Community Foundations & Policy Leadership: The Imperative, Challenge, and Path Forward

According to Gallup’s July report, public faith in institutions is at its lowest in generations – and sinking. ??The Supreme Court has now joined Congress, “big business,” newspapers, and criminal justice in the lower echelons of public confidence.?

This is a serious problem.?Functioning institutions give us platforms for pursuing our shared interests.?When people don’t trust their institutions, they look elsewhere to be served.??This makes it harder for people to find reliable bases of leadership, support, and collaboration for the greater good.

As community bonds weaken, so does community strength. ?Windows of opportunity are missed.??Community problems are poorly addressed.?Inequities intensify.?Negative consequences spread.?And while the wealthy tend to avoid the worst of it, they do not emerge unscathed.?The declining tide lowers all boats.???

The Imperative of Community Foundation Policy Leadership

Gallup’s poll didn’t include community foundations, the ~750 “institutions” that are fundamental to the strength of the communities they each serve.?Yet community foundations can be part of the solution needed to address this growing problem.??

In fact, community foundations are well-situated to step up amidst this crisis of public faith in institutions.?Located within the regions they serve, they are proximate to their communities, non-profits, businesses, government officials, media, and more.?They track their community’s pulse, understand where the problems lie, and have the breadth of relationships required to foster non-partisan solutions to its problems.?Given their unique philanthropic power to even “lobby” as needed, community foundations have an impressive ability – and arguable duty – to exercise their policy leadership potential in ways that foster their communities’ strength.

According to a 2020 CFLeads report , there is now a growing cohort of community foundations successfully undertaking such policy leadership work, with others just getting started and even more intending to engage in the coming years.??

Yet while there is great interest, policy advocacy is still quite new for community foundation staff and board members – and community foundation operations overall.??What’s more, effective policy leadership is neither simple nor “one size fits all.”??

So while community foundations are eminently capable of providing important policy guidance to their communities, doing so requires a deliberate, pragmatic, and genuinely organization-wide approach that is specific to each organization and the community it serves.

Fortunately, many community foundations - such as the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Greater Buffalo Community Foundation, and others - are proving that successful policy leadership is eminently doable.??What these organizations will also tell you is that success requires a thoughtful and strategic approach, and a commitment to ongoing learning, organizational communication, and adapting to ever-shifting external opportunities and challenges.

Providing effective policy leadership in our ever-changing world is never easy.?But these community foundations have proven that it can be done – while making them more effective, successful, and heartened through the value they’re adding.???

The Challenge of Changing for the Better

Change is hard for all of us, all the time.?As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, there are physical, emotional, and mental impulses that cause people to resist change.??

Organizational change is exponentially harder.?It requires simultaneous change from each of the individuals on the board and staff – in harmony with the whole. ?

On top of this, when a community foundation engages in policy leadership, it presents itself differently to its community.?This inherently compels its existing friends and audiences to think anew about their relationship with their community foundation – and if and how they want to support it in the future.?

This can be daunting for board members, leadership, and staff –as well as donors and grantees.?Many of these colleagues had never considered community foundations’ duty to their communities in the policy sphere.?Invariably, some within each of these groups will suggest – and even urge – that it’s safer and better to leave well enough alone and keep pursuing the traditional model.?

And even for those who come to believe that their community foundations should engage their policy leadership potential for the greater good, there is another organization-specific question that must be answered: ?“How exactly are we supposed to make this work – in ways that serve both our community and our organization?”

Meeting the challenge

These were precisely the questions I explored with my teammates when I was the inaugural Director of Advocacy & Capacity Building for Fairfield County’s Community Foundation.?At the departmental, staff, leadership, and board levels, we worked together to envision our best approach to the policy leadership that would serve our community - and what that would require of our operations.

I’ve also been fortunate to launch and lead numerous conversations with community foundation colleagues from across the country who are themselves engaged in various stages of policy advocacy. ?While each community foundation’s realities and options are unique, there is a common framework for successfully approaching this work.??The approach requires patience, listening, honesty, courage, and an unwavering mission focus.?Yet if adhered to, such work can strengthen the team, organization, and community in ways that reinforce each other with each step forward.??

When a community foundation decides it wants to explore its leadership potential, its primary task is to develop and coordinate its organization-wide thinking and approach to that work - before diving headlong into it.??

As noted in this recent Stamford Social Innovation Review article , this generally means assessing the organization’s mission and readiness to meet the external realities involved; what will be operationally required to succeed on the new front; and how the organization will assess and revise its plans as they unfold.?

As pertains to community foundations, the following steps can enable their team(s) to develop their initial readiness – and long-term ability – to lead for the policy changes that will best serve their communities.?

1. Board and staff must together explore, at a broad level, what it would mean for their organization to incorporate policy leadership into its work.? This includes identifying, at a general level:

-??????The community foundation’s policy voice and positioning;

-??????How each department’s operations will integrate policy leadership into their work;

-??????How the organization will together handle the political challenges that inevitably arise;

-??????How it will explain its policy leadership work to supporters, donors, and the public at large; and

-??????How the organization will, structurally, continually learn from - and adjust their operations to meet - the endlessly evolving world of policymaking.

2. Leadership should create a committee of key team members – comprised of staff and board representatives - to refine the target policy issues and/or approaches.? Their work should then be shared, discussed, and approved in consultation with the entire organization.?

3. Community members and other experts on the politics of the issues should be engaged, to realistically explore the short- and long-term potential ahead. This includes considering the political realities, existing policy advocacy landscape, key players, and realistic potential for the community foundation to become impactful.?

4. The community foundation should determine the organization’s best specific advocacy targets, approaches, and goals for the long- and short-term. ?These will vary per issue, and rely heavily on the advice received from their trusted colleagues (internal and external) in the previous step. ?The issue approach can be narrow and deep; broad and shallow; or something in between.??In general, it’s best to start slow, learn, and decide how to expand from there.?Also worth noting is that the most reliable measures of progress for each issue may be qualitative (ex. mileposts) instead of numeric – and that sustainable progress requires patience.??

Having established specific, attainable, and measurable goals enables the organization to foresee how its parts will need to collaborate to reach them – and assess their progress along the way.??Of critical importance is that all the preceding enable the community foundation to both pitch and report on their successes to the funders who want to catalyze their community foundation’s policy leadership potential.?

5. Establish the immediate and long-term steps across the organization for shared thinking and operations, to enable the successful integration of policy leadership into the organization’s work. No two community foundation approaches or plans will be the same.?None will deliver results fast or deep enough to immediately overcome the structural inequities that plague all our communities.?Yet if each community foundation proceeds at the pace most appropriate to its unique potential, it can begin engaging its policy leadership strength in ways that enable growing progress with every step it takes.????

6. Within those plans, specifically identify the internal and external communications work required to support both the policy goals and organizational success across all fronts.??Advocacy is multifaceted – and therefore subject to great interpretation (and even mudslinging). ??External communications plans enable various audiences to understand why their community foundation is pursuing specific policy advances.?Planning for internal communications helps ensure coordination across the organization about “how” the organization’s pursuits need to be handled within ever-evolving external realities.???

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At this tumultuous time, when public faith in so many societal institutions is failing, community foundations have both the unique potential and duty to lead for policy improvements for the communities they serve.??The field has demonstrated that it is ready, willing, and able to do so. ?And we have many examples demonstrating that with appropriate preparation, both their communities and organizations become stronger when community foundations effectively engage in policy leadership.??

The question that remains is whether community foundations will engage their policy leadership potential - or instead stick to their traditional role, leaving their communities’ key policy concerns to others.?

The answer lies within each community foundation that considers it.