February 27, 2024

Community foundations serve as the nexus between community needs and philanthropic support.  While discrete entities, our fundamental role is as a hub that enables our communities’ specific needs to be served by locally focused philanthropic leaders and service providers. 

Historically, this has meant raising money from local individuals and companies, then granting that money to local organizations serving those donors’ charitable interests.

Yet the evolution of philanthropy has encouraged us to look beyond our traditional model, to identify how we can better serve our communities by also leveraging, guiding, and securing the resources of those outside our local philanthropic sphere to meet our communities’ needs.

For instance, community foundations are increasingly exploring funding opportunities from corporate, private, and national foundations that want to pursue shared goals in the regions we serve.  

Local private philanthropy likes what we can offer, because we tend to have more staff and a broader set of relationships with key leaders. We readily understand our communities’ specific problems and deficits, and can help our colleagues direct their resources to where they’re most needed. We also help them see opportunities to co-leverage their support with others’, to realize even greater gains.

National philanthropies respect community foundations’ proximity to those we serve.  They know we understand not only what’s needed, but also how things work (and don’t work) where we live.  They know that our relationships with nonprofit, government, and business entities are an important source of intelligence and collaboration.  And that together, community foundations can help national foundations maximize their impact when pursuing goals in our communities.

While the financial potential of these opportunities is truly exciting, impacting government decisionmaking can provide even greater mission impacts. 

Community foundations have significant social and political capital that can be engaged to convince local leaders, institutions, and the public at large to manage government in ways that advance our shared goals.  Yet the trick for our field is that engaging on anything related to policy is relatively new, unknown, and therefore risky.  

The good news is that when we reflect on the “nexus” role we play in our communities, we can also see that such engagement is not new or unfamiliar, and the challenges and risks far more manageable that we might imagine (and our boards fear!)

To my mind, the key to community foundation success on policy issues lies in thinking of it as Community:Foundation Policy Leadership.

What is Community:Foundation Policy Leadership?

Community:foundation policy leadership is a way of thinking about our potential for positive policy impacts in ways that transcend our organizations alone. Community:foundation policy leadership means we think of ourselves as the hub for what our:

• Community members want, need, and are asking for;

• Foundation partners would like to accomplish in our communities; and

• Policymakers can do to more effectively strengthen our regions.

Community foundations don’t create any of those things, nor do we have to push others to get there.  Our role is to connect with each set of entities on our priority issues, and then connect them with each other, to explore their shared goals and how collaboration can help us together make progress on those goals.

When we lead on policy issues in this way, we aren’t depending on our organizations alone to have all the ideas, provide all the funding, or take sole responsibility for the policy solutions. We are depending on our community foundation’s relational, financial, and political capital to activate these key colleagues to identify, plan for, and pursue solutions together. And in doing so, enable all involved to strengthen our communities.

After years of exploring and advancing policy leadership in our field, this is how I’ve come to see our path forward. It doesn’t look beyond us, but sees us within our larger context. As such, it frees us of a responsibility we can’t alone shoulder. I.e., To know the answers and compel our governments to act in accord with our missions.  It enables us to appreciate the combined power of our key colleagues. And ultimately, it shows us how to effectively catalyze our ability – and I would argue, fiduciary responsibility - to bridge their interests in ways that create attainable paths to policy progress. 

More to come in future posts... Yet I'm glad to be in touch in the meantime as well. If interested, please email me at Stephen@CFPolicyLeadership.net or just set a time for us below.