New Orleans :: Three Cases of Community Revitalization
Ashley Bowden, Cool Culture
Historically, economic development and the arts and culture have been perceived as mutually exclusive. More recent conversations around community revitalization have put them in conversation with one other. This session will highlight community revitalization initiatives that seek to combat poverty AND maintain New Orleans’ rich history, and its arts and cultural scenes. Panelists will represent leaders from three organizations that seek to uplift the city’s underserved communities.
People, Place & Planning: Engaging Residents & Using Data in Revitalization
Crystal Dundas, Program and Communications Officer, Wells Fargo Regional Foundation
How can you create and sustain long-term neighborhood change that engages and energizes residents, leverages the assets and market momentum of place, and assesses whether you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do? Come play the Neighborhood Planning Game, and experience a participatory neighborhood planning process through the eyes of a stakeholder. Hear first-hand how one community is revitalizing based upon its resident driven plan, and learn about tools like Success Measures and Policy Map that are available to support and assess the impact of these activities.
#Revolution – Building a Digital Grassroots Movement
Francesca Dulce Larson, Mosaic Strategies Group
Today more than ever before, organizers have the ability to engage more voices. The use of social media and online engagement has become an understood necessity for building a movement. Free and low cost organizing technology is abundantly available for those who know what to look for and have a comfort level using it. However, without the knowledge to harness these resources, organizations frequently overpay for to participate in the digital space and under utilize the amazing networks available to them. In this session we will simulate the launch of an on-the-ground initiative using new media.
Community Change from the Inside Out
Joann M. Ricci, Kellie Chavez Greene, Flint Mitchell and Jeffrey Glebocki, Greater New Orleans Foundation
This session will focus on the community-building and community-change lessons generated through the Stand Up for Our Children initiative, an endeavor to foster civic participation and empower parents and families to improve the quality of life for New Orleans’ most vulnerable children. The core vehicle for participation and development for the 12 organizations in the initiative was through engagement in a Community of Practice (CoP). Through a set of revolving, interactive discussion groups, the objective of this 90-minute session is to delve into key lessons from the evaluation of the initiative, including: increasing the capacity of community members to advocate for their children and families; fostering collaboration and learning amongst participating organizations to leverage greater impact; using Communities of Practice as an organizing strategy to strengthen community networks for longer term positive influence; and shifting grassroots responses to long-entrenched, local and state political and systems dynamics that were not supportive of children, families and healthy communities.
Transforming Communities: Funder-Supported Social Justice Models
Libby Lok, Frontine Solutions
Andrew Ford, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation
Ashley Shelton, One Voice Louisiana
We seek to highlight three models for how funders have worked with local advocates as partners to advance social justice agendas in local places (Arkansas, California, and New Orleans) – what has worked, what has not worked, and how have funders been bold, innovative and smart in their approaches for funding, partnering, and defining change. There are many lessons to be shared and unpacked – how to create inclusive spaces, how to build momentum within an organization and externally with partners, how to impact local and statewide public policy through place-based community change, how to create and manage a multifaceted collaborative, defining a problem and creating consensus around the strategies to address the problem, and more.
“Build It. Fund It. Change It.” — How the ARTWorks for Kids model helped increase sustainable funding for youth arts in Massachusetts.
Mari Brennan Barrera, Hunt Alternatives
Hunt Alternatives and leaders of the ARTWorks for Kids coalition would like to present what was accomplished and learned as we developed the ARTWorks model to develop sustainable funding sources for youth arts programs. Hunt Alternatives used grant funds and technical assistance as incentives to bring youth arts organizations together in a coalition that first worked on increasing support from private donors for their work, and then advocated for public support for youth arts in our state’s budget and in the Boston Public School budget. Our session will feature ARTWorks coalition leaders, who will share how they learned to collaborate, not compete, with fellow youth arts organization leaders for grant dollars, board members, and other precious resources.They will share how the coalition building activities helped them take a huge leap of faith to participate in a collaborative fundraising event, where every organization benefited by gaining new major gifts, and how donors came to understand the youth arts sector differently.
Catalyzing a Social Movement for National Health Equity
Matt Bond, DentaQuest Foundation
This interactive session will focus on the roles that Foundations can play to build partnerships through grantmaking and convening efforts to create an infrastructure on which a national social movement can be launched, sustained, and guided toward the achievement of large scale systems change and the creation of a new social norm around what it means to be healthy. By leveraging the key concepts of social networks, movement building tactics, and engaged philanthropy, this session will engage attendees through interactive dialogue and facilitated exercises in the core components of philanthropy’s role in social movements.
Pop Culture Interventions: Why We Need More ‘Halal in the Family’
Miriam Fogelson, Moore & Associates
Kashif Shaikh, Pillars Fund and McCormick Foundation
The “Pop Culture Interventions” workshop will raise awareness about how pop culture and media can shift culture in support of progressive values and build support for social justice movements. Although pop culture is highly effective at shifting hearts and minds on a mass level, only a limited pool of funders currently invest in pop culture and media interventions. We believe the lack of funding in this space deters nonprofits from exploring pop culture and media as a tool to enhance and complement their existing social change strategies.
We will lift up several successful case studies of current pop culture initiatives that highlight inequity in our society and cross sectors, silos and issues.We will illustrate the opportunities for funders, nonprofits and the cultural/entertainment sectors to partner on powerful pop culture interventions by telling the story of “Halal in the Family”, a new web-series sitcom parody with Aasif Mandvi that uses satire to combat anti-Muslim bias and bigotry.
Out in the South: Increasing Funding for LGBTQ Southern Communities
Naa Hammond, Funders for LGBTQ Issues
More than 3 out of 10 LGBTQ adults live in the South – making the South home to more LGBTQ adults than any other region in the U.S. Yet each year, the South receives only 3-4 percent of domestic LGBTQ funding. Despite this, the region is rich with over 750 LGBTQ community assets doing incredible work to advance the legal equality, cultural change, and lived experience of all LGBTQ Southerners. Funders have a strategic role to play in helping these groups grow and in expanding the movement for LGBTQ rights and justice in the South.
This session will dive deep into trends, opportunities and gaps in foundation funding for LGBTQ issues in the South. Presenters from Funders for LGBTQ Issues will share data on the state of foundation funding in the South, focusing on an interactive scan of the rich network of southern LGBTQ community assets, and the growing network of place-based funders dedicated to LGBTQ issues in the South.
Giving Beyond the Grant – How Private/Public Partnerships Can Drive Philanthropy Forward
Rachel Chong, CEO, Catchafire
Catchafire and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina will collaborate to create a panel discussion that includes key stakeholders involved in the Catchafire/BCBSNC partnership. In this session, we want to engage the audience by allowing them to think beyond traditional giving and encouraging them to leverage other assets that will provide resource restricted nonprofits access to talented people, knowledge, networks and more.
BCBSofNC has made it a priority to leverage a hugely underutilized resource – human capital. All too frequently we allow the standard definition of philanthropic giving to define how we can make impact in the nonprofit sector. People equate financial donations with impact, but often times these donations come with restrictions which make it difficult for nonprofits to use the funds for overhead costs which would ultimately help the organizations build capacity. By expanding our definition to include giving skills, talent, and expertise Catchafire has been able to drive over $42M worth of pro bono impact to the nonprofit sector in 4 years.
Baking It In: Integrating a Talent Lens into Grantmaking & Fundraising
Rusty Stahl, President and CEO, Talent Philanthropy Project
In order to build social change movements that are effective, impactful and sustainable, we must invest in our greatest assets – nonprofit professionals and activists. According to my research with the Foundation Center, funders have only been spending 1% of grant dollars on grantee leadership development over the last two decades. While businesses spend $120 per person per year on employee learning, nonprofits only spend $29. The result is often low morale, high rates of burnout–particularly amongst emerging leaders–and organizational instability and ineffectiveness.
The session will offer EPIP members a new way to look at philanthropy and the nonprofit sector using a “talent lens”. This will help them to advance inter-generational, racial, gender and other forms of diversity. We will offer not only cutting-edge ideas and research, but also brand-new prototype practical tools that will help them invest in grantee talent.
*These session descriptions are not final