Development Planning

Today, Trina Almond, Development and Communication Director, and I attended the third of a series of four seminars on Strategic Fundraising for Nonprofits put on by the Nonprofit Services Consortium in St. Louis. Today we covered corporate and foundation relations, and board and staff leadership. The second part was particularly interesting to me as our agency wrestles with how best to engage our board in the process of fundraising. Because of our funding sources we are required to have a "tripartite" board of directors made of 1/3 low income representatives, 1/3 elected officials, and 1/3 private sector representatives. Within those sectors we have to have expertise in legal issues, finance, and early childhood education. This is a very important operational board but it isn't really geared towards fundraising. With that in mind, one of our board members suggested that we establish a Development Advisory Board that would be established with fundraising in mind and specifically recruit community members with the experience, network, and resources to make such efforts successful. We are moving forward with this concept and the board member that brought this concept is going to serve as the first chair of our advisory board! We have been slowly preparing our board to support fundraising efforts to supplement our program funding and I am looking forward to implementing our development plan.

Some people ask why we need to establish a development plan when we receive federal and state funds to operate our programs. The generic answer is that none of those sources is designed solely to "empower individuals and families to achieve self-reliance" as our mission suggests. All of our services play a role in our strategic plan, helping people to achieve their goals regardless of their starting point along the human development continuum but ultimately, it is important for CMCA to generate unrestricted funds to fill in gaps in those services. Specifically, unrestricted funds will be used for quality control and expansion of existing programs, capacity building within the agency (training, support, salary structures), client asset and business development, and our Circles approach (which is a comprehensive approach to ending poverty that is relatively unfunded at this point). With a more diverse source of revenue CMCA is more likely to achieve it's mission.

Announcement

CMCA has been working for a long time now on our transformational plan. This is the plan that gives us the opportunity to think beyond our programmatic barriers about how to end poverty in mid-Missouri. The plan both acknowledges all of the valuable contributions we are already making to our communities and challenges us to do more. Transformation does not mean paying lip-service to the management process of the month but rather it means that we are going to change the way we do business. By increasing our communication within the agency and engaging the community outside of our agency we can change the way we all think about poverty and build activities around long term solutions.

Our five agency wide strategic commitments are as follows:
1. Engage the community to assure that all people have their basic needs met.
2. Enhance community capacity to ensure all individuals have lifelong learning opportunities.
3. Build community capacity to enhance economic and community assets.
4. Build relationships across class and race lines.
5. Develop an innovative, caring agency dedicated to being an influential leader in our communities.

My sincerest thanks to everybody that worked on this plan or covered for a colleague while they attended planning meetings or who got excited about trying a new challenge!

So we have this great plan to transform our agency, now it is time to implement the plan. Over the summer we established a Coordinating Team that will be responsible for coordinating the work and approving implementation plans of Strategy Teams. Coordinating Team members will lead the Strategy Teams which will establish baseline information about our performance targets, identify indicators of progress, create activities that will accomplish our goals, and develop work plans and budgets around those activities. Whew! That sounds like a lot of work! That is why I refer to this process as a marathon, not a sprint. This is the way we will conduct business now and we will have to figure out how to make it work. The process of including CMCA staff in decision making is critical to our success. With that, it is my pleasure to announce that the Strategy Teams have been selected.

The Coordinating Team met to discuss all of the leaders across the agency. They considered cross-agency representation, staff work load and capacity, performance, geographic dispersion, and the interests and skills of various staff to come up with diverse teams that we would like to invite to help us implement our plan. The Co-Leaders will be contacting many of you to invite you to be on a team. I hope you will seriously consider this leadership opportunity. Think about your commitment to our mission and vision and whether you can commit to this long term aspect of your job. Discuss the invitation with your supervisor to make sure they support your participation by being flexible with your schedule and balancing your workload. If you accept the invitation please mark your calendar for an orientation session from 10:00 to 2:00 on December 2.

For those of you that were not selected, please understand that many factors went into this process and that it is no reflection on your performance or commitment to the agency. In fact, in many cases your heavy involvement in other agency commitments was so impressive that we did not want to add more to your plate. Still, there will be many opportunities to include additional leaders in the implementation process. Keep an eye out for ad hoc committees and other chances to provide feedback. As always, you can contact me directly if you have ideas that should be included in the implementation process or if you are particularly interested in one of these teams.

The Strategy Team Co-Leaders:
Strategy 1: Wendi Matlick and Adam Tipton
Strategy 2: Mernell King and Joyce Davis
Strategy 3: Dianna Moore and Brandy Tallman
Strategy 4: Angela Hirsch and Melissa Chambers
Strategy 5: Anita Sanderson, Chris Macy, and Julie Kratzer

Health Care Institute

CMCA submitted a Head Start Innovation and Improvement grant earlier this year to coordinate nationwide implementation of UCLA’s Health Care Institute. Last week we were notified that we have been awarded the grant. The grant is for just over $1 million over three years and we will focus primarily on Missouri for the first year, then east of the Mississippi and West of the Mississippi. Essentially this is a train the trainer model designed to increase the capacity of Head Start families to understand and address their health care needs and ultimately reduce strain on the Medicaid system. I think this fits nicely with the interests of many of our partners including Parents As Teachers, Mo HealthNet, and the Missouri Department of Social Services. I think there will be further-reaching opportunities beyond Head Start families as we get our grant into full gear. We will be recruiting Missouri Head Start programs to participate over the next few months. This grant will be heavily evaluated and I expect to show great outcomes over the next few years. This is a coup for Missouri and we intend to spread the benefit of this opportunity as far and wide as possible. While I tend to think social service interventions generally address the symptom rather than the cause, the HCI approach, like our Circles approach, Step Up to Leadership, and Family Development Credential, is designed to empower individuals and give them the tools to address their own needs and goals.

From the grant narrative:

“We understand the benefit of bringing low-literacy healthcare training to Missouri families. Using the low-literacy materials and methodologies that have been developed by the HCI at UCLA, families will become stronger advocates for the healthcare needs of their children and will also be able to better provide for the basic healthcare needs of their children. A healthy child has more opportunity to succeed in school and in life and healthier families mean healthier communities.”