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.