Alliance Online - December 2007

Community foundations seek to enhance leadership skills

Peter Walkenhorst

EVENT Council on Foundations 2007 Fall Conference for Community Foundations
Date 16-19 September
Venue San Francisco, USA
Theme Eureka! Learn, Lead, and Grow

Community foundations in the United States are facing new responsibilities and challenges as their communities increasingly look to them to lead the way in addressing complex issues. In response to this growing call for leadership, arising from both societal and market pressures, more and more community foundations are rethinking their mission, vision and values, trying to make community leadership a moral and market imperative for their work.

Against this background, the Council on Foundations (COF) 2007 Fall Conference for Community Foundations was designed to enhance the leadership skills community foundations bring to the work of building community. The theme of the conference, held in San Francisco 16-19 September, was ‘Eureka! Learn, Lead, and Grow’ (‘Eureka’ is California-speak for ‘I found it!’ – a legacy of the California Gold Rush).

The meeting was attended by a record 1,818 participants, representing 592 community and private foundations, support organizations and other institutional funders. The spectrum of topics discussed in over 130 sessions and conference events ranged from basic grantmaking to good governance practices and mission-related investment, covering virtually all aspects of community foundation work, with the overarching conference theme of ‘community leadership’ permeating many, if not most, of the discussions.

This points to a profound shift in the way US community foundations talk about their work. Not long ago, conversations at a COF Fall Conference focused primarily on asset figures and the amount of money spent in grants. Although community foundations have always added value to their communities in ways beyond grantmaking and donor services, asset growth used to serve as the primary indicator of success. Now, community foundations are giving far greater attention to their non-grantmaking roles. What is new is the breadth and the depth of interest in these leadership roles.

The leadership theme was reinforced by a report from the Council on Foundations Leadership Team, entitled ‘Community Foundations. Leadership Multiplied’, which urges community foundations to multiply their efforts by acting as a unified field. In addition, it stresses the need for community foundations to expand their roles beyond the realm of donor services and grant management to embrace new levels of leadership. Reiterating many of the key insights from Lucy Bernholz, Katherine Fulton and Gabriel Kasper’s 2005 report On the Brink of New Promise, the Leadership Team declared: ‘Our long-term relevance and viability depend on the distinct value we deliver: community leadership, personal philanthropic services, and our local expertise.’ This quotation is a good summary of what could be heard almost everywhere in San Francisco. Many community foundations in the US are now eager to be more than grantmakers and to engage in leadership roles. Whether this new ambition will translate into effective practice remains to be seen. But the conversation has clearly moved into a new territory.

This new emphasis on community leadership is of particular interest to non-US community foundations because it opens up opportunities for a mutual exchange of experience. Most community foundations outside North America have only small assets and are still struggling to become sustainable organizations. Yet they have experiences that could inform the leadership work of more established community foundations in the US.

What emerging community foundations from other parts of the world – where there is less wealth and where the culture of philanthropy is much younger – have to offer to their US counterparts was demonstrated in San Francisco in two well-attended concurrent sessions. Community foundation representatives from Canada, Northern Ireland, Slovakia and Zimbabwe discussed how community foundations can be leaders on issues of significance and shared innovative practices developed in their countries with the audience. Despite the obvious differences in individual countries and communities, it became apparent that community foundations everywhere are facing similar challenges, and can therefore learn a lot from each other. But there was also a consensus that fostering civic engagement and participation is not an easy task and sometimes requires community foundations to take risks. Taking calculated risks, however, was seen by all presenters as a crucial component of genuine leadership.

The lively discussions in these two concurrent sessions made clear that there is a huge potential for mutual learning between community foundations from different parts of the world – a potential that has not yet been fully utilized. For a European observer, it was striking to see that, maybe for the first time in the history of the international community foundation movement, attitudes and trends in North America seemed to converge with experiences in other parts of the world. Community foundations in the US are beginning to recognize that there is a world beyond the US borders and that this world is becoming more and more relevant to their own work.

Of course, the two sessions mentioned here constituted only a small part of the overall conference programme and most of the other sessions and plenary discussions continued to be driven by a predominantly domestic agenda. But if the strong focus on community leadership activities continues to dominate discussions in the US, there will be a genuine opportunity for an intensive dialogue among US and non-US community foundations on the essentials of their work. At a time of rapid social change worldwide, such a dialogue is more relevant than ever.

Peter Walkenhorst is Programme Director Community Foundations at the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Gütersloh, Germany. Email Peter.Walkenhorst@Bertelsmann.de

For more information
www.cof.org
To download On the Brink of New Promise, go to http://www.communityphilanthropy.org/pdf/fullreport.pdf

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