This pre-conference session is sold out.

Community foundation CEOs have a long list of responsibilities and face many challenges. What are the excellent CEOs doing and how can we apply these concepts to our work as community foundation leaders? Using the recent McKinsey book, “CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest,” join your CEO colleagues in a rich facilitated discussion about community foundation leadership in today’s environment. All attendees who register by April 1 will receive a copy of the book before the conference. Fees includes book, lunch, beverages, and snacks. Registration is open to all community foundation CEOs and Executive Directors, regardless of CEONet membership status. 

Session Designer: Diane Miller, Executive Director, CEONet

Council Members $339 | Non-members $449

You can register for this session even if you are not attending Leading Locally 2023. Find more information here.

Led by the Council on Foundations Legal Team, this workshop is flexibly organized to ensure that your broad legal questions for administering funds, grants, and community foundation activities are addressed. The legal team will provide technical and practical understanding of complex rules and regulations. 

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Session Designer: Jill Gordon, Manager, Training, Council on Foundations

All Attendees $75

Register for this session or contact educate@cof.org to add it to an existing Leading Locally 2023 registration.

Bringing Impact Home: Collaborating to Raise the Profile of Community Foundations Nationally

Join CommA and the Community Foundation Awareness Initiative (CFAI) for an interactive half day pre-conference session focused on branding and media for community foundation communications staff. Lunch is included. Registration is open to all community foundation communications staff, regardless of CommA or CFAI membership status.

Community foundations have an identity crisis: few Americans actually know what a community foundation is or can describe what we do. CFAI has been working with field leaders to address this to raise the field's profile through branding campaigns and media placements that aim to consistently tell our story of impact through powerful messaging.

The ”Bringing Impact Home” campaign was created in partnership with field communications leaders and launched on social media in November 2022 with in-kind support from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. A second phase effort is in the works for 2023.

This session will share insights from the initial campaign, outline the long-term vision, and offer attendees an opportunity to learn how they can use the collateral and insights for their own branding and communications efforts.

You’ll hear from a panel of community foundation communication leaders about their own successful brand campaigns, media pitches, and placement efforts in raising awareness of their work, and there will be ample time for small group discussions and share outs.

Session Designer: Nicole Paquette, Director of Marketing and Communications, Communities Foundation of Texas, and Chair, CommA

Join us for our conference kick-off and breakfast plenary as we answer the question: What does crisis response illuminate about the best of humanity and philanthropy? In the face of compounding crises, funders in Colorado are catalyzing local solutions. Learn from funders who are strengthening their places by supporting recovery in the wake of natural disasters, facilitating healing in the aftermath of community violence, investing in affordable housing, and welcoming migrants who have been displaced by war and trauma. Together they will share their love for their places, their ideas for building resilience, and the innovations that can lead the way.

This session is reserved for Current CEOs and Executive Directors. 

This session will be an "off the record" discussion of challenges, risks, and opportunities for foundation leaders in unprecedented times. Come prepared to reflect and share frankly on the hard and surprising lessons from your leadership journey.

Session Designer: Daniel Lee, Executive in Residence, Council on Foundations

When local crises unfold, community foundations often find themselves swiftly at the forefront, leading and partnering to help fill the gaps, and communications staff are often asked to step in and up in new and different ways. Join us for a session on crisis communications featuring field colleagues who have launched rapid disaster response communications efforts to learn how they’ve navigated nimbly working in the crisis communications space, particularly as information is constantly evolving and crises continue.

Miami-Dade, often desired for its weather, is also located in a in tropical zone on the east coast of Florida, putting it at high risk for sea level rise, extreme heat, hurricanes, and more. To ensure that Miami could withstand extreme weather, it needed to overcome extreme topic politicization and silos. That's when three municipalities, along with a community foundation, came together to collectively create Resilient305, a long-term resilience plan, elevate resilience leadership within government, engage residents, and take action to tackle climate vulnerabilities. Learn creative approaches to addressing complex issues through unlikely collaborations and how Foundations can flex their superpowers to convene partners and stakeholders. 

Session Designer: Nikisha Williams, Managing Director, Collective Impact, The Miami Foundation

Supporting the development of place-based and jurisdictional projects helps restore and preserve natural ecosystems and improve livelihoods. This session will provide insights into a collaboration between a funder, the WWF, and ranchers and their successes and challenges. Attendees will learn how to evaluate the value of place-based investments, how these local investments can have great returns for communities, both in terms of environmental resiliency and economic development for the long term and how to get corporate funders engaged in rural America.

Session Designer: Mariel Messier, Senior Manager, Global Communications, Walmart

This session takes a deep dive into how climate change affects all communities and how all of us – regardless of focus area – can incorporate a climate lens into our work. Using county-level data that includes past climate disaster declarations and costs of recent climate events, participants will develop an understanding of the specific climate threats in the geographical areas they work in, as well as the underlying physical and social vulnerabilities that determine how communities fare during a climate event. We conclude with an example of how this data led to an unlikely multi-sector partnership that achieved a $4.2 billion Bond Act for ecological enhancements and climate resilience, and lessons for how more of these partnerships might be built in the future. 

Session Designer: Johanna Lawton, Assistant Program Manager, Rebuild by Design

This panel discussion will feature providers with diverse philosophies for solving this complex social issue. Each presenter is currently working on the front lines of Homelessness in Colorado, utilizing different philosophies and approaches. Learn how private vs. government funding impacts outcomes in services to the homeless and examples of successful solutions and trends for the future. 

Session Designer: Owen McAleer, Senior Program Officer, Daniels Fund

The Rural Funders Learning Network (RFLN) addresses pressing, systemic issues in rural regions that share challenges - affordable housing, economic distress, limited access to healthcare and childcare, and community cohesion, to name a few. This session will highlight a structure and pathways for developing rural funding networks and cultivate investment for place - based and statewide funders, and cross-sector partners in rural communities. Two different regions of the state will be highlighted, including the San Luis Valley and Telluride (San Miguel, Ouray and western Montrose Counties). 

Session Designer: Amy Swiatek, Director of Rural and Statewide Networks, Philanthropy Colorado

This session is reserved for Current CEOs and Executive Directors.

No matter your path to the CEO’s office, a steep learning curve awaits you there. Join us for an intimate space where new CEOs can connect with their peers about the skills and relationships needed to navigate a transition that’s often a lonely one.

Session Designer: Daniel Lee, Executive in Residence, Council on Foundations

Join this interactive conversation to learn how this community foundation embedded equity in their grantmaking processes. Highlights will include areas of opportunity for both programmatic and grants management staff, identifying how small changes can have a larger impact, reducing the burden on both applicants and grantmaking staff. This includes both what we fund and the grantmaking practices behind how we fund - timelines, applications, review processes, reports, and more. 

Session Designer: Kelly Costello, Director of Grants Management, Rose Community Foundation

How can funders lean into more effective and equitable ways of giving? Last year, a diverse group of place-based funders came together to dig into that challenge (and more) with a shared commitment to equity and a desire to learn alongside one another. Join the conversation alongside these funders to hear about promising approaches to equitable philanthropy, reflect on your own practices, and consider next steps as you authentically engage Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) stakeholders in shaping your thinking and strategies. 

Session Designer: Jen Driggs, Director, The Bridgespan Group

Join us for a moderated conversation about experiences and perspectives on the importance of education freedom for all. A public official will discuss policy views on school choice, charter schools, and the state's role, and a practitioner will share from his perspective focused on education, upward mobility, and importance of family formation. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about the value of empowering parents to choose an education path that is best for their family. 

Session Designer: Carrie Tynan, CEO, Adolph Coors Foundation

MRIs and PRIs bring opportunity to leverage foundation assets and provide useful vehicles for collaboration. Join us for a lively conversation around specific examples, including The Philanthropy Collective, a consortium of philanthropic organizations and individuals that exists to learn, share expertise, collaborate, and leverage resources to address our region's most significant challenges.

Session Designer: Margaret Dolan, CEO, Pikes Peak Community Foundation

Are you inspired by your innovative community foundation colleagues around the country and looking to implement some new and proven strategies in your own communications? Do you or your teammates have communication responsibilities, regardless of your title, and need a little inspiration? Join us for this session featuring a robust communication idea exchange that will generate ideas you can recycle, reuse, and repurpose for the benefit of your own network and community. This session is set up as a lighting round where each presenter has a few minutes to present their “idea that worked” and take questions. 

In a state ranked last for connectivity and access in the nation, and in some of the least connected tribal and rural communities in the state, a collaboration was formed to increase broadband infrastructure and access, build workforce development programming, and engage tribal communities in sovereign-led initiatives to increase high-speed connectivity within their own communities. Learn from this collaborative on how they’re expanding broadband access through community ownership and leveraging new technologies and partnerships to create more jobs.

Session Designer: Jennifer Duran-Sallee, Senior Program Officer, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Community foundations are especially well-positioned to prepare for and respond to disasters in their communities, because the place-based and year-round work that community foundations provide can give them a comprehensive view of community strengths and needs that become magnified in disasters. This interactive session will focus on network-building and an exploration of holistic approaches to serving and preparing communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. 

Session Designer: Maureen Lawless, Executive Vice President, The Funders Network (TFN)

This interactive session shares the experience of eleven local philanthropies in Maryland, who decided in 2019 to share their grantmaking data to identify funding overlaps, gaps, and opportunities, especially based in a shared community needs assessment and shared data categories. Learn why the funders decided to work together on this project, the "mud puddles" they encountered along the way, their journey to agreeing on a common coding system, and the surprising findings from the analysis of 2020 and 2021 grant data that are shaping the future of local grantmaking. 

Session Designer: Elizabeth Y. Day, President & CEO, The Community Foundation of Frederick County

Using the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to envision and track community progress can take different forms in different communities. This session will highlight the work of three community foundations and how they have worked collaboratively with each other and in their own communities to coordinate nonprofit and philanthropic work, including a conversation about "17 Rooms", the central event in a multi-year community-wide SDG initiative coordinated by a Foundation in Orlando, Florida; a Foundation’s role as the backbone organization for Future Makers Coalition in Southwest Florida; and the work of another Foundation to bring foundations across northern Ohio together to work on community issues through an SDG lens. 

Session Designer: Sandi Vidal, Vice President of Community Strategies, Central Florida Foundation