Assessing Your Readiness for an Earned Revenue Strategy

Earned revenue—a source of funding organizations can secure by providing something of direct value, such as a product or service—can support an organization’s financial sustainability and impact. Figuring out if an earned-revenue strategy is right for your organization right now takes time and honest reflection.

Community Wealth Partners has been helping nonprofits create earned-revenue strategies for more than 25 years. In that time, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what to watch out for. As you consider whether an earned-revenue strategy is right for your organization, first consider your motivations. Are you hoping to make a profit right away? Could earned revenue help advance your organization’s impact?

Any earned-revenue strategy will require time and resources, and it could take time to break even or earn a profit. That’s why it’s important that the time and resources you spend pursuing an earned-revenue opportunity are also advancing your mission.

Once you’ve reflected on your motivations, you’ll also need to assess three key elements: 1) marketable assets, 2) market opportunity, and 3) organizational capacity.

 

  • Marketable Assets—what assets do you currently have? These could include a skill you could train others in or a product or service you could sell.
  • Market Opportunity—how might our assets be valuable to the market we’re trying to reach? You will need to test whether the market is ready and willing to pay for the products or services you could offer.
  • Organizational Capacity—do we have the resources and skills we’d need? If the earned-revenue strategy would require additional capacity, does that seem like something you could realistically develop?

A sustainable earned revenue strategy sits at the intersection of marketable assets, market opportunity, and organizational capacity.

Case Example: Communities In Schools

In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which included a provision clarifying that federal funds can be used to support programs offering non-academic support to struggling students, including supporting students’ social and emotional learning. This change presented a market opportunity for Communities In Schools (CIS) to leverage its model of surrounding students with a community of support into marketable assets. CIS already worked in 2,300 schools to support about 1.5 million students across the country, and the organization saw many possibilities for how it could sustainably increase its impact now that the legislation allowed schools and districts to use federal funds in new ways.

Community Wealth Partners partnered with CIS to help them assess the many possibilities they saw and hone in on the ones that were best positioned to advance their strategy, reach more students, and do so in a way that was financially sustainable. We worked with staff and board members to develop early hypotheses about new ways they could offer programs or services to school districts, schools, and educators. We then conducted targeted market research with a diverse array of potential customers and beneficiaries to assess market needs, explore which of the organization’s assets best meet those needs, and consider the social impact, scale, and revenue potential of various opportunities. Once the board and staff aligned on the strongest opportunities to pursue, we developed a plan for CIS to prototype and pilot some efforts in the short term—to test concepts and learn—as well as a longer-term plan to create new products.

From this work, CIS decided to launch two products:

  1. Licensing of its in-school support model.
  2. Professional development courses for school and district staff.

In the first year, these products helped CIS extend its reach into five new markets and brought in an additional $500,000 in revenue. Several years later, CIS received a significant investment in its Licensed Partners work, and, as result, set a goal of reaching 1,000 more schools and has hired additional staff to bolster capacity to meet this goal.

“Undertaking an earned-revenue strategy allowed CIS to reflect internally on what portions of our work were the most requested, mission-aligned and how CIS was able to uniquely add value to communities,” said Michael Huang, vice president, district and community engagement. “The added clarity around purpose and value helped make our work stronger.”

Read more guidance about creating an earned-revenue strategy and examples from nonprofits in our field guide.

 

Sharing Power With Communities: Choosing an Engagement Strategy

The people closest to the issues are also closest to the solutions. Yet many nonprofits and foundations, even those deeply committed to the communities they seek to serve, don’t always know how best to engage those communities in shaping their work.

Based on our work helping a range of organizations center the perspectives of the communities they serve in their strategies and programs, we at Community Wealth Partners have questions organizations can consider to guide their approach as well as two possible paths for engagement.

Questions to Consider when Choosing an Engagement Strategy

  • WHO is most impacted by your work? What engagement methods work best for them? How much time and interest do they have to participate?
  • HOW MANY people will you involve? How many different perspectives are you seeking?
  • WHAT POWER will they have? What decisions will community members have the power to make? Are certain things off the table?
  • HOW LONG will engagement last? Are you seeking input on a discrete topic or ongoing advising?
  • WHAT IS YOUR CAPACITY AND EXPERIENCE to manage the work? What time and skills does your team have for the work? What prior experience do you have partnering with community? What is your budget for compensation and support?

Possible Paths Forward: Time-Bound Engagements and Ongoing Partnership with the Community

Based on your responses to the questions above, consider whether a time-bound engagement or an ongoing partnership with the community is the right approach for where you are now.

Time-bound engagements are when community members have influence in the design of the work that affects them. Possible models include hosting sessions in the community to invite community input to co-design programs or strategies, participatory budgeting processes where community members vote on budget priorities, forming a planning team that includes community members, or community-led research initiatives like participatory action research.

Ongoing partnerships are when community members have influence over the ongoing decisions of the organization, ideally across different functions such as strategy, programs, communications, evaluation, governance, and budgeting. Community members can have ongoing partnerships with organizations through board membership, by serving on standing advisory committees, or by joining the organization as staff.

Learn how the Greater Rochester Health Foundation started with a time-bound engagement and evolved to ongoing partnership in this case study.

Learn more from our field guide, Sharing Power with Communities.

Building Collective Capacity for Systems Change: Four Components to Prioritize

Nonprofits and funders share bold goals for creating meaningful, systemic change on the issues they care about. Yet many nonprofits say they feel like they are working in silos and crave deeper connection and collaboration with peer organizations. Some funders are supporting collaborative spaces like communities of practice to help strengthen ties across nonprofits working in pursuit of shared goals and to help build their collective capacity to advance long-term systems change.

Our experiences designing and facilitating communities of practice have taught us the importance of prioritizing four key areas to build a strong community that is positioned to create change together.

 

Strong Relationships: Trusting relationships are the bedrock of collaboration. While it can be tempting to try to jump quickly to action, it is important to create time and space for members of a community of practice to build authentic relationships and understand how their work connects with one another.

Learning: When members of a community of practice identify priority areas for shared learning, it helps build knowledge and capacity in individual organizations while also building shared understanding and capacity across a cohort of organizations working toward a shared goal. For example, members of the Healthy Food Community of Practice identified a need to better understand systemic barriers that have led to inequities in healthy food access and consumption as well as the specific needs of BIPOC communities. Learning together on these issues led to changes in the programs and services of individual organizations and also catalyzed collaborations among participants to help address inequities. (See more on this community below.)

Action: Once community of practice members have trusting relationships and shared learning, they are better positioned to take meaningful action. They will be more likely to implement changes within their organizations, based on what they’ve learned with and from their peers. They also will have the relationships and shared understanding needed to begin to pilot new efforts in partnership with other organizations.

Field Building: By sharing insights and recommendations with the broader field, the learning and successes of a community of practice can have ripple effects beyond the participating organizations. Community of practice members can co-create content and share their learning with the broader field. This can be another lever for advancing broader, long-term systems change.

Putting the Four Components in Action

Communities of practice can help advance systems change on a range of issues. Two examples are the Healthy Food Community of Practice and the Networks for Education Equity cohort.

Healthy Food Community of Practice: The Healthy Food Community of Practice is a space for national and regional organizations to connect, learn, resource share, and take collective actions in support of local communities as they reimagine and rebuild their food systems to thrive. The goal of the community was for BIPOC communities to have equitable access and consume nutritious food – doing this will also address barriers faced by other marginalized communities.

Through four years together, the Healthy Food Community of practice yielded relationships that will endure beyond the community’s formal end, changes in learning and practice among participating organizations, and collaborations and contributions to the field. Together these outcomes contribute to a more equitable food system. Read more.

Networks for Education Equity: Education networks (e.g., professional associations of education professionals) have long been a source of knowledge and support for education professionals, but for many networks, it has been difficult to keep up with the pace of change in the field and ensure their knowledge and resources are reaching those who need it most. To address this challenge, we facilitated a community of practice for eight education networks focused on supporting better outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty.  The result was a cohort of education networks with relationships, resources, and strategies for reaching educators to help advance equitable education outcomes for students.

While the community of practice engaged only a subset of the field of education networks, the experience led to changes in approach for participating organizations, stronger relationships that are likely to endure beyond the community of practice, and knowledge and insights that can benefit the broader field seeking to advance equity in education. Together these outcomes help education networks evolve how they share knowledge with practitioners so that they are better equipped to support education outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty.  Read more.

Fostering connection, learning and collaboration to advance systems change

For organizations working to create meaningful, systemic change, it can be helpful to come together with other organizations to work together on a shared challenge. This was the case for a group of education networks working to evolve the way they provide support to teachers and administrators.

Education networks (e.g., associations of education professionals) have long been a source of knowledge and support for teachers and administrators, but for many education networks, it has been difficult to keep up with the pace of change in the field and ensure their knowledge and resources are reaching those who need it most. Many networks are struggling to find formats that align with education professionals’ busy schedules and needs. Others have realized they are not reaching diverse audiences whose engagement is essential to achieving equitable student success — whether it be professionals holding various roles in the education system, working in different parts of the country, or representing different races, ethnicities, and other diverse identities.

Given the changing landscape, how might education networks think differently about their approaches to educator support? How can they help educators learn and adopt new practices in service of more equitable education outcomes for students?

To address this challenge, eight education networks came together from January 2022 – March 2024 to form a community of practice focused on supporting better outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty. They identified two common questions to focus their time: How might we build resilient networks for knowledge mobilization? How might practitioner networks adapt and transform to meet future challenges? Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the community of practice, as part of its K-12 Education Strategy.* Community Wealth Partners led the design and facilitation.

The community of practice’s power was that it created a mechanism to facilitate knowledge sharing across organizations that had not collaborated before. It provided a space for networks to learn from peers, pilot new approaches, inspire further learning and collective action, and share insights with the field.

“At the start of this community of practice, I didn’t know most of the people involved, and wasn’t familiar with all of the organizations,” said one community of practice participant. “Now I feel like I have a bigger community of other network leaders I can talk to and collaborate with in different ways.”

A summary report shares more about the activities of the community of practice and the outcomes that came out of the work.

One key learning for community of practice members was that creating space for members to build community, share knowledge, and pilot new approaches will help educators and administrators adopt new practices in pursuit of educational equity. This ethos can be characterized as a network approach — a method for navigating complex challenges by fostering connection, learning, and collaboration.

We partnered with network consultant Amelia Pape to create a resource — A Network Approach to Educator Support: Cultivating Networks to Advance Educational Equity. The publication includes principles that comprise a network mindset and considerations for assessing the overall health of a network. While this publication is framed in the context of the education field and includes examples from the community of practice, the principles and recommendations are more broadly applicable. Networks exist everywhere, and embracing a networked approach is an important strategy for advancing systemic change.

We hope this resource sparks new ideas for nonprofits, funders, and other organizations working together to create meaningful systemic change on the issues they care about.

* This blog post and resources linked in it were written through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the foundation.

Leaning into Relationships for Greater Impact: Resources from and for community foundations

While community foundations have always existed to support local donors who want to give back to their community, many are now exploring how they can deepen their impact by leveraging their unique strengths and relationships with both local donors and nonprofits.

Many of these foundations are centering racial equity in their work out of recognition that, in most communities, race is the biggest driver of disparity on a range of issues that impact residents’ and communities’ ability to thrive. As a result, these foundations are engaging with nonprofits and donors in new ways such as deepening relationships with nonprofits working closest to the issues in communities and communicating a stronger point of view with donors about where their giving can have greatest impact.

Community Wealth Partners has partnered with dozens of community foundations as they work to center community voices in their strategies, direct more resources to BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving nonprofits, and partner with donors in new ways.  While these foundations differed in terms of size, geography, and grantmaking priorities, each of them has shown commitment to listening deeply to nonprofits and donors, centering the voices of the people closest to the issues in communities, and trying new ways of working in response to what they’ve learned.

A few new resources summarize themes from what these community foundations have tried and learned and provide in-depth examples of what’s possible:

  • Activating Donors for Change synthesizes insights from community foundations who participated in a cohort program facilitated by Community Wealth Partners.
  • A case study of the Pittsburgh Foundation offers an in-depth look at internal changes the foundation has made to bring greater alignment in pursuit of shared goals.
  • Listen, Learn, Act, written by Heather Peeler of ACT for Alexandria and published on Fund for Shared Insight’s blog, shares what happened when the foundation gave community members a seat at the table throughout the strategic planning process.

It’s exciting to see the ways in which community foundations are leveraging their roles and relationships to help create more equitable communities. We hope these resources offer inspiration and guidance for other community foundations considering ways they can deepen their impact.

From Chaos and Competition to Clarity and Coordination: Four Pivots for Aligning Coalitions to Achieve Equity

We know that changing systems to be more equitable requires collaboration, but sometimes working with a broad network or coalition can feel chaotic, with competing interests among players and a lack of clarity and purpose. How do you get diverse stakeholders, each serving different communities and with its own unique mission and goals, moving together in pursuit of equity?

At Community Wealth Partners, we’ve worked with networks focused on a range of issues from education to economic mobility to health and nutrition. One of these networks has been the Healthy Food Community of Practice, a network of more than 50 organizations working toward a shared goal—that communities of color across the country can access and consume nutritious food. From our perspective, there are 4 important pivots to make—these are shifts in mindset and thinking that can help coalitions and networks to move in one direction.

  1. From scarcity to abundance
  2. From consensus to consent
  3. From breadth to depth
  4. From “I” to “we”

1. From scarcity to abundance.

A scarcity mindset is risk adverse and tends to see things in black and white. An abundance mindset is more open to possibility and emergence. The scarcity mindset can show up in a variety of ways. One example is scarcity of resources—the pie is only so big and everyone is focused on their share. This can lead to competition for resources among organizations within a network or coalition – organizations that ideally would be collaborating with one another. We’ve used a variety of practices with networks to help create a sense of abundance.

Walmart Foundation supported the Healthy Food Community of Practice and provided flexibility in how the resources were spent, giving ownership to the community in determining their priorities. As a result, participants decided to regrant some of the resources to community-based organizations working in innovative ways to address food access and nutrition in collaboration with the community of practice member organizations. Over three years, the community granted $400,000 through a participatory grantmaking process where community of practice members decided together which projects to fund.

The community could have decided to spread these funds across their organizations, each receiving about $8,000 to support their work. Instead, they made fewer and larger grants of up to $50,000 to fund pairs of organizations working in partnership to advance community-based solutions. Giving the participating organizations voice in how resources were allocated helped create a feeling of greater abundance and impact.

2. From consensus to consent.

We often see networks aspire for consensus in decision-making. But when you are engaging a diverse group of individuals and organizations, it’s not realistic to think that everyone will agree on every decision that needs to be made. Instead, it may be better to strive for consent.

You can think of consent this way—while a decision that’s on the table may not be exactly what you would choose if you were making it on your own, you can live with it and don’t have any strong objections. That’s consent.

We learned about consent-based decision-making from Circle Forward Consulting. Consent-based decision-making aims to help a group make a decision that is within the group’s range of tolerance. If a proposal falls outside someone’s range of tolerance, it is the group’s responsibility to modify the proposal to bring it back within the group’s range of tolerance.

After a couple of years working together, the Healthy Food Community of Practice realized it needed to refine its vision and goal to center racial equity. It was not easy for the community to make this pivot. The community includes organizations serving specific communities like the elderly, rural Americans, and college students. But eventually the group realized that focusing on racial equity will yield benefits for other groups of people who have historically been marginalized.

As the community refined its purpose and vision, we worked to ensure the language was within everyone’s range of tolerance. While some organizations may have preferred to have the population they’re focused on specifically named in our goal and vision, they gave consent to a race-specific focus because they understood that in the United States race is the difference that makes the biggest difference, and when communities of color are thriving, everyone is thriving. Getting to this agreement required multiple conversations and would not have happened without trusting relationships within the community. Consent requires continuous investment in strengthening relationships and trust.

3. From breadth to depth

To have deeper impact, sometimes networks need to pivot from being a broad tent where everyone can see themselves to something more focused and defined. And, even when a network has an explicit focus, there still can be power in enabling small groups go deeper around shared interests or priorities.

The Healthy Food Community moved from breadth to depth when it aligned on a more specific focus of prioritizing BIPOC communities. To allow more opportunities for deeper collaboration, we formed innovation pods—small subgroups within the network that are focused on discrete topics. Innovation pods have taken collective actions such as co-creating resources and conducting research together.

For example, the nutrition education pod worked together to create a proposed framework for nutrition education that is wholistic and centers cultural competency. To create this, nutrition educators from several organizations came together to share their approaches, conduct research that centered the voices of communities of color, and imagine alternatives. As the nutrition education pod shares this framework with the broader field and invites feedback and discussion, pod members hope this body of work will help the field shift thinking and practice.

The successes of these innovation pods helped lay the groundwork for additional collaborations across the community. In a 2023 survey of participants, 40% of respondents said participation in the community led to coordinated actions with one or more organizations, and 21% of respondents said they were actively collaborating on a common goal with one or more organizations. The connections and collaborations happening beyond the Healthy Food Community are signs of meaningful progress toward the community’s vision and goals and shows promise that these connections will continue even after the community’s time together has ended.

4. From “I” to “We”

Members of a network need to determine what it is that they can best accomplish together that they can’t accomplish individually. Then, when working with the network, they need to be able to put aside individual or organizational agendas to prioritize the goals of the collective. This takes time and effort and requires a strong foundation of trust. From our work with networks, we’ve found it is important to start by helping network members build relationships and share knowledge. This is an important precursor to a network taking collective action.

When the White House announced a conference on Nutrition, Hunger, and Health for the first time in more than 50 years, organizations working in the field were invited to offer input on the White House strategy. Many organizations represented in the Healthy Food Community crafted their own recommendations, and yet community of practice participants recognized a gap—the voices of people with lived experience of food insecurity were not yet part of the conversation.

To address that, community of practice members organized focus groups with various community perspectives to get their input on what the White House strategy should focus on. They put aside personal agendas to center and elevate community voice.

Pivoting for Equity

Achieving equitable outcomes requires changing systems, and this requires a range of actors coming together, letting go of personal agendas, and working in pursuit of a shared goal. The following action steps can help coalitions make the pivots we’ve found to be important for achieving impact.

From Scarcity to Abundance

    • Invest in relationships to build a foundation of trust. This will help foster collaboration over competition.
    • In grantmaking, provide flexible funding and embrace the principles of trust-based philanthropy. Rather than tightly controlling how funds are spent and the outputs and outcomes you want to see, trust that grantees know best how to use their resources for meaningful impact and be open to different ways of making progress toward your shared vision.

From consensus to consent

    • Make clear and specific agreements about how decisions will be made.
    • Consider consent-based decision-making to foster an environment where members may not fully agree but can support decisions made within the group’s range of tolerance.

From breadth to depth

    • Prioritize having focused goals and strategies for achieving them over offering a broad tent for participation. Trust that this focus will attract the participation needed to have the desired impact.
    • Create opportunities for subgroups to take collective action on areas of common interest. These “small wins” can lay the foundation for larger collaborations.

From “I” to “We”

    • Identify shared goals that require collective action, and support participants in prioritizing the goals of the collective over individual agendas.
    • Spend time supporting participants in relationship building and knowledge sharing. These are important steps that help coalitions move toward meaningful collective action.

Embracing these pivots can help coalitions transcend individual interests, foster collaboration, and yield greater impact. Committing to abundance, consent, depth, and collective action helps lay a more inclusive and effective path toward equity.

As you think about your own collectives, collaboratives, or even organization, we welcome you to reflect on the following: which of these pivots feel exciting to lean into? Which feel challenging? How might you begin shift mindsets to further your impact?


Evolving Your Organization to Sustain and Deepen Impact: Why a Clear Business Model is Important

The events of the of the last several years—a global pandemic, a racial reckoning, administration changes and new legislation as a result—have had a dramatic influence on what nonprofits do and how they do it. In our 2020 Stanford Social Innovation Review article Three Things Nonprofits Should Prioritize in the Wake of COVID-19, we offered advice to leaders as they faced immediate concerns about sustaining their work. Four years later, we are seeing an uptick in nonprofit organizations wanting to explore what sustainability will look like going forward, leveraging the lessons learned from the pivots they made during the last few years of uncertainty and responding to recent shifts in the contexts in which they are working.  

For many nonprofit leaders the impact they want to have is clear, but the path to getting there is keeping them up at night. In some cases, leaders are now seeing new opportunities, and in other cases they are seeing issues that need to be addressed. Here are a few examples:  

  • A nonprofit with a fee-for-service model has seen a shift in buyers’ willingness to pay for what it has to offer. During the pandemic, the organization had an opportunity to secure significant philanthropic funding to support its work, but leaders are concerned that this funding isn’t sustainable. Leaders are wondering what the sustainable model is going forward and how they can leverage the best of what both revenue streams have to offer.  
  • Another organization experimented with virtual programming during the pandemic. Not only did this allow them to continue vital programming, it also inspired thinking about opportunities to reach new audiences. Leaders are wondering how the organization could deliver both in-person and virtual programming going forward and what revenue model would sustain these programs.  
  • A third organization doubled down on its racial equity commitment after the killing of George Floyd. With renewed energy around this commitment, the organization is rethinking its priority audiences, what their needs are, what they want, and how to deliver and sustain that.  

The questions these organizations are asking are all business model questions.  

What’s a business model anyway?  

In the nonprofit sector, we’re all familiar with strategic planning. Strategic planning often focuses on helping an organization clarify what it is trying to achieve—its purpose and goals. Sometimes, however, strategic planning stops short and doesn’t get to the business model that is needed to support the strategy. The business model is about how the organization works and sustains itself financially to achieve the impact it aspires to. The business model is a series of strategic choices about what an organization will deliver, to whom, and how it will create value or impact. As seen in the diagram below, it starts with being clear about the people you want to serve, what their aspirations and needs are, and designing programs, products or services that will meet those needs and/or help them achieve their aspirations. After an organization has answered these questions, it’s important to clarify the resources, structures and processes that will be needed to deliver, what they will cost, and what will drive revenue, whether contributed, earned, or a combination of both. (If you are considering earned revenue (ex., fee for services, product sales, or membership dues) as part of your business model, read our field guide for more recommendations on developing earned revenue strategies.) 

Tips for Evolving Your Business Model 

We want to offer a few tips we’ve learned from our work helping organizations navigate these moments of evolution, and in some cases, reinvention of their business models. The first step is to recognize if your business model might need to change. Is there an opportunity that you want to capture that will require shifting an aspect of your business model? Or, are you experiencing a pain point that needs to be addressed? If you decide change is needed, here are three tips: 

  1. Make sure you know what your current model is. Consider taking the business model diagram and writing down what is happening today. What is your value proposition? What are the key resources, structures and processes that are critical to your delivery of value or impact? What are the costs of these, and how will you fund these costs? (For more guidance on assessing financial health, visit Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Financial Self-Assessment.) 
  2. Alignment is key. Once you decide upon change to one aspect of the model, discuss what other aspects of the model need to change to bring everything into alignment. For example, if you decide to pursue new sources of revenue, you may need to also develop new resources, structures, or processes.
  3. Be intentional about managing the change. Start by having a compelling vision or explanation for why an aspect of your business model needs to change and identify champions inside the organization who can help you make that change. Create an action plan, outlining key milestones on the path to change, immediate next steps, and owners and deadlines for each step. Make sure you have someone who is monitoring the action plan to track progress and troubleshoot when challenges arise.  

As nonprofits evolve to stay resilient and deepen impact amid an ever-changing environment, checking in on the organization’s business model is important. If you have aspirations to evolve your nonprofit’s business model and want to explore how we might be able to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Community Wealth Partners by emailing me at acelep(at)communitywealth.com.  

Bridging Differences to Advance Equity: Three Lessons Community Foundations Are Learning About Engaging Donors and Community

This post originally appeared on Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ blog. View the original post here

An exciting evolution is happening among community foundations in the United States.

While community foundations have always existed to support local donors who want to give back to their community, many are now exploring how they can leverage their unique strengths to contribute to transformational change in their communities. CFLeads’ Igniting the Future of Community Foundations survey found that 98 percent of community foundations plan to deepen or expand their community leadership. Most of these foundations are also centering racial equity in their work out of recognition that, in most communities, race is the biggest driver of disparity on a range of issues that impact residents’ and communities’ ability to thrive.

Since 2020, Community Wealth Partners has facilitated peer learning cohorts for community foundations working to advance racial equity and direct more resources to BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving nonprofits. (This work was made possible through funding from Fidelity Charitable Trustees Initiative.) Through these cohorts we were able to work with 18 community foundations, located all over the country, and ranging in size from less than $300,000 to more than $1 billion in assets. While these foundations had differences in terms of size, geography, and grantmaking priorities, some common themes emerged from these cohorts.

Many of these foundations are centering racial equity in their organizations’ strategies, and, as a result, are prioritizing engaging in new ways with donors and community to advance these strategies. For the most part, foundations in the cohorts were looking to deepen relationships with communities and nonprofits that historically had not had access to resources from the foundation—especially those organizations that are most proximate to the challenges the foundation seeks to address. At the same time, these foundations have also been experimenting with communicating a stronger point of view with donors. For example, foundations were educating donors about systemic inequities in their communities, having explicit conversations about racial disparities, and inviting donors to support discretionary funds aligned with the foundation’s strategic priorities.

Working in these ways requires community foundations to bridge differences in lived experience and perspective. Some foundations have had to stretch themselves to build trusting relationships with nonprofits and community leaders that perhaps the foundation has not supported before. At the same time, they are having conversations with donors that are different from how they’ve engaged donors in the past. While the community foundations we worked with would say they still have a lot to learn about how they can bridge differences to advance equity, through experimentation and iteration, some lessons are emerging. Here are three of them.

Lesson 1: Leverage and deepen relationships and trust.

As Rev. Jennifer Bailey of Faith Matters Network has said, “Relationships are built at the speed of trust, and social change happens at the speed of relationships.” Community foundations are finding ways to leverage their unique position to build relationships and bridge divides between donors and organizations working closest to the issues in communities, with the goal being donors, nonprofits, and the community foundation working toward a shared vision of a thriving community with equitable outcomes for residents. Doing this requires time and patience.

On the donor side, some community foundations are trying to engage donors differently to share a point of view about outcomes the foundation is working toward and opportunities for donors to support this vision. To do this, they are finding personal connections with donors to be an effective strategy. While mass communications and learning and networking opportunities are important tools for donor engagement, community foundations we’ve worked with are finding that one-on-one conversations are what makes a difference in helping donors understand the foundation’s goals and priorities and having a meaningful influence on donors’ giving.

“We’re working to leverage the trust in the donor services team that our donors have to create better connections and get to more robust giving,” said Lindsay Aroesty, vice president of development and donor services at the Pittsburgh Foundation. “We are trying to make more of a connection between what we’re funding through our discretionary grants and how aligning with those priorities is a value-add for donors. This speaks to the need for our donor services team to be able to communicate about the foundation’s grantmaking priorities effectively.”

On the nonprofit side, some community foundations are taking a closer look at their own history of funding and working to rectify disparities to ensure organizations closest to the issues have access to foundation resources. Reaching a more diverse range of nonprofits has required community foundations to do intentional outreach and relationship building.

One way the Community Foundation of Northern Virginia (CFNOVA) is doing this is by promoting grant opportunities to area chambers of commerce that represent diverse cultural and ethnic communities, such as the Northern Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Northern Virginia Black Chamber of Commerce, and the Asian American Chamber of Commerce.

CFNOVA also has created a tiered funding model for one fund, offering different sized grants to organizations depending on the size of their organizational budget. This allows organizations of similar size to be reviewed and vetted alongside one another rather than alongside organizations with widely different budgets. The foundation also has leaned into its convening role to host events featuring regional data and providing opportunities for diverse stakeholders from government, private, and nonprofit sectors to come together.

“We have recognized that community leadership on part of the foundation is essential, and we are striving to provide as many entry points as possible, with the goal of creating a community that works for everyone,” said Sari Raskin, vice president of grants and community leadership.

Lesson 2: Words matter—use language that offers “grace and space.”

Community foundations have relationships with a broad swath of the community, representing diversity in identities, lived experiences, and understanding of historical drivers and current data showing inequities that exist in communities and how racial justice strategies can lead to better outcomes for all residents. “When we’re talking about why racial equity matters to us, we have to assess where people may be and what they don’t understand and give them grace and space to engage in dialogue with us,” said Judy McBride, director of strategic partnership investments at Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

In Texas, Communities Foundation of Texas has worked to stay the course living their diversity, equity, and inclusion values, charting toward a community that thrives for all. Dr. Reo Pruiett, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for the foundation, says a helpful strategy has been staying focused on the issues community stakeholders and partners have an interest in—which in North Texas has been education, health, and economic workforce opportunities.

“I try to enter these conversations from my background as an educator and principal,” Dr. Pruiett said. “Healthy communities have education, health and safety, and economic workforce opportunities as their center of focus. Concentrating on these points has helped open doors with people who may be wary of language sometimes categorized as polarizing or politicized, and it’s also enabled me to further listen and learn what continues to be top of mind for the community.”

The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham learned similar lessons when they surveyed their donors and hired Frameworks Institute to offer guidance on language and messaging. Recommendations from Frameworks Institute included 1) lead with the shared values and principles of the community, 2) clearly define “equity” for your audience, 3) use stories to show local solutions to challenges and the impact of those solutions. (See more guidance from Frameworks Institute in their report Navigating Cultural Mindsets of Race and Place in the United States.)

“Words have power, and the context in which they are used matters,” said Christopher Nanni, president and CEO. “We have learned that the language we use and the audiences that receive them can determine how the message is received. We know that we need to be thoughtful in how we frame our communications around these challenging issues so that people will be open to hearing and not be alienated. It is not about watering down the message, but, rather, being more strategic in communicating the message so that it is actually received. We are learning to talk about equity-related issues in a way that distinct audiences can understand so that we can move forward together in unity as opposed to feeding into an already divisive environment.”

Some community foundations are leaning into their role as a connector and working to bridge differences in experience and perspective. The Community Foundation of Northern Virginia names community resilience as one of its strategic priorities. This includes supporting and encouraging civic engagement and helping residents bridge what divides them with civil conversations and dialogue.

The foundation recently launched a book circle, inviting donors and other members of the community to read and discuss Monica Guzmán’s book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

“Our belief is that a resilient community is a connected one, and we saw Guzmán’s book as a unique formula for civic healing,” said Gabrielle Webster, director of donor relations. “The book is challenging readers to be curious and build or maintain relationships. Over the course of the year, we were able to engage more than 425 readers in conversations across the region and learn how they were using the text in their homes, workplaces, places of worship, and beyond to enrich our collective understanding and dialogue.”

Lesson 3: Create more bridges internally between donor services and programs.

As community foundations center racial equity in their strategies and work to engage donors in their vision for a more just and equitable community, it is important for programs and donor services teams to be working in alignment. Some community foundations have recognized the need to break down silos that have been occurring across these parts of the foundation — each side focused on a unique segment of the community and with their own goals — to bring greater alignment.

“Silos between donors services and program teams aren’t going to work if the goal is racial justice,” said Aroesty of the Pittsburgh Foundation. “You need to leverage the foundation’s reputational and social capital across all areas of its work.”

One way the Pittsburgh Foundation has worked to bring stronger alignment across the donor services and program teams is through joint visioning sessions. For example, the donor services team invited members of the program team to offer advice and coaching as to how the foundation might reimagine donor events to align with the foundation’s new strategic framework and focus on racial justice.

Leaning Into Community Foundations’ Role as Bridge Builder

As community foundations work for more just and equitable communities, many are bringing more intention to their relationships, communications, and internal ways of working. For community foundations interested into leveraging their role to build bridges across differences in the community, here are some things to try.

  • Invest time in relationship building with donors with donors and nonprofits. Community foundations hold a unique opportunity to unite a community around a shared vision.
  • Create a vision for the future that will attract broad support by focusing on the issues that everyone cares about. This could include things like quality education, access to jobs and affordable housing, and the health and safety of residents.
  • Find ways to bring alignment across teams in the foundation. Possibilities include co-creating strategies and plans, cross-team peer coaching and support, or joint learning opportunities.

Using Movement-Building Strategies and Tools to Cast a Wider Net

As education networks work to advance educational equity, many are recognizing a need to reach broader and more particular audiences. For example, NCSM is working to have a more racially diverse network and leadership to support high-quality, equitable mathematics teaching and learning. Similarly, as Benjamin Banneker Association (BBA) works to improve math outcomes for Black students, the network is working to attract more white members that effectively teach Black students. 

Efforts to center equity and inclusion have become more challenging for some educators recently, as issues and language akin to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have become increasingly politicized. Some state legislatures have gone so far as to suggest and require removal of language (like the words gay and equity), goals (for example – teaching about the realities of slavery in the U.S.), and instruction related to equity (ex. how women and People of Color are having distinct experiences) from public education materials.

Despite these challenges, and given this urgent context, there are definitive opportunities for education networks working to advance equity to invite more and different people to join their campaigns for increased equity. Strategies and tools from social movements can help, and members of the K-12 education networks cohort learned some strategies and tools in a session with Trina Olson and Alfonso Wenker of Team Dynamics.

“Movements aren’t simply showing up for an action, they are about the long-haul work of moving people closer to living their values in a particular way,” Wenker said. “If we’re interested in broader equity in the education space, we have to be thinking together about what movements are, and specifically what are the values that motivate us?”

Logic and data alone are not enough to motivate people. Research shows that messages that lead with values are more effective. (Learn more about this in the resources below.)

“We know that identity and education have been politicized,” Olson said. “One of the things that takes the most discipline is to not get sucked into the frame of the people that are organizing on an opposing side. It’s neither strategic nor helpful. Instead of fighting their message, you need to have your own message that’s more effective.”

BBA is working to spread a message that their network is for “people who have a passion for math education for Black students.” “This can include classroom teachers, coaches, people in higher education, corporate members, or vendors,” said Shelly Jones, board president. “Most of our members are Black, but we want people to understand that this is for whoever is interested in supporting education for Black students.”   

As networks think of possible frames to craft their own message and invitation, research shows one frame that resonates with many in this moment is the notion of interdependence and collectivity. This has not always been a frame that would motivate many. As the image below shows, there have been different frames which have ebbed and flowed in popular opinion over time.

In 1969, “rights” was polling as the number one issue people cared about. During this time, the civil rights movement and women’s rights movement made significant gains, and the gay rights movement was born. On just about any social issue, “rights” were a frame that garnered support.

By the mid-1970s, “rights” were no longer polling as a compelling frame. Instead, a frame of individualism was getting growing support. By the early 2000s, a frame of interdependence and collectivity started to gain popularity, and we are in a moment where this frame is continuing to rise.

For leaders and organizations working to support a movement for education equity, there is an opportunity to lead and be consistent with frames of interconnection, interdependence and belonging.

NCSM has historically been a network of mathematics directors that work with math teachers. As the organization works to grow and diversify its membership and leadership to include more people of color, they are working to redefine what math leadership can look like so that a broader range of practitioners might feel both a sense of their leadership potential in mathematics education and a sense of belonging in this network.

“Our members include curriculum directors, instructional coaches, administrators, and classroom teachers,” said Katey Arrington, board president at NCSM. “They’re all leaders if they’re influencing what happens in math instruction in some way, whether it be at the school level or district level.”

By helping math practitioners reimagine what a “math leader” could be, NCSM is working to foster connection and belonging among a wider network than they were previously.

Try This

As you think about ways to attract broader, different, and deeper participation in your network, try this path to begin to craft a values-centered invitation to join your movement.

  1. What is the first time you remember showing up for justice, whether it be at a rally, in support of a campaign, or an action you took individually? What value felt under threat that motivated you to show up? (Examples include safety, respect, choice)
  2. Think about your work and the invitation you want to offer. What value or values might motivate people to join you?
  3. Now think about who you are trying to motivate. How might their perspective and life experience be different from yours? How might that influence what motivates them? Does that spark a different idea about values that might motivate people different than you to join this movement? What words might you use to bring along people who aren’t with you yet, but could be?
  4. Now that you’ve refined which value(s) you want to lead with, experiment with crafting values-based messages that might motivate people to join you.

Additional Resources

These resources offer more guidance, frameworks, and tools for understanding social movements and using language that can attract more people to your cause:

Four Lessons Learned in Building Trusting Relationships with Community

Four Lessons Learned in Building Trusting Relationships with Community 

Many nonprofits and foundations are recognizing the importance of centering the voices of those closest to the issues as a key factor in designing programs and strategies that are likely to succeed. Being able to authentically engage these voices requires a level of trust between the organization and the community it serves, and some organizations have found they have work to do to build or regain trust with the community.  

We recently spoke with a group of leaders from nonprofits and foundations who shared their lessons learned in building trusting relationships with community for authentic engagement. Here are four lessons that emerged from the conversation.  

Be honest and reflective about your organization’s past, repair harm where necessary. Community members may be leery about requests for input or co-creation because they’ve seen similar requests in the past that didn’t lead to meaningful change. It is important to understand and acknowledge ways your organization has broken trust in the past and take steps to proactively rebuild trust in ways that center what the community wants. This will take time and will likely require a different way of engaging. 

Some organizations have found the need to start with some internal work to be able to engage with humility and authenticity for community. Deputizing one or a few people from an organization to engage with community is not enough. Authentic engagement will require buy-in from leadership, a culture that values and supports this type of engagement, and structures and processes that allow the organization to respond to what you are hearing from community. 

Be clear and honest about where input is wanted, how it will be used, and what other factors must be considered. A common tension that, if not managed well, can end up damaging trust is the tension between wanting to be open to community input and also having to work within some real parameters about what is possible. Sometimes organizations don’t communicate those parameters upfront, and this can cause community members to feel their input wasn’t valued or heard. Clarify and decisions that have been made and are not up for discussion so community members can offer ideas that can work within those parameters. (For example, the budget you have to work with, the goal the effort must support, the population(s) you are prioritizing, etc.) Be clear and specific about how decisions will be made.   

Lean on partners when you can. You may not yet have relationships with members of the community your organization serves, but you may have grantees or partners that do. Consider ways you can leverage their relationships, knowledge, and skills. These partners may be able to convene community members, help with or lead facilitation, or offer insights they’ve already gathered from the community to inform your work. These partners could also serve as “critical friends”, offering feedback on ways your organization might engage with authenticity and humility to build trusting relationships with community members in the future.  

Be intentional about follow up. We’ve likely all had experiences where we’ve been asked for input and then wondered what ever happened with that input. This is another common practice that can damage trust. Make a plan for how and when you will circle back to the community once you’ve engaged them. Some leaders we spoke with also recognized the need to make a plan for how the organization will maintain relationships after an initiative is over. For example, if you’ve built relationships with a group of individuals through a strategic planning process, what can you do keep those individuals connected and engaged after the process concludes?  

Read more insights and examples about building relationships with community for authentic engagement in our field guide, Sharing Power with Communities