“Building Community Capacity: The Potential of Community Foundations” tells how small community foundations can get bigger, stronger, and more useful to their communities. This small book, endorsed as essential reading in the field, summarizes the work of the Ford/MacArthur Leadership Program for Community Foundations. Operating from 1987 to 1993, this initiative is the best I’ve seen at incorporating principles of growth and leadership development. The book details these features and contains lessons for making community foundations bigger, stronger, and more useful to their communities.
Free download: Building Community Capacity: The Potential of Community Foundations (pdf).
Lessons for Effective Philanthropy
This book shows how an established private foundation can stimulate the growth of less established and more local community foundations. The book makes clear how the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation did it in this highly productive initiative. For one thing, they gave incentive for community leadership by dangling a meaningful financial match on favorable terms. Second, they offered long-ish term support and assistance. Third, they shared the lessons of this on-going program evaluation, first within the group, and then more broadly to the entire field.
Lessons for Community Development
The concept of community capacity emerged from the experience of this program. We see it as “the combined influence of a community’s commitment, resources, and skills which can be deployed to build on community strengths and address community problems.” Increasing community capacity should be on the agenda of every community foundation.
Lessons for Program Evaluation
The evaluation inquiry used throughout this project made use of an “organizational capacity building framework” based on earlier discoveries of growth factors in emerging community foundations. With every site visit, both participants and evaluators filled in the framework with data and observations over a five-year period.
Lessons for Nonprofit Management
Almost every community in America, and throughout the world, has a community foundation. Most of them are eager to import project dollars from larger institutional funders and distribute them to nonprofits in support of local goals. This book shows how local nonprofits can make themselves attractive to such community-focused grantmaking.
Free download: Building Community Capacity: The Potential of Community Foundations (pdf). Published originally by Steven E. Mayer, Ph.D., Rainbow Research, Inc., 1994.
See also: CF – The Magazine for Growing Community Foundations
Participating community foundations:
Round 1:
Community Foundation of Greater Greenville
Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan
Round 2:
Baltimore Community Foundation
Community Foundation of Greater Lorain County
Greater New Orleans Foundation
Central New York Community Foundation
Greater Richmond Community Foundation
Spokane Inland Northwest Community Foundation
Greater Triangle Community Foundation
Round 3:
Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro
Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation
Fargo-Moorhead Area Foundation
Greater Santa Cruz County Community Foundation
Sacramento Regional Foundation
This post by Steven E. Mayer, Ph.D./ Effective Communities Project / November 5, 2021
