Community Impact
We accomplish our mission of "improving lives by mobilizing the caring power of our communities" by following three guiding principles:
1. We maintain a focus on the most critical of needs in our communities
2. Money that is raised in our communities stays in our communities.
3. We collaborate with community leaders, donors, volunteers and agencies to make a difference.
Our Community Impact process is a deliberate approach to identifying and funding the agencies and services that will most effectively address critical needs. There are 4 steps:
- Research – in 2005, we identified the 5 critical needs in our communities as outlined above. Each year, we update the research and in 2009, we find the same needs to be prevalent, with Basic Needs continuing as the highest priority. Click here for a copy of the report.
- Collaborations – we reach out to partner agencies to create and foster a collaborative spirit whereby agencies can leverage each other to provide more comprehensive solutions than they might be able to provide alone
- Allocate – we follow a diligent grant-making process to engage and determine the best possible partner(s) to address a critical community need, and to insure that donor contributions are turned into effective service delivery
- Evaluate - we look at how effectively the applicants deliver on committed services and we measure the results and impact of the funded process; this enables us to fund programs with an eye toward sustainability and growth
