To create true inclusion that drives results for an organization, Lewis notes that it takes focus, commitment, deep authentic relationships with communities of color and an enduring will to do the work.

If you’d like to explore the issue of racial diversity in the independent sector further, Lewis has recommended a couple of resources. In this Blog Talk Radio interview with Rosetta Thurman, Lewis and a number of other guests share their perspectives on how to involve people of color more deeply in nonprofit work, and how their inclusion is essential to success of programs within their communities.

If you’re a person of color considering a career or looking to further your career in the independent sector, Lewis has also shared with us this document (pdf) that outlines pathways to leadership and career development in the field.

Join the conversation: Has your organization taken on the challenge to cultivate diversity within the ranks of leadership? If so, what strategies have you developed? Please share them, and any resources you might have by commenting on this post.

-Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate

In addition to featuring original content written by Forum staff, the blog will post syndicated content from various regional association blogs, like our own Philanthropy Potluck from the Minnesota Council on Foundations.  Check out MCF Manager of Member Services Stephanie Jacobs’ recent post on Switch, a book about creating change within individuals, and across organizations.

Consider checking out the Forum’s blog if you’re interested in keeping tabs on the activities of grantmaker associations around the nation, new resources on grantmaking, and national conferences and online programming opportunities. The most recent Forum post, for example, features a free March 15 webinar by the Foundation Center on the new i3 application, and its impact on education funders.

The blog can be found at givingforum.wordpress.com, and you can subscribe to it in your RSS feed reader by clicking here.

How is this new reality affecting funding and grantseeking? How can nonprofits access insight directly from those who review grant applications and make funding decisions?

Drawing on its connections with grantmakers who account for nearly $900 million in grants each year in Minnesota, the Minnesota Council on Foundations has encapsulated grantmaker knowledge and insight into its Grantseeking for Beginners seminars to help nonprofits learn what makes a proposal rise to the top, get noticed and get funded in an era of intense competition for extremely tight resources.

A group of corporate grantmakers and family, private and community foundations recently shared these nuggets of advice for grantseekers:

• “Those who are able to convey their message the best will win out in a tighter grant reality.  Poorly written applications will not get noticed, and grant funders may no longer be as accessible to work with groups to help them improve their application.”
• “I would encourage collaboration and research to avoid duplication.  In a tighter funding reality, grantmakers will be looking closely at the amount of collaboration between organizations and seek to ensure that there is as little duplication of efforts as possible in the grants that they award.”
• “Don’t assume ‘same as last year’ when it comes to a foundation’s contact information, focus or funding guidelines. Many foundations have made internal changes, tightened budgets and changed processes.”
• “Prepare and educate yourselves on the funder. Visit websites first; don’t call with questions on information that can be found online.  Use that information to your benefit to show you have educated yourself. Organizations need to do homework.”

If you’d like to learn more directly from funders, attend one of MCF’s Grantseeking for Beginners one-day seminars – we’re offering four this year, including some in greater Minnesota.

First up is 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 3 in St. Paul. Sign up by February 25 to save $30 off the registration fee.

At this session, learn all the basics – from researching relevant funding sources to developing strong and effective grant applications. See the proposal review and decision-making process from grantmakers’ points of view during a grantmaker panel discussion featuring:

• Emma Mogendorff, Senior Community Relations Specialist, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans
• Patrick Troska, Senior Program Officer, The Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation
• David Nicholson, Program Director, Headwaters Foundation for Justice

If you can’t make the seminar, but want to learn more about a resource that can help you do your grantseeking homework on funders, check out Minnesota Grantmakers Online, MCF’s searchable database of funders and grants.

Tawanna Black, MCF diversity fellow

MCF announces today the appointment of Tawanna Black as diversity fellow to support inclusivity initiatives of the grantmaker association and its members.

Tawanna has a unique blend of for-profit and nonprofit leadership, public policy and communications experience that will serve MCF and its members well during her nine-month fellowship.  She is the former and first director of diversity for Cox Communications in Omaha, Nebraska.  While at Cox she advised senior management in setting high standards for business growth, innovation and stakeholder return by ensuring that the corporation understood and acted upon the needs of diverse communities.

Prior to joining Cox, Tawanna served as the first executive director for Destination Midtown, leading a public-private community redevelopment strategy in Omaha. Tawanna has also served on numerous nonprofit boards of directors, including several philanthropic organizations.

Outside of her part-time appointment with MCF, Tawanna leads consulting firm Innovations By Design.  In this capacity, she provides organizational development, capacity building, and diversity and inclusion services to nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

During her fellowship, Tawanna will work with MCF and its members to:

• Increase MCF’s capacity to serve staff and members’ diversity and inclusivity educational needs.
• Enrich existing MCF programs and services by integrating diversity content and applying an inclusion and equity lens across the full spectrum of grantmakers’ work, as exemplified in the MCF Diversity Framework.
• Build MCF member and staff awareness and use of diversity and inclusion knowledge, resources, tools and best practices.
• Foster stronger member commitments to the MCF Diversity Principle and create momentum for additional inclusivity initiatives.
• Create a body of work that can be modeled by others who strive to advance philanthropy by enhancing diversity and inclusivity in the field.

To learn more about the Diversity Fellowship, contact Wendy Wehr or Tawanna Black at MCF.

- Wendy Wehr, MCF VP of communications and information services

How each grantmaker chooses to work “differently” is as varied as the number of foundations and corporate giving programs. Peter C. Hutchinson, Bush Foundation president, recently wrote about the challenges facing his organization: “Like others, we are pulled in competing directions. We want to do the right thing, but there are many right things we could do…The question is: Which right things are right for us?”

In our winter issue of Giving Forum, we highlight several foundations and how they’ve chosen to address the challenge of finding and then focusing on what’s the “right thing” for them to do during these tough times:

The Bush Foundation is keeping its sights on longstanding aspirations and its Goals for a Decade. Explains C. Scott Cooper, director of engagement and communication: “We have decided that the role we need to be playing in this economy is not to react to new problems, but to stay focused on the issues that we think are important – which are the same issues that were important to us before the recession – and to be held accountable for outcomes.”

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in the midst of developing a strategic framework when the recession hit, stepped back to look for new answers. “Our big ‘a-ha’ came when we decided that – as we sat here in Battle Creek, Mich., where the bottom has repeatedly fallen out of the job market – we needed new answers to grow the economy and to bring into our workforce development perspective entrepreneurship skills and the mindset and tenacity that go with them,” recalls Anne Mosle, vice president for programs.

The Minneapolis Foundation partnered with its donors to establish a Crisis Assistance Fund to assist individuals and families with food, heat and housing, and it matched additional funding from donor-advised funds to support workforce development, education, housing and other human and social service agencies.

The McKnight Foundation is maintaining its long-term focus to fight catastrophic climate change, among other priorities. “There is often a tension between responding to changing times and remaining focused on long-term goals, addressing the most critical issues with appropriate resources, urgency and creativity,” acknowledges President Kate Wolford. Over the course of 2009, Wolford reports that the McKnight board “sharpened our strategic focus in several priority areas, including accelerating the shift to a low-carbon economy, improving third grade literacy in the metro area, and implementing place-based strategies to increase opportunities for low-income residents.”

Land O’Lakes Foundation, in the enviable position of experiencing added funding due to the company’s record growth, launched its Feeding Our Communities initiative. “We looked at who owns us – we’re a cooperative owned by farmers,” explains Lydia Botham, executive director. “And, we looked at rising needs: people who never had to go to a food shelf before who now just can’t make ends meet. We felt that more needed to be done to address hunger, especially in rural areas, where it is somewhat hidden, but just as great as it is in urban communities. Feeding Our Communities is taking our ongoing support of hunger issues to a much higher level, using our expertise and resources locally, nationally and globally.”

Foundations’ responses to the hardships created by the economic downturn are not limited to decisions on funding priorities and strategic plans. Like the nonprofits they support, many also face tough administrative and operational choices. The wellbeing of nonprofits is always top of mind, though. For example, at the McKnight Foundation, “When looking at administrative reductions, a key goal was to minimize any negative impact on grantees,” Wolford says.

Articles in Giving Forum also address funders’ perspectives on the state budget plight, the advent of federal stimulus dollars and where they believe all this turmoil is leading.

- Chris Murakami Noonan, MCF communications associate

Stephanie Jacobs

We’re pleased to introduce you to Stephanie Jacobs, MCF’s new manager of professional development.

A Little About Stephanie
Stephanie has knowledge and expertise in nonprofit capacity building and issues facing the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. She worked most recently at Fieldstone Alliance as a consulting associate where she was involved in a number of projects and programs related to nonprofit effectiveness.

This fall, Stephanie taught a hybrid online/in-person course on nonprofit management and governance at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

She earned a B.A. from St. Olaf College and a Master of Public Policy from the Humphrey Institute.

Their findings in a nutshell — “grim”:

• Sixty percent of organizations reported an increase in need for services, compared with 42 percent in 2008.
• The ability to meet this increase in need for services is undercut by the reduction in revenues to these organizations.
• The types of organizations most frequently reporting declining total revenue were environment related, education and employment/jobs related.
• Organizations with budgets under $400,000 have faced the most difficulty in 2009.

Many nonprofits are trying to stay afloat by cutting staff, creating hiring and salary freezes and reducing employee benefits. The outlook for 2010 according to survey’s nonprofit respondents? Gloomier still than 2009. What are nonprofits to do?

Marcia Avner, public policy director at MCN, says, “This is not a time to wring our hands.” Marcia went on to make a plea for nonprofits to band together in these troubled times and create a unified voice to advocate for creating a sustainable state budget through participation in Invest in Minnesota, a coalition of nonprofit, faith and labor organizations.

The response panel carried forward this theme of defiance in tough times. Mark Peterson of Lutheran Social Services challenged attendees to build “a culture of possibilities” by developing practices in their organizations that encourage everyone from staff to board to innovate, create goals and execute them.

Similarly, Kate Barr of the Nonprofits Assistance Fund stated that, whereas 2009 was a time for “trimming the edges,” survival in 2010 and beyond will be determined by how willing nonprofits are to rethink their way of delivering services and maintaining back office operations. Short-term thrusters will no longer drive solutions for maintaining operations; organizations must look to the long term — three years out — and develop a plan for sustainability.

Renae Oswald-Anderson, director of MAP for Nonprofits’ Project ReDesign, asked nonprofit leaders to look within and define first what they do best as an organization, and then seek partners to shore up gaps. She stated that this strategy — sticking to your core services and finding opportunities to collaborate and share resources with others — may be the key to continuing operations for many nonprofits that are facing hard times in the recession.

“Now is the time to ask, What can we do better together?” Renae reiterated in her closing statement. Fortunately there are resources available for funders and nonprofits considering just this question. Project ReDesign has many resources available on its website, and Grantcraft recently released a guide for grantmakers on funding collaboratives.

Upcoming program: MCF’s 2010 Funding Outlook for Minnesota Grantmakers and Nonprofits
Registration is now available online for MCF’s Outlook event happening on January 29th in St. Paul. At the event philanthropic and nonprofit colleagues will convene to learn about the funding outlook for 2010, based on MCF’s survey of grantmakers conducted in October-November 2009, and to network and discuss opportunities to work toward shared goals. For further information and to register, visit mcf.org.

- Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate

Likewise, many in the grantmaking field are doing similar soul-searching to increase the efficiency of their giving, and also to avoid being perceived as disingenuous by the very nonprofits they may be asking to make sacrifices.

As one foundation president quoted in Grantcraft’s report on collaboration stated:

“Funders are asking nonprofits to do so much more in hard times — like merge or even go out of business. But how many foundations are doing the same? It’s the credibility issue; you know, we need to walk our talk.”

Fortunately for grantmakers exploring opportunities to collaborate, Grantcraft’s new guide titled “Funder Collaboratives: Why and How Funders Work Together” offers insights from the field on how grantmaking organizations can pool their resources to give more effectively and produce better outcomes in the communities they work.

Highlights include:

• How to design a collaborative to achieve project goals
• Questions to answer before beginning a collaborative
• Benefits and challenges of funder collaboratives
• Three case studies

Grantcraft’s guide on collaboration can be downloaded for free at grantcraft.org.

Join the conversation: Grantmakers, what strategies for collaboration and resource sharing are you considering? If you are actively engaged in a collaboration, what tips do you have for other grantmaking organizations who are considering doing the same?

-Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate

2009 and 2010 MCF Board Members

New directors elected to three-year terms ending in 2012 are: Julie Hara, executive director, Marbrook Foundation; Steve Joul, president, Central Minnesota Community Foundation; LaVon Lee, program officer, Grotto Foundation; Tim Ober, president, Mardag Foundation.

Directors elected to second three-year terms ending in 2012 are: Bill Linder-Scholer, executive director, ADC Foundation; Karen Rauenhorst, vice president, Mark and Karen Rauenhorst Family Foundation; Kris Taylor, vice president of community relations, Ecolab Foundation.

Officers were elected for 2010: Karen Kelley-Ariwoola, vice president, Community Philanthropy, The Minneapolis Foundation, was elected chair; Kate Wolford, president, The McKnight Foundation, was elected vice chair; George Thompson, trustee, Minnesota Community Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation, was elected secretary; Nancy Nelson, vice president and chief actuary, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, was elected treasurer.

MCF expresses its gratitude and thanks to these retiring board members: Ellis Bullock, executive director, Grotto Foundation; James R. Frey, president/CEO, Frey Foundation; Holly C. Sampson, president, Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation; Jo-Anne Stately, director of grantmaking and special projects, The Minneapolis Foundation.

– Chris Murakami Noonan, MCF communications associate

I volunteer for a local nonprofit (Pet Haven Minnesota) and they are participating in an event called Twice the Gift, sponsored by one of MCF’s members: The Pohlad Family Foundation.

Twice the Gift is a store located in the IDS building where 67 nonprofits showcase crafts and other items for sale, perfect little Christmas gifts that carry a message of giving to the greater good. The profit from the sales goes right back to the nonprofit thanks to the Pohlad Family Foundation, who provide the organizations with the retail space and store management.

This is the third year the fabulous event is going on. This year Partnership Resources, Inc. has taken over the operational management of the store with the Pohlad Family Foundation still supporting it.

One of the sales item ideas is a so called “share card”, which is a printed informational card about the organization of your choosing.  You donate a selected amount and give the share card as a gift. With the informational share cards the Twice the Gift store not only give the nonprofits a place to gain monetary support, but also provide them with a platform to spread the word about the work they do.

- Annette Lennartsson, MCF administrative assistant