Building Capacity in Nonprofit Organizations

Offers a capacity building model that is based on a review of civil society, sustainable development, and organizational management literature. Reviews effective capacity building programs sponsored or operated by foundations. Includes recommendations

Building Evaluation Muscle: Practical Steps for Health Nonprofits at Any Stage

This paper bridges the academic literature and ordinary practice to show how nonprofit organizations, regardless of where they are on the spectrum of evaluation capacity, and regardless of their desire to conduct evaluation internally or use external consultants, can strengthen their ability to engage in and sustain an ongoing evaluation practice. These suggestions are not exhaustive; but they are meant to be practical, accessible, and realistically doable for most nonprofits

Measuring Collaboration: The Benefits and Impacts of Nonprofit Centers

Provides an overview of nonprofit centers that house multiple organizations and encourage shared resources and collaboration, the benefits, and impact on social services, local economy, civic infrastructure, and public and private partnerships

Power Amidst Renewal: Foundation Support for Sustaining Advocacy After Disasters

Follows up a 2007 report on the effectiveness of foundations and nonprofits in advocating for systemic changes in the Gulf Coast and lessons learned. Calls for collaboration, regionalizing agendas, and integrating advocacy into missions and grant periods

Collaboration and Connection: How Foundations Partner Effectively to Address Their Community's Information Needs

Offers examples and tips for partnering with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors on community news and information projects, including finding the right partner by assessing organizational capacity, community assets, compatibility, and structure

From Crisis to Opportunity: Learning from One Region's Response to the Economic Downturn

How can community giving practices be transformed, using lessons learned from the recent economic crisis?This report profiles a number of Pacific Northwest funders who have worked over the past year to respond to urgent community needs. While these actions were in direct response to the economic crisis at hand, the lessons learned from these community-based philanthropists can provide future direction for doing more with limited resources at any point in time. These funders were intentional about how best to apply and leverage their assets, and they collaborated with others to avoid wasting time, effort and money

A Matter of Survival: Volunteering

This monograph documents the rich traditions of self-help and civic engagement that are found in America's "tough" communities -- communities most often found in the inner city, where resources are scarce and where it is difficult to live and to raise a family. There is also inner-city wisdom here for the Volunteer Centers, community foundations, nonprofits, the business community, and others searching for better ways to partner with the resident drivers of low-income neighborhood renewal.A Matter of Survival is the product of a 1996 invitation from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to the Points of Light Foundation to explore the role of volunteering in building the social capital necessary to transform distressed neighborhoods into family-supporting communities. We set out to document volunteering activities in these communities, but along the way, we came to a much deeper understanding of the myriad homegrown, informal networks and service vehicles that animate residents and empower them to drive reform.The Points of Light Foundation utilized this opportunity to listen, learn, and share our learnings. We convened national, regional, and grassroots leaders who shared their experience and wisdom in focus groups and workshops, and we recorded their wisdom. From them, we learned what worked and why, and under what circumstances. We used our own grants as vehicles to create partnerships that supported and strengthened local initiatives, and because we listened carefully, many of these initiatives bore fruit. This report shares that experience and that knowledge

Built to Change: Catalytic Capacity-Building in Nonprofit Organizations

Summarizes the results of a broad survey of programs, and business and nonprofit experts, in the field of organizational effectiveness

Measuring the Work of Intermediaries in the St. Louis Region

This guide serves to encourage funders and intermediaries to think about intermediary nonprofit organizations and their outcomes differently as well as explain how these two groups can partner successfully to create change. "We do not fund intermediaries" is often times used as a blanket statement by funders. This statement has led many nonprofit organizations to claim "we are not an intermediary" to avoid getting lumped into a certain bucket when they are in fact an intermediary organization. This guide will give insight into both the communications struggles and best practices that funders and intermediaries encounter with one another and give examples of successful funder/intermediary partnerships

Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change

This handbook provides the growing number of people who are developing networks for social change with practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about "connectivity." It is intended to join, complement, and spur other efforts to capture and make widely available what is being learned in the business, government, and civil sectors about why and how to use networks, rather than solitary organizations, to generate large-scale impact