Last week I blogged from San Diego while co-delivering Engage for Results with my colleague Melinda Weekes to a group of grantmakers in partnership with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. This session focused on engagement strategies to help foundations be more effective and accountable as funders and providers of other important resources to their grantees, surrounding communities, and other funders. The end of our first day focused on power as an ever-present dynamic, not just in the foundation-grantee dynamic, but also in a number of other dimensions of difference within and beyond organizational walls. Read More
. . . and much more! Melinda Weekes and I are currently partnering with the good people at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations to facilitate another offering of “Engage for Results,” a workshop that builds on our work together 5 years ago through the Change Agent Project. During this initial work convening grantmakers and nonprofits around the country, we heard loud and clear that addressing power dynamics and engaging in authentic relationships would be key to ensuring that grantmaking is more relevant and impactful with respect to the work of nonprofits and outcomes for communities. Read More
This past week marked the release of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ newest action learning guide – Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders. IISC is pr0ud to be a co-publisher of and contributor to the publication, which builds on our work with GEO staff facilitating Engage for Results. Essentially this seminar walks foundation staff through a series of strategic questions and tools for engaging grantees, community members, and other stakeholders in their grantmaking. Worth highlighting here is what GEO and IISC identify as being core to the case for funders doing more to involve others in their work: Read More
|Photo by Qoncept|http://www.flickr.com/photos/37418570@N03/4488784822|
With another public offering of Pathway to Change on the horizon (May 4-6), I’ve been putting my thinking towards how best to encapsulate this robust course, which focuses on skills and frameworks for designing and facilitating collaborative change efforts. The genius behind IISC’s courses in general (for which I can take absolutely no credit) is the simple elegance of the visuals that capture many of the essential ideas and steps. That said, we can sometimes find ourselves awash in images and wanting something a little more to the point to guide us. For these purposes, I’ve boiled the course down to a series of key questions that stand behind the various models. So here is the Curtis’ Notes version (which also applies to a related course, Engage for Results, that we offer to foundations in partnership with GEO):
We had an interesting conversation during last week’s Engage for Results session at the Donors Forum in Chicago. IISC has been partnering with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations(GEO) to offer this two day skill-building session to foundations interested in strategies for engaging stakeholders in their grantmaking. This offering grew out of GEO’s Change Agent Project, which revealed the strong interest on the part of nonprofits to be in deeper relationship with funders in order to achieve greater impact.
On the first morning, I shared some striking results from a 2008 GEO survey of attitudes and practices of foundations in the United States. Specifically, less than half (49%) of those foundations surveyed indicated that it was important for their organization to seek external input. Among GEO membership the number was higher, coming in at 78%. However, the survey also showed that overall only 36% of respondents actively solicited feedback from their grantees. That strikes as quite a discrepancy between stated beliefs and actual practice. So I turned to the workshop participants for reactions.
We had an interesting conversation during last week’s Engage for Results session at the Donors Forum in Chicago. IISC has been partnering with Grantmakers for Effective Organizations(GEO) to offer this two day skill-building session to foundations interested in strategies for engaging stakeholders in their grantmaking. This offering grew out of GEO’s Change Agent Project, which revealed the strong interest on the part of nonprofits to be in deeper relationship with funders in order to achieve greater impact.
On the first morning, I shared some striking results from a 2008 GEO survey of attitudes and practices of foundations in the United States. Specifically, less than half (49%) of those foundations surveyed indicated that it was important for their organization to seek external input. Among GEO membership the number was higher, coming in at 78%. However, the survey also showed that overall only 36% of respondents actively solicited feedback from their grantees. That strikes as quite a discrepancy between stated beliefs and actual practice. So I turned to the workshop participants for reactions.
