Linking, Learning, Leveraging

These three themes unify the Coalition’s work. These mutually reinforcing concepts provide us with clarity of purpose. They describe how we serve the community foundation field, and they are the touchstones we use to gauge the strategies we develop and the opportunities we pursue.

What does this mean in practice?


Linking
Linking is at the core of what we do. Our primary role is to link people, resources, and interests in ways that contribute to healthy, resilient children, youth, families, and communities.

The Coalition facilitates linking at many different levels:

• forging new connections within communities;
  
• linking work across communities; and
  
• serving as a conduit for information, expertise, and resources between the national and local levels.

Our vantage point as an intermediary organization makes us well suited to link compatible community and national foundation objectives. We have connected community and national foundations on issues such as mentoring, immunization, youth development, community organizing, systems reform, and responsible fatherhood. We also link community foundations to each other, experts in various disciplines, and others in the field of philanthropy in a variety of ways:

• in response to individual requests for assistance;
  
• at our annual conference;
  
• through regional meetings of grantmakers;
  
• at meetings of our grantees;
  
• by connecting community foundations to cross-disciplinary groups such as the Emerging Coalition for Community Schools; and
  
• through the medium of technology.

Our web site debuted this year, and we are experimenting with ways to provide information on demand to our members. Technology is also a cost-effective way to create opportunities for our members to interact with each other, and we intend to expand our repertoire of electronic options. At the same time, we recognize that the community foundation field has, generally speaking, been slow to embrace technology. If we intend to make this a useful tool for our members, our efforts must be complemented by training and technical assistance.

We also still do things the old-fashioned way -- every other month we publish Community Building Chronicles, a story highlighting some facet of community foundation work that is contributing to improved conditions for children, youth and families. This publication is sent to the more than 550 community foundations around the country as well as their board chairs. These pieces are short, easily digestible, and provide contacts that enable interested community foundations to pursue the issue addressed at deeper levels.


Learning
We view our role in learning as twofold:

• creating learning opportunities for community foundations (“just in time learning” or what you need when you need it); and
  
• creating learning communities among community foundations (environments where best practices can evolve and new ground can be broken).

Mindful that people learn in different ways, we approach learning from multiple perspectives. We facilitate community foundation access to leading researchers, practitioners, organizations, tools, and techniques. We are firm believers in the efficacy of peer learning. We structure and fund technical assistance and training. We document and disseminate innovative ideas, lessons learned, and best practices. We respond to issue-specific needs identified by community foundations. We are in the process of creating forums for posture-free conversations about tough issues like race, class, gender, and power -- issues that defy simple solution but continue to hamper our ability to create hospitable environments for children, youth, and families. We are experimenting with strategies such as site visits to promising works-in-progress and regular group discussions on challenging issues. And we are assembling a toolbox to permit broader and more systematic access to our expanding knowledge base.


Leveraging
By leveraging, we mean enabling community foundations, and the community at large, to leverage human, social, and financial capital. Risk capital is a scarce commodity even for the largest community foundations. Our matching grants have encouraged community foundations to venture outside of their comfort zones to test new alliances, new ideas, and new ways of doing business. These experiments have led to advances -- some incremental, some fundamental -- in community foundation practice and capacity. Since 1994, the Coalition has made 221 grants to a total of 76 different community foundations.

Our matching grants have also created opportunities for community foundations of all sizes and at every stage of development to access national foundation resources. Particularly in communities that have not attracted national foundation investment, these grants serve to validate community foundation ventures into new roles and new territory. This, in turn, makes it easier for community foundations to leverage local resources and build new relationships. Equally important, the leveraging is reciprocal. These relatively modest investments have enabled national foundations to mine a rich vein of local resources, from hard dollars to sweat equity, to deeper understandings of social problems and promising solutions.