Anticipating Your Impact

Change Within Your Foundation

Determining a role for your foundation in poverty reduction work means taking a closer look at the prevalence and nature of poverty in your community. (See Understanding Your Context). In many cases this will be eye-opening for foundation staff and volunteers since poverty tends to be hidden and underestimated.

It is also important to acknowledge that your community foundation is acting as a connector between people in your community with significant financial resources and more disadvantaged people. In making the decision to deepen your commitment to poverty-reduction work it may be important to evaluate how well you are doing at reflecting community diversity in your staff, Board, committees and leadership. Community foundations, to fulfil their mission of representing broad community interests, should try to reflect the full diversity of their communities and practice inclusion. CFC's bookstore offers a Diversity Scanning Tool for Community Foundations that may help.

Sharpening your focus on poverty-reduction may also lead you to make specific changes to your foundation's core practices in areas like grantmaking and investment management. You may decide that the way you determine your granting priorities and the way you manage your investing need to be examined for their social impact.

Goals that could be evaluated over time in this area might include:

Reducing barriers to grant applicants
Increasing the number of grant applications from a range of different organizations
Staff and volunteers are more knowledgeable about poverty issues and local context
Staff and volunteers are more diverse
Low-income people have a role in foundation's poverty reduction effort

Through the Community Foundations Addressing Poverty project several community foundations across the country have been bringing new focus and energy to their poverty-reduction work over the past year.

For example:

The Calgary Foundation has completed an evaluation of their Neighbour Grants Program. They held Conversation Circles across Calgary where they heard from 29 grantees about how small grants enhance the role of local leadership and active citizenship.
Vancouver Foundation was able to second a staff person from the not-for-profit sector who has significant experience in issues relation to poverty and homelessness to focus on developing a roadmap for the Foundation's work in the area of poverty-reduction. This person was able to conduct a series of 25 interviews with stakeholders to help define the Foundation's role moving forward and develop a proposed plan for the Foundation's work.
La Fondation du Grand Montréal has spent considerable time and energy building its relationships with other local stakeholders such as Centraide, the Roasters Foundation and the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. With these relationships and knowledge of other approaches in place, the Foundation will be able to play its role effectively.
The Winnipeg Foundation has completed another round of evaluation of its own poverty-reduction work. It has brought new focus to identifying the most effective poverty-reduction practices in their targeted neighbourhood which might be extended through public policy change to other inner city neighbourhoods. In relation to this, it has established an Ad Hoc Committee on Philanthropy to discuss broader issues facing the charitable sector and The Winnipeg Foundation's role in advancing public policy and systems change, amongst other things, in support of its mission;
Hamilton Community Foundation has developed a comprehensive research paper reviewing best practices for place-based (neighbourhood) work focusing on poverty reduction and community strengthening. They have also done an extensive consultation with key community stakeholders (60+) to inform the next phase of the foundation's poverty reduction work.