Worksheet: Our Culture Story
Get clarity around the specific behaviors, actions and outcomes you are currently seeing in your culture and want to be seeing in your desired future.
Resource Type: Guide
Using Key Moments to Shape Culture: The Helen Macpherson Smith Trust
With the retirement of their long-time CEO and a milestone distribution to celebrate, Helen Macpherson Smith Trust took this natural opporutnity to review and transition the trust’s organizational culture, grantmaking strategy, structure and processes.
Culture Resource Guide: Shift
Shifting culture doesn’t simply mean developing a fresh values statement or identifying three or four cultural attributes that we want to define us. Rather, we need to back up these actions with real work to create a culture that will make our organization and our grantees more successful.
Culture Resource Guide: Acknowledgments
This list of people helped to make GEO’s Culture Resource Guide possible.
Worksheet: Culture Tightrope
Your organization’s values are often balanced by an opposite value. One way to visualize your future culture is to name the values in tension and the desired balance.
Culture Resource Guide: Assess
Once we have gained a good understanding of the culture of our organizations, it’s time to assess the degree to which that culture supports our values, goals, mission and vision. This means asking tough questions about which aspects of our current culture reflect and reinforce the values and strategies at the heart of our work, and which aspects do not.
Culture Resource Guide: Understand
A productive internal culture aligned with a foundation’s mission and goals is essential to support nonprofit resilience and success. In other words, if we are striving to have more impact, we should look not just at our external strategies and theories of change, but also at the ingrained behaviors, assumptions and values that drive our daily work and our interactions with grantees and other partners.
Culture Resource Guide: Overview
After more than 15 years promoting grantmaker practices that support nonprofit results, GEO is convinced that a strong culture inside foundations is critical for effective philanthropy. The following sections of this guide provide more perspective on each of these phases of culture change: understand, assess, shift and tend.
Worksheet: Culture Lily Pond Activity
Culture is the collective behaviors and underlying assumptions of an organization. How does your culture manifest at your organization?
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: The GEO Community at 20
Over the last 20 years, the GEO community has worked to transform a desire for results into real improvements by creating spaces where grantmakers learn together and use that learning to drive concrete changes in the way grantmaking work gets done. As a field, we’ve made progress. And, as we continue learning together, our understanding of effective philanthropy evolves.
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: The Implications of Implicit Bias
Focusing on equity necessitates reflection on ourselves and reckoning with the impact of our actions, regardless of our intentions. Understanding how implicit bias can manifest in behavior is crucial to understanding how our organizations may perpetuate the very inequities we seek to reduce.
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: Centering Philanthropic Change in Community
Organizations seeking to support authentic change on complex, multi-layered issues often find that listening to and being in relationship with impacted communities is central to the work.