Building Commitment and Resources (Foundation Building Best Practice Study Excerpt)

The following section examines how founders of foundations built commitment among key constituencies and developed plans to raise financial and other resources for their initiatives.

Example 1: A Feasibility Study
Puerto Rico Community Foundation
Example 2: Outreach, Study Tours and Workshops
Foundation for the Philippine Environment
Example 3: Consultation, Exchange Visits, SteeringCommittee
Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe

Who Should Be Consulted? Why?

Summary Points

Consultative processes can build your program, build legitimacy and build trust in your foundation. Consultations are a way to learn from other individuals or institutions, discuss ideas critical to the foundation-building effort, share experience and skills, explore the viability of the initiative, communicate the idea to potential supporters, build consensus around the initiative, and guarantee the credibility and transparency of the whole process.
Consultative processes are unique and respond to the specific needs of each foundation. Consulting can take place through different approaches (disseminating concept papers, study tours, feasibility studies, workshops) depending on the objectives of the foundation. The process of consultation can be short or lengthy. For example, founders of the Foundation for the Philippine Environment (FPE)'s founders held meetings with over 600 stakeholders, a study tour to the United States and a major two-day workshop on governance and grantmaking.
Opportunities for learning and exchange among foundations help gain access to new ideas and create bridges to other institutions. The exchange of ideas and experience among grantmaking foundations helps create productive relationships and promotes the transfer of skills. In the case provided by the Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe (WRF), there were visits organized in 1994 and 1996 to fourteen US organizations in addition to one foundation in Mozambique and one in South Africa. These visits were instrumental in helping WRF's founding members design the structure of the new foundation.
Involving the intended beneficiaries helps build trust and ownership. Consulting with the beneficiaries helps build trust and create a sense of ownership among those who will be directly affected by the work of the foundation. Consultations also provide intended beneficiaries a way to express their interest in the initiative as well as their expectations. In Zimbabwe, the founders of WRF actively sought the input of people at the community level resulting in a foundation that deeply reflected the community's needs.

The foundations highlighted in this chapter were started by a diverse set of individuals and institutions and were designed to serve the needs of a variety of "clients." They were developed to serve local communities in need of resources and also aimed to serve the needs of national and international donors desiring to maximize the impact of their contributions. To act as an efficient bridge between diverse constituencies, the founders of these institutions, and many other Southern foundations highlighted in this Sourcebook, carried out a process of consultations to clarify two important questions:

Who will support the foundation politically, technically and financially?
Who will benefit from the foundation?

The foundations discussed in this chapter all attempted to reach out to both potential supporters and beneficiaries. Consultancies for with these stakeholders during their periods of formation helped them to identify and define the roles their foundations would play, and how they could be best organized and governed. Such a consultation process also helps to identify where the foundation will get its resources (financial, material and human). Specifically, consultation has helped to:

Determine the viability of the foundation
Define its role and scope
Identify leadership
Define objectives, strategies and activities
Define the structure it will adopt and clarify governance issues
Stimulate interest among public and private actors

Exchange information with well-established foundations/network with other relevant actors Foundations usually consult with a variety of individuals and groups in the early stages including:

Affluent citizens
Key local organizations (other foundations, major nonprofits, business groups, etc.)
Universities and leading academics
Legal and accounting professionals
Political leaders
Influential community representatives of the geographic and demographic population the foundation will serve

How Is Consultation Facilitated?

Commitment to a new institution is built primarily through personal contacts. Founders in these cases spoke with a significant number of people within their own personal and professional networks. In all of the cases, however, they saw a need to broaden their existing networks in order to build adequate support to establish the foundation. Some of the ways in which they did this were:

Feasibility studies to explore the viability of the venture. These studies can point out areas of potential conflict that might threaten the consolidation of the new initiative, such as whether other NGOs believe the new foundation to be in conflict with their own fundraising efforts. They can also identify whether the private sector would commit to the idea, and whether the legal environment is conducive to the enterprise.
Study tours to learn about foundations and philanthropy in other places. These can take the form of exchange visits to other foundations in the country, region or overseas. These visits allow foundation-builders to benefit from the experience of established institutions, to exchange information and to learn from their peers.
Workshops to build understanding of and agreement about the elements involved in establishing foundations (i.e. defining a mission, role, organizational structure and resources) and to exchange ideas among those involved. Participants can include founding members, representatives from other foundations and nonprofit organizations (local and/or international), government agencies, businesses, community leaders and wealthy individuals.
Concept papers, also called position papers or needs statements, are descriptive pieces about the foundation, its purpose and role. These papers help to communicate the idea of the new institution and may lead the way to a stronger consensus about the grantmaking foundation. Concept papers can be shared with both potential beneficiaries of the foundation's eventual grants and to potential supporters. Founders will often solicit feedback on the concept paper in an attempt to perfect the idea and to arrive at the best way the communicate the idea to different constituencies.