Leadership Program Supports the Philanthropic Sector

The Casey Foundation’s Results Count™ usu­al­ly bring togeth­er lead­ers in gov­ern­ment and non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions to move delib­er­ate­ly toward greater impact and bet­ter results. Now the Foun­da­tion is offer­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to a small group of fun­ders who are build­ing their capac­i­ty to use the Results Count meth­ods themselves.

Learn more about Results Count

Casey’s Results Count approach blends five com­pe­ten­cies, two foun­da­tion­al skills and two foun­da­tion­al frame­works — the ​“5−2−2” for short. Each Results Count pro­gram is designed in part­ner­ship with par­tic­i­pants to reflect their iden­ti­fied results, avail­able resources and spe­cif­ic needs. Don­na Stark, a senior lead­er­ship fel­low with the Foun­da­tion, says that cre­at­ing a cur­ricu­lum specif­i­cal­ly for fun­ders grew, in part, from with­in the phil­an­thropic com­mu­ni­ty itself, with fun­ders such as the Skill­man Foun­da­tion and the Gor­man Foun­da­tion ask­ing for assis­tance in build­ing their foundation’s capac­i­ty to use the Results Count methods.

“Many foun­da­tions can speak clear­ly about how much they invest, but don’t mea­sure the dif­fer­ence they are mak­ing, that is, how the peo­ple they are try­ing to serve are mea­sur­ably bet­ter off,” said Stark.

The first cohort of the fun­der pro­gram, called Invest­ing for Results, recent­ly com­plet­ed its work, and a sec­ond cohort is under­way now.

Shali­ni Iyer, the direc­tor of pro­grams at Met­ta Fund in San Fran­cis­co, and Francine Rodd, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of First 5 Mon­terey in Mon­terey Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia, par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first cohort. Both lead­ers are part of col­lec­tive impact ini­tia­tives in their respec­tive communities.

For Iyer, who is part of a team of fun­ders address­ing the health and safe­ty of res­i­dents of the Ten­der­loin dis­trict in San Fran­cis­co, a sig­nif­i­cant take­away was learn­ing how to facil­i­tate bet­ter group con­ver­sa­tions and bring dis­sent­ing views into the room. She says she ben­e­fit­ed by see­ing how oth­er col­lec­tive impact efforts suc­ceed and strug­gle in sim­i­lar ways with essen­tials such as col­lect­ing dis­ag­gre­gat­ed data and estab­lish­ing process­es for eval­u­a­tion. ​“Part of col­lec­tive impact is to dis­rupt the sta­tus quo,” Iyer said. ​“Results Count does the same because it forces us to think differently.”

As Iyer takes on a new port­fo­lio of work with Met­ta Fund — improv­ing the qual­i­ty of life for San Francisco’s seniors — the Results Count approach is giv­ing her tools, dis­ci­pline and con­fi­dence to invite com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pa­tion in deriv­ing solu­tions, build strate­gies and set per­for­mance measurements.

Rodd and her team are focused on mak­ing sure all chil­dren in Mon­terey Coun­ty are ful­ly pre­pared for school. ​“Every child in the coun­ty should have the oppor­tu­ni­ties that the chil­dren in the afflu­ent com­mu­ni­ty of Carmel do,” she said.

“[Results Count] gave us a frame­work, lan­guage and con­text to be able to lead our good work to its max­i­mum and rev­o­lu­tion­ize how we use everyone’s resources and time,” Rodd said, whose First 5 Mon­terey orga­ni­za­tion is part of the back­bone of the col­lec­tive impact ear­ly child­hood devel­op­ment ini­tia­tive Bright Begin­nings. ​“We’ll know we are mak­ing the dif­fer­ence we want to make when mul­ti­ple orga­ni­za­tions and insti­tu­tions in the coun­ty have aligned their strate­gies and objec­tives and we see the coun­ty indi­ca­tors improve.”

After it assess­es these first two pro­grams, the Casey Foun­da­tion will announce its plans for con­tin­u­ing lead­er­ship devel­op­ment work with the phil­an­thropic sec­tor in 2018. ​“The ulti­mate mark of suc­cess will be that fun­ders’ tar­get pop­u­la­tions are mea­sur­ably bet­ter off,” says Stark.

Watch videos about lead­ing for results