What's Next for Community Philanthropy Toolkit

On Monday, June 9, at the Council’s 2014 Annual Conference: Philanthropy Exchange, Monitor Institute announced a new resource for community foundations, the What’s Next for Community PhilanthropyToolkit.

The What’s Next Toolkit features nearly a dozen interconnected essays, exercises, and games aimed at helping community philanthropy organizations adapt to changing times by building on their existing strengths, challenging traditional assumptions, and exploring new roles that they can play in their communities.

The interactive tools are organized around four key behaviors that can help community philanthropy organizations open up to new ideas and new possibilities:

• Looking Outward: Exploring how emerging global and regional trends will affect local communities and understanding the ways that other organizations in the community are already responding.
• Looking Around: Discovering promising new approaches from a variety of institutions and considering how to translate those ideas across organizations.
• Looking Inward: Prioritizing which roles a community philanthropy organization should be playing in its own community, and asking whether outdated assumptions might be holding back thinking.
• Getting to Action: Generating new ideas for improved products, services, and programs and then prototyping the approaches that show real promise.

The Chronicle of Philanthropycovered the release of the toolkit in a story on Monday: To Stay Relevant, Community Funds Must Adapt to a Radically Changed World.

To learn more about the toolkit, you can read the toolkit highlights, go to www.monitorinstitute.com/communityphilanthropy, or contact WN4CP@deloitte.com.