In 2023, your state legislature enacted laws and policies that will impact your community foundation’s priority areas, for better and for worse. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions had similar impacts, as have federal laws and programs (such as the winding down of ARPA funding).

Yet the enactment of even the most momentous “good” and “bad” laws in your priority areas are never the end of the story. They simply change your potential to advance your community foundation’s mission.

A new chapter will unfold. Your community foundation’s priorities will still need to be pursued.

The primary question is: What, if anything, will your community foundation do to pursue the most progress possible in light of recent changes?

If you'd like to protect your region's strength in your priority areas, Summer is a pivotally important time. Talking, thinking, and potentially coordinating with grantees, local officials, and allied organizations is an extremely valuable starting point. It helps reveal the many different ways your community foundation can best engage to enable progress, whatever the new landscape.

For example, new laws will have to be implemented at the state and local levels. Yet the way they are implemented depends on many additional decisions to be made by state and local officials, and even front-line government and non-profit employees.

How will these new laws and policies be implemented in your region? Where is support needed to ensure they’re implemented for the best possible - or least damaging - results? Are there ways your community foundation can help? Will there be impacts on the service providers you fund? Do your grantees, those they serve, and the public at large understand the impacts to their services – and what they can do to create the best results in the evolving landscape ahead?

What’s also perpetually true is that new legislation and laws are never bulletproof. They can also be undermined, scaled back, or repealed in future legislative sessions. Would you like to see the public and policymakers maintain support for new laws in the next session, despite inevitable efforts to undo them? Are there harms from some legislation that you would like to see corrected next year?

And what about the bills that could have helped or harmed in your community foundation’s priority areas, yet which narrowly failed to pass? Would you like to see some of those bills succeed next year? As importantly, would you like to see some of those bills fall short again next year?

By engaging with your policy colleagues, local officials, grantees, and community members about those issues throughout the summer and fall, you can begin to identify the smartest steps your community foundation can take to impact those issues’ future progress. Most of those steps would in fact be consistent with your community foundation's history of activities - and virtually none of them need to be “lobbying” to be impactful.

If you’d like to learn more about how your community foundation can start engaging with colleagues to strengthen your community foundation's impacts in light of recent changes in law and policy, please join us this Friday, July 28 at Noon ET/11CT/10MT/9PT. We'll be joined by longtime lobbyist and former gubernatorial staff leader Bill Welz, who will address the many ways you can enable your community foundation to keep advancing the policies that will strengthen your region, amidst the challenges and opportunities that developed in the past year.