy for a project, doing so for a partnership is unique because there generally are at least three distinct sets of objectives: those of Partner A, those of Partner B and those of the partnership. A first step is to create a theory of change for the partnership. Creating a theory of change at the beginning enables the organizations to establish a shared understanding of partnership objectives. The next step is to create an evaluation framework. The framework enables partners to identify metrics for Partner A’s objectives, Partner B’s objectives and the partnership objectives. Most importantly, approach the evaluation with a spirit of learning, not just one of accountability. Evaluations are ripe with opportunities to see what is working and what is not, and shift course.

Creating strong partnerships is hard, particularly if time is limited and partnership requests are abundant. Yet if we hope to change systems and make the transformational change we seek, we need partners. These steps may not make sense for all organizations but can serve as guideposts in many partnership situations. Ultimately, forging a strong partnership boils down to intentionality. From building interpersonal relationships to outlining budgets, what matters most is that partners are deliberate and thoughtful in the decisions they make and how they work together.

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5 Strategies for Effective Stakeholder Management

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In his recent post, Bill Shore urges nonprofits to pay more attention to their stakeholders, because no nonprofit organization is capable of achieving the change it seeks all on its own.

While most nonprofits understand the importance of keeping stakeholders engaged, we’ve seen many nonprofit leaders become overwhelmed with the “when, which, how often, and how” of stakeholder engagement.  Our clients often ask us for help in figuring out how best to manage stakeholder engagement.

In our work with nonprofits, we have identified five key strategies for effective stakeholder management:

  1. Develop a comprehensive list of people and/or organizations that have the ability to impact your organization or issue. Positively or negatively. Both are important.
  2. Segment your stakeholders based on your understanding of the degree of their ability to impact your desired outcomes (high, medium, or low).
  3. Assign “owners” from your organization to manage each high value stakeholder based on their level of potential impact. Who should manage “high impact” stakeholders? They should likely be assigned to the ED and Board members. What about “low impact” stakeholders? They could be great candidates for your e-newsletter. Continue reading “5 Strategies for Effective Stakeholder Management”