How We Pick em: How

Berks County Community

Foundation Decides What
Issues To Take On.

Kevin K. Murphy
President,
Berks County Community
Foundation

Berks County Community Foundation Revised 2014

Note: This document was created by Kevin K. Murphy, president of Berks County
Community Foundation for the foundations board of directors.
How We Pick Em
From time to time, the Community Foundation finds itself stepping outside of the
stereotypical making grants function and taking on a broader leadership role in
community issues. A list of these issues includes our leadership in organizing the
farmland preservation community, our development and leadership of the Initiative for a
Competitive Greater Reading (ICGR), and our ongoing Task Force on Libraries.
This paper doesnt deal with why that is happening (weve discussed that in other
contexts) or how it works (that too has been covered), but the oft-asked question: How
does the Community Foundation decide which issues to undertake? Since we certainly
dont take on all the issues that were asked to (not even a fraction of them), why
libraries? Why job creation? This following list of characteristics is intended to provide
insight into a process thats far more art than science, but more rigorous than most
imagine.
I. The Bias Against Taking on More Work
The Community Foundations impact in the community is deceptively large relative to its
staff. Eight full time people do the core work of the Community Foundation. Since the
work we do is labor intensive, our natural bias is against taking on big-scale projects
beyond our grantmaking role. We do, of course, but in my twenty years here, I never
remember a meeting that included a discussion around: Is there something we can take
on next?
As a general rule, wed rather encourage others to take a leadership role, but we know
sometimes that wont, or cant, happen.
II. What Pushes Us To Take On A Leadership Role?
When we do decide that we need to take onand ownan issue, its usually driven by
one of three reasons.
The most common is that were driven by donors and the funds theyve given us. One
obvious example of this is our effort to lead the first-ever community wide health care
needs assessment (funded largely by our Community General Hospital Healthcare Fund).
Since we strive to make our grantmaking data-driven and outcome-oriented, the
Community Foundation had no real choice but to generate our own base-line data
through that process. Other examples of this would include our work on Lesbian and
Gay Issues (the National Funding Partnership was the donor), our leadership role in
community media (for the Knight Foundation) and our work in supporting the agriculture
industry (for the Wm. Penn Foundation).

So, if in order to fulfill our obligations to our donors we need to take on a leadership role,
thats what we do.
We also take on issues at what Id call the request of the community. That might seem
vague, but many of you will remember the decision we made (very reluctantly) to take on
the creation of a county economic development plan, which became ICGR. We did that
after the County Commissioners, the Mayor and the Business Executives Forum all asked
us to. This was not driven by donors, but truly by request of the community.
We receive requests all the time (more than once a month) from groups to intervene in a
community issue. Because of our bias against getting ourselves into this work, were
seldom able to accommodate them, but as we see from ICGR and the Libraries Task
Force, sometimes we decide that we must.
The third driver of potential leadership involvement, and probably the rarest, is the
glaring need. Our efforts to lead the redevelopment of walk-able commercial districts
were the result of a glaring need for leadership. Convening the Downtown Working
Group and arranging the trips to Greenville were the result of seeing strategies working in
other communities that were not being pursued aggressively here. In short, sometimes,
but very rarely, we step in because it just needs to be done.
III. How We Decide if the Community Foundation and an Issue Are a Good Fit
Even after weve come to the point where we cant answer the question, If not the
Community Foundation.whom? we still run through a list of considerations. Again, it
is more art than science, and we call this list a think list not a check list. The list
follows (with comments in italics).

How important is the issue to the community? Do people care? All the issues we
are asked to look at are important to someone, but our limited resources mean
that some issues just arent big enough to take on. Some of you may
remember that we were once asked to convene a community wide discussion on
the problem of feral cats. Without meaning to discount the passion that some feel
around this issue, it didnt seem like an issue that was going to generate broader
interest.
Are the groups involved looking for a solution to a problem, or looking to have a
problem? Do they want a better outcome? A key reason Community
Foundations hesitate to take on the challenge of improving public education
systems is that the players on the field are often resistant to the idea that things
can be better, or made better with the help of an outside entity. The farmland
groups, on the other hand (like the libraries), all wanted a better outcome, they
just needed disinterested leadership to get them there.
Do we have funds that can be used in implementation? One outcome of the
healthcare study was a series of grants from our healthcare fund to double the
capacity of the low-income dental clinic.

Can we find a disinterested facilitator and a neutral meeting ground? Actually,

this is easy and is, of course, a big reason we built the Community Conference
Center.
Is there somebody better prepared/positioned to do this than we are? Do we need
them as a partner or should we urge them to do this? Almost all human service
issues, for instance get referred to the United Way. We brought the Arts Council
in when we were asked to get the community theater groups together to discuss
better coordination between them.
How partisan is the issue? Some issues require a change in governmental
personnel to achieve anything. Its not even legal for us to get into those issues.
Can we affect a large number of people?
How will our donors feel about our using the money they gave us for this?
Is there an exit door for us if things do work out? What about if they dont
work out? Sometimes, we fail. Weve actually learned that failure is okay, as
long as we have a clear end-point for our work.
Do we have relationships with the players? At this point, its rare that the
Community Foundation doesnt have connections to the groups involved in a
community issue, but its still a consideration.
Does it fit our mission and values? This list isnt in order, but this would really
be the first question we ask.
Will it be fun? This stuff doesnt all have to be painful. If we can get a great
system of libraries for the community, that will be fun.

III. Conclusion
As Ive said at least twice, community leadership initiatives by community foundations
are much more art than science. Still, by looking at our successes and failures, weve
become better (I hope) at figuring out when the Community Foundation should go
beyond its role as strictly a grantmaker.