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Conversations with the Arizona Community Foundation

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The Arizona Community Foundation has been on a journey to redefine how they measured impact and respond amid the pandemic. In this series of one-minute videos, you can hear some quick takes from Steve Seleznow (President and CEO of the Arizona Community Foundation) on community foundations’ value proposition, impact measurement, their role during times of crisis, and equitable grantmaking amid COVID-19. Watch the videos here and below, and read a more in-depth Q&A with Steve on these topics here.

How might community foundations think about their value proposition?

“[Donors] choose to work with us because they want that relationship and they believe there’s value in the relationship we have and there’s value in our ability to share our community knowledge to help them achieve what they want in the community.”

How might community foundations think about measuring impact?

“There are certain things I think I can measure from our grantmaking, … and there are many things that I know to my heart are really great work and are having some level of impact that I don’t think I can measure.”

What role should community foundations play during times of crisis?

“At the heart of a community foundation is the middle name: community. So when our community is in distress, as one of our core values requires us to do, we have to be nimble. We have to respond to what the community tells us.”

How can COVID-19 rapid response funds lead to more equitable grantmaking?

“Through this process, many new nonprofits that typically weren’t on our radar and probably never got a grant from us in the past now got on our radar.”

Read the full conversation here.

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Supporting Leaders of Color

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Particularly amid the dual pandemics — COVID-19 and systemic racism — organizations need strong leaders who bring lived experiences and can support, reflect, and understand the concerns and needs of the communities that are disproportionately impacted. Some of these organizations are responding by shifting practices including hiring leaders of color. “This practice is necessary but not sufficient,” said Angela Romans of AchieveMission.

Following the Nonprofit Quarterly article “Failure Is Not an Option: How Nonprofit Boards Can Support Leaders of Color,” the podcast Nonprofit SnapCast interviewed Angela Romans, Idalia Fernandez of Community Wealth Partners, and Monisha Kapila of ProInspire about their work coaching and supporting nonprofit leaders of color and some key patterns they see emerging as many historically white-led organizations appoint leaders of color for the first time. Listen to the episode here.

Here are some highlights:

  • Organizations and boards looking to hire leaders of color need to look inward: “What is the context we’re bringing someone into? To what extent are we prepared to tackle the inequities we’re propagating within our own organization? How will we tackle those as a board and as an organization so that we can truly create the kind of ecosystem that embraces the vision and leadership of a new leader of color and also helps them grow?” — Idalia Fernandez
  • Boards play a critical role in supporting the vision of CEOs of color: “Boards can encourage and support the change by aligning to the CEO’s vision. It’s the board’s job to identify the CEO, but then the CEO sets that vision and the ways the organization needs to change to achieve it. The board has to be on board with supporting that leadership and not second-guessing it.” — Monisha Kapila
  • Organizations and boards need to identify and plan for the challenges a new leader of color might face: “Every organization has strengths as well as growth edges or gaps. So if there’s a big financial mess [at the organization], does the [new] leader of color have strong financial chops and training? If they do, great. If they don’t, develop a professional development plan and staff or consultant support to help that leader face those organizational gaps. You can’t be ready for every challenge, but it’s a matter of understanding where the gaps are and then creating the right plan to address those challenges.” — Angela Romans

Listen to the episode

Read the Nonprofit Quarterly article

 

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Wealthy Donors Need to Go Outside Their Bubbles and Support Local Organizations Driving Social Change

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Reposted with permission of the Chronicle of Philanthropy

By Erinn Andrews , Lori Bartczak, Rebecca Shamash, and Piyush Tantia

During the past few months, many foundation leaders have called on philanthropic organizations to change their practices in pursuit of racial equity, including directing more resources to Black-led organizations. But these important efforts leave out a critical funding source for nonprofits: major individual donors.

Research released Monday by our organizations found that wealthy donors are in a unique position to provide reliable and flexible funding for community-based organizations but are frequently stymied by ingrained philanthropic practices that lead them away from giving to these groups.

The good news is that these donors often provide exactly the type of support that could benefit community-based nonprofits: multiyear, unrestricted funding with minimal administrative burden. But our interviews with 34 major donors, whose annual giving ranged from $13,000 to $5 million (with a median value of $100,000), found that they typically rely on personal experience and networks to identify which groups to support. As a result, a vital funding opportunity is lost for organizations that aren’t already plugged into wealthy donor networks.

Most of the donors we spoke with reported spending little time researching organizations to give to and instead relied on personal connections and recommendations of family and friends. In order to make a larger gift, donors said they needed to have a belief in the organization’s mission, a relatively longstanding relationship with an entity, some type of personal connection with the mission or the organization itself, confidence that the nonprofit was well run, and trust in its leadership.

Why Causes Get Left Out

While these approaches are convenient and comfortable for donors, they are also problematic. From a behavioral-science perspective, using trust in leadership as a criterion for giving carries the risk of implicit bias. Most people judge traits like competence within microseconds based on factors such as ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We typically like people simply because they are similar to us or are familiar in some way. Using emotional criteria such as trust or likeability to make decisions about giving can create barriers to building relationships with nonprofit leaders of different races or backgrounds at organizations not already supported by major donors or high-profile foundations.

The result is that community-based organizations whose work falls outside of donors’ personal networks or experiences have less opportunity to cultivate relationships that lead to significant donor support. Multiple studies from organizations such as Echoing Green, the Bridgespan Group, Open Impact, and Building Movement Project have found that community-based nonprofits whose missions are focused on social change lack the networks and resources to engage deeply with donors, which affects the amount of funding they receive. The problem is particularly acute for organizations led by people of color.

While our research uncovered areas in significant need of improvement among major donors, we also found encouraging practices. Most notably, major donors tend to give unrestricted funding to nonprofits, allowing them the flexibility to use the money as they see fit, including on overhead.

We had hypothesized that donors would prefer to see their money go directly to programs and services and might be reluctant to support operating costs, but our interviews with eight nonprofit leaders revealed the opposite. All reported they had little trouble raising unrestricted funding from individual donors. In turn, the donors we spoke with largely recognized that nonprofits need strong operations to deliver quality programs and consequently often gave unrestricted funding.

Wealthy donors have the potential to be key allies to local organizations meeting critical needs and driving racial-equity movements. But these donors need to intentionally take steps to reach beyond their comfortable giving bubbles. Here’s what they should do to get started:

Look beyond personal networks to find and fund organizations that directly serve people of color. Seek out introductions to nonprofit leaders working on issues related to racial equity. Build relationships with those organizations by attending online events (or in person when allowed again) or by doing volunteer work.

Build relationships with people of different backgrounds and identities. Join social or professional groups with diverse memberships or take part in professional development opportunities that draw a diverse crowd.

Listen and learn from community leaders and activists of color. They are closest to the issues and are in the best position to define the problem, identify opportunities, and shape solutions. Follow them on social media; take part in conferences or events where they are speaking; follow the outlets that are amplifying their voices.

Consider supporting a philanthropy organization that connects donors and nonprofits. Examples include the Groundswell Fund, Solidaire Network, and Headwaters Foundation for Justice, all of which use donated funds to make grants to organizations working on racial equity. These organizations, often referred to as intermediaries, can also connect donors to community organizations in need of funding and provide guidance on the amount to give.

Continue giving unrestricted funding and making multiyear pledges. These gifts are the most valuable to nonprofits because these donations can be invested where organizations see fit and provide a source of predictable revenue.

Educate other donors about the importance of giving to community-based organizations. Donors who are passionate about a particular nonprofit led by a person of color should share that passion with other donors in their network and encourage them to support the organization as well.

Donors who want to support racial justice need to recognize how their own unconscious behavior may influence their decisions about which organizations they trust to do this work. They need to reach beyond their networks, seek diverse voices to inform their philanthropy, and give more to community-based organizations serving people of color. Now is the time for individual major donors to do things differently.

Erinn Andrews is director of research and education at the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, where Rebecca Shamash is a research fellow. Lori Bartczak is senior director of knowledge and content at Community Wealth Partners and Piyush Tantia is chief innovation officer at ideas42. Their research was supported by the Fidelity Charitable Trustees’ Initiative.

Read the original post on here on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s website.

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Three Truths About Stakeholder Engagement

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Strategies for social change are stronger when we engage a diverse group of people in shaping solutions. Through our work helping nonprofits and foundations set strategies for social change, we are seeing growing interest in engaging stakeholders when shaping strategy and, in particular, ensuring people closest to the issues have power to shape solutions.

While the who, what, and how of engaging stakeholders varies in each context, there are three things we’ve consistently heard from partners and seen ourselves:

1. Successful strategies rely on engaging a diverse set of stakeholders in shaping them.

When we talk about diversity here, we mean role — as described in the definition above — and identity. In thinking about identities, racial diversity should be the first consideration because we know that race is the biggest difference that makes a difference in terms of outcomes people experience in the U.S. You will probably want to consider other identities in developing your strategy as well. For example, in our work with a national organization that serves people affected by mental health challenges, it was important to engage stakeholders from a diversity of geographic areas (urban, suburban, rural) since we knew that geography impacts the types of support people can access. We also knew it was important to engage people with different relationships to mental health challenges, from individuals personally navigating them, to their family members, to those who provide mental health services.

Stakeholders: People who will be impacted by your strategy and/or should influence its development. This could include community members, staff, board, public officials, funders, etc.

2. Stakeholders closest to the issues should lead your strategy.

This often means those who have historically not had the power or resources to shape solutions. Board members and staff without ongoing lived experience may not fully grasp the nature of the challenges they’re trying to address. And creating strategies without engaging those directly impacted keeps power from them. Miriam’s Kitchen — which works to end chronic homelessness in Washington, DC — strives to center their guests (which is how they describe people who access their services and others with lived experience of homelessness) in everything they do. Their efforts started in their advocacy program, engaging people who have experienced homelessness and empowering them not just to get involved in advocacy but to be true partners and leaders in that work. The staff quickly realized that their guests had valuable insight into the organization’s other programmatic offerings as well. Today, Miriam’s Kitchen ensures guests have a voice in shaping the organization’s program strategies. (Watch our webinar to learn more about how Miriam’s Kitchen engages guests.)

3. Stakeholder engagement should be an ongoing practice.

Authentic stakeholder engagement is rooted in trusting relationships. Approaching stakeholder engagement as a checkbox exercise will likely cause more harm than good. Organizations that have built ongoing relationships with stakeholders — like Miriam’s Kitchen has done with their guests — can create open channels for feedback and communication that ultimately helps them do their work better. When the Greater Rochester Health Foundation was developing a strategy for its Healthy Futures program, which aims to improve the health and well-being of children ages 0-5 in the region, the foundation knew local parents and families were important partners to engage. The experience of engaging parents and families to inform this program strategy led the foundation to realize they could have greater impact if community stakeholders have more voice in all their strategies. Today, as Senior Program Officer Danette Campbell-Bell shared in our webinar, “the foundation is taking a back seat and allowing stakeholders to drive what we do.”

A Call for Deeper Engagement

As you work to engage stakeholders, continually challenge yourself and your organization to take it further. Look for opportunities to engage stakeholders, particularly community stakeholders, as co-creators or shift decision-making power to them. If your stakeholder engagement centers those closest to the issues and is rooted in authentic, trusting relationships, it is more likely to result in stronger outcomes.

To learn more about engaging stakeholders in your strategy, read our field guide and watch our webinar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyxhJKXy7X4
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Defining Impact and Responding to COVID-19: A Q&A with the Arizona Community Foundation

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In 2018, the Arizona Community Foundation (ACF) decided to redefine how they measured impact. The foundation, which focuses on mobilizing philanthropy throughout the state of Arizona, had been successful by standard measures. Over 10 years, their assets under management had grown from $400 million to just over $1 billion. But beyond dollars, they needed a clearer and more nuanced picture of their impact on donors, nonprofits, and communities. In partnership with Community Wealth Partners, ACF created a new impact model and vison for building a culture of philanthropy. In this vision, donors, grantees, and community foundations work in collaboration to contribute to greater impact for each of them individually. Since then, the foundation has found early evidence of a culture of philanthropy and affirmed their unique value proposition amid an environment in which commercial financial institutions were threatening their sustainability and, more recently, as COVID-19 heightened and increased community needs.

In May 2020, Sara Brenner (president of Community Wealth Partners) sat down with Steve Seleznow (president and CEO of ACF) through a virtual interview to discuss ACF’s view on impact, how they engage donors, their response to COVID-19, and more. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity, and below are the highlights. You can also watch a series of one-minute excerpts from the conversation here.

Sara Brenner: A couple of years ago, your team decided to redefine what impact means for your work. I’d love to start there and hear why that was important for the foundation and what challenges you wanted to address.

Steve Seleznow: I found the existing tools and methods wholly inadequate to measure how we were supporting our donors, what donors were doing through grantmaking, and the tangible results in supporting our communities across Arizona. Every time I tried to apply models that I’d learned from private philanthropy or nimble venture philanthropy, I came up short. I had seen plenty of false precision being used to define the impact of grants, and I wanted none of it. I was challenged to find a better way for measuring impact for our community foundation.

Working together with Community Wealth Partners, we discussed the donor relationships we created and how that develops and grows over time. What we decided to test was whether or not ACF could support a culture of philanthropy through the work of relationship managers and donors. Could we move donors from transactional to transformational? It was an amazing journey, and we learned a great deal about our expertise and connectivity within the community and how it supported our donors’ ability to be more connected to the causes they were passionate about, increasing impact for both our donors and the nonprofits they support.

Brenner: Through our early work together, part of what we began to explore was how donors changed through the work with ACF in their knowledge, actions, and behavior. I wonder if you could share a little about what you learned about donors.

Seleznow: We’re a very donor-centric community foundation. At the heart of what we do is engage directly with donors, understand their charitable goals, and help them become more effective philanthropists. What this journey clarified for us was that the way we engage donors is core to what we do, our growth, and our ability to have positive impact in the community. Donors have many choices – they could work with Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, or J.P. Morgan Chase, and they don’t. They choose us because they want that personal relationship. They believe there’s value in our ability to share our community knowledge and help them achieve what they want for their community.

“Donors choose us because they want that personal relationship. They believe there’s value in our ability to share our community knowledge and help them achieve what they want for their community.”

Brenner: Through this process, we worked together to identify three archetypes of ACF donors. How do you understand those archetypes, and how does the foundation work differently with those donors now?

Seleznow: We crystalized three archetypes. No one archetype is better than the other; they’re three different types of donor. There are donors who have a very clear idea of who they want to give to and how much they want to give, and they rarely veer from that. They’re what we call supporters. They support a nonprofit or group of nonprofits, and their support endures through time. The nonprofits tell us those supporters are essential because they offer a sustainable form of capital that nonprofits count on year after year. So we place great value on that type of supporter giving. There are some donors who stay there and some who morph into something we define as an investor. An investor is the donor who sees their donation as an investment in a nonprofit or a small group of nonprofits where they want to get really engaged and make a difference for the cause. They want to sit on the board, know the CEO, know the board of directors, visit, and sometimes volunteer. They invest their time and charitable dollars in supporting and growing that organization. They typically give larger grants. The third category is the multiplier, the person interested in leverage. “I’m going to put up $100,000 to invest in this organization that I love, but I want to find five other donors who will do it with me, and I want to multiply my donation of $100,000 by five. Can you help me find five other donors?” They want to multiply everything they do. They’re very entrepreneurial and believe their talent is best used engaging with a nonprofit and getting others to invest along with them. This results in multiplying their investments. Multipliers often engage in bigger systems change because they are more invested individually and through the people they have recruited to support the cause.

“Donor archetypes help us know who we’re working with and how we can help them achieve their philanthropic goals.”

What that means is we now have a lens to filter and use to define as we begin working with donors or bringing in new donors. Who seems to lean toward being a multiplier? Who’s an investor? Who’s a supporter? We now use those lenses to assess where we think a donors is. A donor can change, but it helps us know who we’re working with and how we can help them achieve their philanthropic goals.

Brenner: Are there moments you’re seeing the community at large work differently and in greater collaboration because of COVID-19?

Seleznow: It was almost immediate that the philanthropic sector in Arizona came together to unify our efforts. We didn’t want donors to have to decide between response efforts, and we wanted to centralize grantmaking so we could be more efficient and timely in getting immediate relief funding out to the nonprofits.

The Valley of the Sun United Way serves the greater Phoenix region and works with an identified group of about 60-80 partner nonprofits. The Arizona Community Foundation serves every county in Arizona. So we decided to set up two platforms – one with Valley of the Sun United Way and one with ACF. They would generate funding from their donor base, and we, from ours. The corporate sector could choose to support the funds based on where they wanted their dollars to go (local or statewide). We agreed to review all grants for the greater Phoenix region together to make sure there was no duplication and ensure we both could respond quickly with the needed support.

The other part that I think advanced philanthropic collaboration was the grants review panel we put in place. We didn’t want the nonprofit sector to think favoritism existed in the grantmaking process. The review panel consisted of ACF staff, nonprofit leaders, corporate contributors, and a few individual donors. We invited the major funders to have a representative on the review team, and we included the president and CEO of the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits on the review team. These representatives could see every nonprofit that applied, who got grants, and how much they received. The process was transparent and inclusive. That made a huge difference, advanced our relationships, led to greater trust within the nonprofit sector, and provided full transparency for all of the dollars contributed by donors and corporate and philanthropic partners.

Brenner: We know that small, grassroots organizations often led by leaders of color can be left out of funding. I’m curious how equity played out in decision making for the rapid response fund and how you think it should play out in the future?

Seleznow: We put together a diverse group of people to review the grants. The panel had to include the community and reflect the diversity of the community – diversity in terms of region, race, gender, identity, and sector. Because we widely marketed the fund – and thanks to the Arizona Republic which ran three full-page ads in the newspaper announcing the fund – we were able to identify dozens of nonprofits we didn’t know. There are about 22,000 nonprofits in Arizona. Through this process, many nonprofits we had not previously worked with were identified and provided grants. And we’ve been cataloguing these nonprofits so that whatever the new normal is, we have a more inclusive catalogue of nonprofits doing amazing work and a new opportunity to achieve greater equity in our grantmaking.

COVID-19 has also brought to light issues of inequity. When schools closed, we saw the digital divide. Everybody could see that not all kids had computers or reliable internet service. So when schools went online, that meant a large numbers of kids – kids who are poor, kids of color – were not getting educated. Then we saw the data on who’s getting COVID-19 – by race, by community. Here in Arizona, Navajo Nation is suffering tremendously. Historically – for centuries – that community’s health needs have not been properly addressed. We’ve seen large numbers of African American and Latino families impacted. We saw who got laid off first and who is being hardest hit by the loss of a paycheck. If you look at the numbers, you see that this crisis is disproportionately hitting people of color and people without economic means. If this is not the time to aggressively address these issues, then when will we?

“If this is not the time to aggressively address inequity, then when will we?”

Brenner: You’ve talked about two phases to this crisis: emergency response and reconstruction. As we move toward reconstruction, what is the role of community foundations and how do you see that changing?

“When our community is suffering, we have to be nimble. We have to respond to what the community tells us. We need to be willing to do things we’ve never done.”

Seleznow: At the heart of a community foundation is in the name: community. When our community is suffering, we have to be nimble. We have to respond to what the community tells us. We need to be willing to do things we’ve never done. I’ll give you an example. We work with a corporate partner that wanted to create a relief fund for small businesses that were serving low-income neighborhoods and employing members of that community. We checked with our lawyers, and we could very clearly define a public benefit. If those small businesses went out of business, those communities would suffer from the loss of jobs, income, and the essential services provided by those businesses. While we’ve never done anything like it before, we said yes. The community needed this service, it clearly has a public benefit, so we’re taking it on.

Brenner: What ideas do you have for engaging donors in ways that keep equity at the center?

Seleznow: If we see inequity in our community and we’re talking to a donor about education grants they want to make, then we have an obligation to say that achieving educational equity is an important part of what they achieve for their grantmaking. It’s our obligation to make sure donors are informed and educated on the inequities that exist and have the data behind it to understand the proven set of facts. If you want this community to offer a better quality of life for all, you’ve got to find out who has been left behind because of inequity. Maybe you’ll want to invest in this, and here’s how you can do it.

Brenner: What closing advice do you have for other community foundations trying to understand their impact in new ways?

Seleznow: I hesitate to tell my colleagues how they should think, but I would say: I had to do a lot of self-examination to be really honest with myself about impact. Take a hard look at your ego and how you define your impact – “We’ve changed our city.” “We’ve changed our state.” There are certain things we can measure from our grantmaking, and there are many things creating a positive impact that I don’t think we can measure. Be honest about that. Don’t say, “Because I can’t measure it, it’s not worthwhile,” but don’t go down the path of not measuring anything either. Figure out what you’re really about, how to measure that, and where you should pivot to create the most impact.

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Engaging Stakeholders in Developing Strategies

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To address complex challenges, we need strong strategies, and strategies are stronger when we engage a diverse set of people (or stakeholders) in shaping solutions. When engaging stakeholders is done well, it can lead to new ideas, stronger and more viable strategies, shared ownership of the vision, greater insight into stakeholder needs, and stronger relationships with stakeholders. But when done poorly and viewed as a checkbox exercise, it can damage trust with stakeholders, fail to add value, and harm the communities you seek to help.

We just released our new field guide on engaging stakeholders in developing strategies, where we share thoughts and questions to reflect on at the beginning of a strategy development process. Our goal is to help you start the process with a clear understanding of which stakeholders you want to engage, why their input matters, and how you will engage them. Though we focus on the strategy process, the information in this field guide might also support stakeholder engagement in other contexts, and we encourage stakeholder engagement as a regular practice outside of the strategy process.

We’re also hosting a conversation this Wednesday, June 24th, at 2pm Eastern. Representatives from Miriam’s Kitchen and the Greater Rochester Health Foundation will join us to talk about what it looks like to engage stakeholders in meaningful ways  and ways to engage stakeholders right now when people are facing so many pressures. Register here.

Register for the Virtual Share & Learn

View the Field Guide

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Five Steps to Reimagine Your Organization’s Future Through Scenario Planning

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While the COVID-19 crisis has brought tremendous challenges, it is also bringing out the best in many nonprofit leaders as they work to sustain their missions and create more equitable communities. Many leaders are pivoting their organizations’ services; tending to the professional, emotional, and safety needs of staff and volunteers; forging new partnerships; and testing creative ideas to address inequities.

This type of proactivity is no small feat amid significant disruptions to services, operations, and funding that can leave leaders feeling uncertain about what to prioritize and how to adapt. It can be easy to deprioritize planning completely or default to contingency planning and risk management. In times of crisis, many leaders understandably take a singular focus on preserving the organization’s operations and planning for contingencies. Of course financial health is crucial for continuing services, and our research and experience show organizations also need to take a broader view. Before doubling down on financial health and organizational preservation, nonprofits should focus on the impact they want to have and imagine possible new futures. One way leaders can do this is through scenario planning.

Scenario planning can help your organization manage uncertainty, envision new opportunities, and spot unexpected threats. It helps you focus on the things you can control – even amid great change and uncertainty – so that you are better positioned to achieve your desired impact. It improves your organization’s sustainability by helping you financially prepare for the worst and take data-informed actions sooner than you otherwise might have.

Scenario planning can happen in five steps:

Adapted from Diana Scearce, Katherine Fulton, and the Global Business Network community’s “What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits.”

1. Define key questions.

What questions do you hope this plan will answer? Are you looking to determine how best to hold steady during turbulent times, or do you want to reimagine your programs and services for a new future?

What is your time horizon for planning? Organizations facing great upheaval and uncertainty may decide to look out only six to 12 months while other organizations may be able to take a longer view. Either approach is fine.

Even if your primary focus is on stabilizing the organization and looking at the near term, scenario planning presents an opportunity to think about steps you can take now that will position you for long-term impact.

2. Explore drivers.

The trajectory of the virus will have many ripple effects, such as closures of schools and other places due to social distancing and economic impacts that affect state budgets, employment, and donor/funder behavior. In most communities, the COVID-19 crisis is widening the racial inequities many nonprofits are working to address. Focus on the two to three driving forces that most affect your organization’s future and are the most uncertain.

3. Build scenarios.

Once you have prioritized the drivers that matter most to your organization, develop a set of plausible and thought-provoking scenarios that represent a range of future outcomes. Here is an example of what scenarios might look like for a nonprofit that identified school closures and state budgets as key drivers.

4. Develop plans based on assets and opportunities.

Envision what each scenario would mean for your organization and what you would do in response. Play out how each scenario might impact the community you serve, your programs, funding, staff, and operations. Pay attention to how each scenario and your response might widen or decrease inequities. For example, data show that communities of color are disproportionately feeling the health and economic impacts of COVID-19. What is your organization doing to address disparities, and how can you ensure your response does not inadvertently contribute to existing inequities?

As you develop your plans, consider where you might have the greatest opportunity for impact. If you are getting stuck trying to imagine a different way of creating impact, take a step back and consider your organization’s core purpose. What are the three things you must hold on to? Maybe those things are your values, the population you serve, or the way you show up in the community. What three things might you change or let go of to stay focused on what matters most? Maybe you are open to changing your funding model, ending a longstanding program, or having staff build new skills. This helps you identify where the greatest opportunities lie in each scenario, what tradeoffs you may need to consider, and the steps you need to take to prepare for the future.

5. Monitor indicators.

To be able to act on your plans, you will need to have a sense of which scenario is playing out. Identify two or three metrics that indicate the organization is transitioning into each scenario, so you can make timely choices about how to respond. Many organizations set financial indicators, such as progress against fundraising goals, to guide operational decisions. Consider what outcome indicators might guide programmatic decisions as well. For example, if you see a widening of racial disparities in your community as the virus spreads, you may decide to double down on your efforts to address those disparities, and that may require you to let go of other activities that don’t support efforts to decrease disparities.

Imagining a New Future

During disruption and uncertainty, scenario planning helps organizations focus on the things they can control. It can clarify what’s most important to your organization and what to pay attention to. Imagining what you would do in your most severe scenario will push you to think creatively and identify actions you could take to help ensure long-term sustainability and improved community outcomes.

While scenario planning can help stabilize organizations during times of crisis, it can also help you imagine a new future. As you embark on scenario planning with your organization, bring an asset-based mindset to consider not just future risks but also the strengths within your organization and community. Build on these assets to find the new opportunities and possibilities for the future, even in times of uncertainty.

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Engaging Communities in Developing Strategies

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This blog post is an adapted excerpt from our field guide on stakeholder engagement.

Strategies are stronger when they’re shaped by people who are closest to the issues and who will be most affected when strategies are implemented. Community engagement can range from gathering community members’ input to looking to communities to decide what the strategy should be and how it should be executed. (See more about a spectrum of community engagement to ownership here.)

The way you engage communities has the potential to heal old wounds and build collective power, but it also can deepen mistrust and harm communities. It’s important to approach community engagement with care and consideration.

Here are some considerations to reflect on before engaging communities. This approach draws on insights from the National Gender and Equity Campaign, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, Building Movement Project, King County Washington, Marnita’s Table, and our own experiences. See more resources at the bottom of this post.

  • Clarify purpose, outcomes, and process. What do you want to achieve through engaging this community? Do you want their perspectives to inform your strategy, or do you want community members to set the strategy? As you clarify your process for developing the strategy, think about how to center and shift power to those who are most impacted, and leave space to change course and be responsive to the community as needed. Recognize that many perspectives can exist within one community, and work to surface those perspectives. Dive deeper into this topic: “Four Questions to Sit With as You Learn to Let Communities Lead” (Community Wealth Partners)
  • Understand history with the community. How has your organization interacted with this community in the past? Where have you built strong relationships? Where has trust been broken? Understand what the history of your relationship looks like from the community’s perspective. To avoid duplication, identify information community members previously shared that could serve you now. Dive deeper into this topic: “Community Engagement Guide for Sustainable Communities” (PolicyLink)
  • Take an asset-based approach. Recognize that solutions exist within the community. Seek first to understand the community’s strengths and assets. Work with partners who are trusted in the community and who are knowledgeable about community resources. Dive deeper into this topic: “Build a Playground Toolkit: Community Involvement” (KaBOOM!)
  • Create space for relationship-building. Not every interaction with the community needs to be linked to your formal strategy development process. In fact, it can feel transactional to community members if you only engage with them when you have a specific need. Make space to build and strengthen relationships without an agenda. Dive deeper into this topic: “What Institutions Get Wrong About Community Engagement and How They Can Improve” (Marnita’s Table)
  • Reach those most impacted. Make sure those most impacted by the issues you seek to change can participate through offering an accessible location and time, translation services, childcare, transportation, and food and drink. Respect their participation by offering compensation if possible. Listen empathetically and strive to understand, not to reply or reframe. Dive deeper into this topic: “Why Am I Always Being Researched?” (Chicago Beyond)
  • Set clear expectations and create feedback loops. Share decision-making power with the community where possible, and in all cases, clearly define and transparently communicate community members’ role. (e.g., Are you asking for their input, or will they make the final decision?) Ask the community for feedback regularly throughout the process, be intentional about integrating that feedback, and loop back to tell the community how you used their feedback. Talk with the community about how you plan to stay in relationship with them throughout the strategy process and afterward. Dive deeper into this topic: “The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership” (Facilitating Power)

View the full field guide on stakeholder engagement.

 

Additional resources: 

Photo courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

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Podcast: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Sector

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In a recent episode of the Business of Giving podcast, Amy Celep (CEO of Community Wealth Partners) talks with host Denver Frederick about what we’re hearing from the organizations we work with. The conversation explores many things including:

  • How the COVID-19 crisis is exposing deep inequities but also accelerating action to address those inequities.
  • The ways leaders are leading effectively in a virtual world and taking care of staff and themselves. If you want to do best by your mission, clients, and staff, Amy says, you have to pay attention to what you need. And as Maurice Jones, CEO of LISC, told Amy, “We’ve had to up our game in matters of the heart, and give people permission, through our words and deeds, to display their pain.”
  • How scenario planning can help organizations prepare amid uncertainty. Around Minute 8, Amy shares a five-step process for scenario planning.
  • How funders can address power dynamics to better support nonprofits. Funders can proactively encourage grantees to be bold in their asks. They can also continue practices of trust-based philanthropy long after this has passed.
  • How nonprofits can better understand the reliability of their revenue streams. Nonprofits can ask bold questions of donors and funders like, “What are your intentions for our grant/donation? What do you anticipate continuing to do and fund? What might you consider stopping or pausing?”

You can listen to the full interview here on the Business of Giving website or below.

 

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What Does Virtual Leadership During COVID-19 Look Like?

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It’s hard enough to lead an organization through a period of difficulty and uncertainty. It’s even harder to lead through the extreme societal and organizational disruption we are experiencing in the wake of a pandemic and to do so virtually with team members juggling work with watching children, caring for sick loved ones, navigating difficult home situations, and managing a roller coaster of emotions.

In response, many leaders are asking, what does virtual leadership look like?

While virtual leadership like this is new for all of us, there are leadership principles that are particularly relevant right now. Just as before, leaders can offer:

  • Inspiration and realism: Give hope to your team while being realistic about the future and its uncertainty and challenges. Getting this balance right is key to helping your team have faith in leadership, their own work, and the path forward.
  • Action: Help your team get unstuck by focusing on immediate steps they can take to make a difference and adapt, especially if they seem paralyzed by the changes. Show them you are in it together.
  • Love: Support your team, assume best intentions, and create space for team members to be multidimensional, imperfect humans who can try new things and learn in the process.

This time also calls upon us to be creative with how we lead. Here’s what strong virtual leadership can look like this moment.

  • Assume the best and give grace. Let’s face it: work and home have just collided like never before, and you may not know what challenges people are facing or what they need. This is a moment to assume the best of intentions, be flexible where you can, and listen to your team. Ask questions to understand what’s going on. Pay attention to the circumstances people may be facing in their homes and personal lives – particularly team members with disabilities, with dependents, with sick loved ones, and who are part of communities that are on the front lines of this pandemic or that are receiving the least support right now. (The Management Center put together this survey to help you understand staff needs.)
  • Be present from afar. As always, your presence matters. As you lead from afar, you can get creative with how to be present virtually. For example, consider temporarily creating daily 15-minute check-ins with teams to stay connected and provide support. During meetings, turn on your video so people can engage with your facial expressions and body language. As you communicate with your team, consider that many people have a greater need right now to feel connected and informed; but also, if their inboxes look like mine, they’re receiving a huge influx of emails. Be generous but intentional in your full-team communications. Consider using email to communicate organizational things and using a chat platform (like Slack or Zoom) to manage smaller, daily, project-level communications.
  • Walk the virtual halls. Connecting one-on-one with individuals can help maintain or strengthen relationships. You can’t physically walk the halls of the office to connect informally with people, but there are virtual ways to do this. You can set up virtual coffees or meet-ups with people you don’t typically see in meetings, particularly people with less access to power in your organization. It’s also important to support your team’s virtual social gatherings to help foster a sense of community. Encourage and support virtual social events like lunches, snack breaks, or mindfulness gatherings. As we distance ourselves physically, we need more social connection.
  • Live your culture virtually. Now more than ever culture matters and will be tested. Culture challenges are often exacerbated amid all the pressures staff are facing, which can lead to less effective work in a time when it’s greatly needed. At the same time, this moment may offer an opportunity for breakthroughs because it may force your team to break down silos and change ineffective ways of working as you try new things. Model the values and behaviors that make your organization effective, and continue to hold teams accountable for doing so too. Most importantly – this is a time to prioritize the conversations that help you uphold your culture. It can be easier to avoid difficult conversations when you are virtual. Instead, insist that your team engage, listen, and have the conversations that matter most. You might hold time with your team to talk about what it looks like to live your values right now. How might you manage power dynamics over your virtual meeting platform? How might you collaborate in real time with each other when people are dealing with slow internet? How can you ensure everyone feels they can fully participate in team meetings when the technology isn’t intuitive to some team members?

We’ve learned some of these lessons over the years, and some have emerged in the last two weeks. This moment and the months that follow will teach us a great deal about how to lead. What are you learning about virtual leadership? What’s working, and what isn’t? We hope to keep learning, making mistakes, and finding humor alongside you.