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Resource Type: Guide

A Guide for Trustees Reimagining Capacity Building: Navigating Culture, Systems & Power

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Strengthening nonprofit organizations is not just a nice-to-have, but an essential part of foundations’ work to ensure that nonprofits have the resources they need to address today’s most pressing social concerns. Indeed, the vast majority of staffed foundations – 86 percent – do just that – invest in organizational strengthening in areas such as leadership, fundraising, evaluation, communications and technology.

Learning in Philanthropy: A Guidebook

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When grantmakers focus on learning for improvement, we use evaluation and learning to generate information and insights that will help us better understand both how we’re doing in our work and how to improve. A focus on taking action based on what we learn ensures that we are engaged in strategic or applied learning. This publication serves as an orientation for staff and board members highlighting key concepts, how to get started, and how others in the field are thinking about and addressing important issues around learning. This publication provides a solid basis for thinking and talking about the next steps in your organization’s learning work.

Worksheet: Culture Crush

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Break down the specific elements of the culture you aspire to have by looking at both positive examples as well as negative ones.

Worksheet: Our Culture Story

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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.

Culture Resource Guide: Shift

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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.

Worksheet: Culture Tightrope

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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.

Worksheet: Anthropologists Game

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Get past what your organization says it values to uncover the hard-to-see, hidden values deeply ingrained in your current culture.

Conversation Starter: Understanding Incentives

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When certain aspects of the “old” culture seem intractable, even though new expectations have been introduced, the culprit could be that old behaviors are still inadvertently incentivised.