I’m tired of bad news and as a result I am very selective about what I read in the newspapers and I don’t watch news on television before I go to bed.  Well let me clarify because I don’t want you to get the impression that I have my head in the sand.  There’s a lot of news having to do with the economy and its impact on people we care about and that’s important to what we’re trying to accomplish at the foundation.  The bad news I’m talking about is what I observe to be a growing trend to spotlight hate , violence, fear, and disrespect…  You get it. 

I guess this is on my mind today because I just returned from our second Women of Compassion award luncheon where we honored six extraordinary women who are making a real difference to lives of many, but who might otherwise go unnoticed.  The stories ranged from feeding the hungry, empowering cancer survivors, educating our youth, advocating for the elderly, balancing college with social engagement and turning the tragedy of a lost child into a movement to cure brain tumors.  Wow!  And none of these women gave any indication that they thought what they had done was special.

Sometimes I think the only reasonable reaction to a world described in the “traditional” news is to lock our doors, distrust everyone and isolate ourselves from all the bad folks out there.  What a different feeling I have from the event today.  This “other” news left me inspired, empowered and ready to roll up my sleeves and do something for someone else. 

I’ve heard the argument that “bad news sells” but I also know it doesn’t build community.  Just knowing that for every honoree today there are probably hundreds of others doing great work to build up our County gives me hope.  It’s too bad their stories aren’t told more often.

We’ve written about it in Sprouting Hope, our eNewsletter, and on our website, but I just have to say a bit about our project in the annual United Way Day of Caring this year – IT WAS GREAT.  We’ve always done something on the Day of Caring, partially to support our neighbors and colleagues at the United Way and partially because we like getting our hands dirty.  But usually, some of our staff were off picking apples with pre-schoolers and some were painting a group meeting room and others may have been weeding the garden at a senior center. 

This year our staff decided early that we wanted to do a project together and we wanted it to be something significant.  So we contacted our friends at the Lorain County Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services and they told us that they really needed a room where new mothers could learn to bond with their children while dealing with recovery from their addiction.  Perfect!  Our staff was good with painting and minor rehab and absolutely shined when it came to shopping, but we needed a hole cut in the wall and a two-way mirror installed, not to mention some major disconnection of plumbing.  No problem, our friends at the Business Industries Association came through to make the project complete.  And what better inspriation for our work and the final product but The Giving Tree by Shel Silversteen.   I see the talents of our staff of ten day in and day out, but I learned that each has hidden talents that I haven’t yet experienced.  I’m confident that in some small way the fruit of our labor will help break the cycle of addiction for a few families in Lorain County, but I know that the labor itself has made our team appreciate each other just a little stronger.  If you’ve got 5 minutes check out our video chronicle of the day.

Nineteen Board members and five management staff spent last Friday evening and Saturday morning looking out into the future for our Community and our Foundation.  On Friday we spent time describing the current status of Foundation finances and efforts and then looked ahead a few years to forecast the impact of the Recession on operations and grantmaking.  Small groups spent the remainder of Friday evening discussing some hypothetical situations in the year 2013 and how the Foundation might react.

 On Saturday morning our Governance Chair, led Board Committees through an exercise to begin the process of crafting a Foundation Diversity and Inclusion strategy.  The remainder of the Retreat was spent comparing our community leadership strengths and capacity to a Leadership Framework created by CFLeads and then applying those strengths to some current work with our Community Development Corporations.  My reaction – the retreat affirmed both the direction we are headed and our desire for continuous improvement.  We also have some great new ideas to explore.

The level of engagement, depth of understanding and commitment, and certainly the creativity of ideas from our Board and staff continue to inspire me.  Plus it speaks volumes that we had such as strong turnout on a summer weekend (out of 20 board members and 5 mgmt staff) .   I sometimes have colleagues who lament that their boards “don’t really get” their community foundation beyond taking in contributions and making grants.  This weekend certainly proved that is NOT the case in Lorain County and we are a stronger community and foundation because of it.  The CFLC is a tribute to the commitment of current and past board members and staff.

Those who know me have heard me say that a significant part of my job is cheer-leading.  Not the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah type but sharing real stories of positive opportunities in our community.  Opportunities derived from organizations that are down in the trenches trying to alleviate distress for our friends and neighbors who are suffering.  Opportunities that are emerging from the numerous entrepreneurial businesses popping up all over our area.  Opportunities from the many generous people who continue to invest in our community despite the fact that the recession is impacting their own bottom line.  My theory is very simple – people will only engage and be part of the solution when they feel hopeful.  And there are many reasons for hope even in this difficult economy.

In our continuing efforts to find new, better and more effective ways to communicate with our community, the Community Foundation has debuted a new eNewsletter called appropriately, Sprouting Hope.   The monthly newsletter is free and features positive stories about people and organizations that are making a real difference in Lorain County.  We will regularly highlight local nonprofits and include wishlists of ways people can directly assist their efforts as well as an events calendar.  Additionally, we will include videos from people you may know, and some you may not, talking about their visions for our community and what gives them hope.  You can sign up online through our website.

I invite you to join us in spreading hope in Lorain County.

For the past six years the Community Foundation of Lorain County has been a proud founding member of the Fund for Our Economic Future, a 100+ collaborative of organized philanthropy in NE Ohio.  Beyond the unprecedented accomplishment of getting more than one hundred foundations, colleges, universities and such to agree on a data driven, unified approach to regional economic developement; the Fund has had a part in remarkable impact including more than a billion dollars of venture investment transforming the region into an entrepreneurial hot spot. 

But what has captured my excitement today is not the millions in dollars awarded to our grantees, or our mayors, city managers, and councils who are pushing regional land use planning and revenue sharing through the Regional Prosperity Initiative – it is a small initiative that has leverage not just changes in attitude but changes in behavior.

EfficientGovNowis intended to encourage, spotlight and reward real government collaboration. More than 60 applications were received for projects involving two or more public collaborators.  A committee reviewed public input on the applications and selected nine finalists, three of which will receive up to $100,000 from the Fund.  During the month of July, 2009 residents of Northeast Ohio will vote to determine which of the projects receive funding. 

The nine competing projects are:

1. Mahoning River Corridor Interactive Web site: “Rollin’ on the River”
2. “Sustain a Greener Ohio,” A Collaboration to Map the Storm Water Conveyance System in Stark County
3. Combined Dispatch to Use New Technology to Save Lives and Money (Ashland County)
4. Westshore Regional Fire District Project (Cuyahoga County)
5. Mahoning/Youngstown Regional Information System (MYRIS)
6. City/Township/School District Fleet Management Collaboration Project (Oberlin, New Russia)
7. Creating Efficiencies and Cost-Savings through Consolidation of Public Health Services in Summit County
8. Rittman and Orrville Schools Administrative Compact
9. Master Plan for the Western Reserve Joint Economic Development Zone of the Cities of Cuyahoga Falls, Hudson and Stow

We know that some of the projects had been under discussion prior to the initiative, but we also know that several of the projects were crafted specifically for the application.  Regardless of their genesis, what inspires me is the desire by so many public leaders to shed the confines of our traditional boxes and to explore new and better ways of working together.  It may be the realities of the current economy that triggers change, or it may be the grant dollars from the Fund, but whatever the cause – I’m glad to see it happening.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of serving as faculty for 39 people who are relatively new to the community foundation field.  I’ve been teaching the 3-day Community Foundation Fundamentals for the Council on Foundations for about six years now and this class was particularly special as it included colleagues from Ohio and our neighboring States of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois.  The Midwest Community Foundation Ventures (I serve as Vice-Chair of the Board for this collaboration), sponsored the training and the Cleveland Foundation graciously provided free meeting space. 

I teach the course for a number of reasons.  This fast paced, interactive class gives me energy and charges my motivational batteries.  It is next to impossible to spend that amount of time with enthusiastic minds and not become inspired. And I invariably  learn something new in the process.

I also believe that we in the field have a responsibility to raise the bar for our own organizations and the community foundation field in general.  Sharing of best practices, promoting National Standards for US Community Foundations and assisting with professional development through courses like Fundamentals does make a difference.

But perhaps the main reason I teach is to help continue a long and honored culture of sharing and collaboration that is inherent between community foundations.  The history of field is a story of this grand idea (called a Community Foundation) passed from Cleveland in 1914 throughout the United States, Canada and then the rest of the world.  The Community Foundation of Lorain County has experienced such remarkable growth because of the ideas, policies, programs and efficiencies we’ve borrowed from colleagues.  It would be difficult to go anywhere in the world and find a Community Foundation that has grown in a vacuum.  But like many native american cultures – if the stories aren’t told and future generations aren’t taught the language, it risks fading away. 

I wasn’t disappointed in Cleveland last week. Thirty-nine people came into the course wanting to learn more about their jobs and hopefully left with a little better understanding the 100-year evolution of a remarkable community building tool.  And more importantly, by understanding our past and present and culture, they now will begin to refine this model to better serve the needs and dreams of our communities in the future.

It probably isn’t’ any surprise to you that I’m a big fan of accountability. I’ve often said that the most precious asset of the Community Foundation, even beyond our endowment, is our integrity and the trust we’ve earned from the donors, grantees, and the community we serve. If we lose that, we’ve lost everything.

I know that earning the trust of our constituents is increasingly difficult as public scrutiny has increased along with the number of public charities and the massive dollars being socially invested by our nation’s foundations and nonprofit organizations. Both supporters and critics alike want charitable dollars spent wisely for results and we often hear calls for nonprofits to be “more business-like”, or to measure the impact of our actions, and we are seeing indications of growing interest in legislative regulation. Paul Light had a great discussion of this in his book Pathways to Nonprofit Excellence.

Within the foundation, staff and board, have worked hard to hone our back-office business practices so that things like a 24-hour turnaround on gift receipts, accurate accounting on 500 individual funds, and timely grant processing all happen without the public being aware of the considerable work involved. But not all business practices work in a public charity; in fact I contend that running a for-profit company is easier than running a nonprofit, because the outcome of our work isn’t a widget with precise specifications and quality standards. Being business-like, mission focused and values driven means that sometimes the wisest decision doesn’t result from a cost benefit study.

We are trying to gauge the effect of our grantmaking and community involvement to help us better utilize our monetary and human resources to truly lead our community to a better future. But having spent the first one-half of my professional career in research and evaluation, I know too well the fallacy of relying on evaluation for “the definitive answer”. Evaluation is an important tool for learning what seems to work and what doesn’t and it is part of the business-mission-values equation.  It is critical to know what your trying to accomplish and why you believe you can accomplish the desired results.  It’s similarly critical to evaluate your actions and results, but the learnings are often less than crystal clear, especially in the difficult work of public charities.

I greatly prefer self-regulation over external regulation that derives is sanction from suspicion and punishment. We’ve seen only too clearly the unintended consequences of this form of external regulations with the implementation of the Pension Protection Act of 2008. That’s why I’ve advocated and worked for National Standards for Community Foundations since 2001 as a rigorous tool to promote quality and consistency among the 700+ Community Foundations in the United States. But National Standards mean nothing if the organization has no value for what they represent.

In the final analysis, I’m convinced that earning trust all about balance and dealing with the many shades of gray that color our day-to-day work in this field. It’s about being professional but not forgetting that we’re a publicly supported charity. It’s about doing your best to be accountable but doing so with honest transparency even if the picture is sometimes blurred. And it’s remembering that what we are trying to accomplish is sometimes illusive.

Warren Buffet described it well in 2003. “The nature of the problems that a foundation tackles is exactly the opposite of business. In business, you look for easy things, like very good businesses that don’t have very many problems and that almost run themselves. In the philanthropic world, you’re looking at the toughest problems that exist. The reason why they’re important problems is that they’ve resisted the intellect and money being thrown at them over the years and they haven’t been solved. You have to expect a lower batting average in tackling the problems of philanthropy than in tackling the problems of business.”

I’m off this weekend to Washington DC (actually Crystal City Virginia) for my final meeting on the Standards Action Team of the Council on Foundations and the first meeting of the Board of Directors of the Community Foundation National Standards Board.  A number of words come to mind – “maturation”, “formalization”, “transformation”, “validation”, and “whew”.

Community foundations took a bold step in 2000 by adopting the first ever National Standards for US Community Foundations.  While we were mostly all similar, this was a significant step to ensure that community foundations employ critical policies and effective practices.  I joined the Standards Action Team in 2001 and have been engaged in the arduous process of confirmation for the 700+ community foundations across the nation.  During the past five years we’ve seen almost 563 community foundations agree to comply and  463 successfully demonstrate compliance.  Most of the rest are still in the review process.

As the field prepares for reconfirmation in 2010 (certification is good for 5 years, so the first group to comply in 2005 will need be reviewed again in 2010), the fields decided that National Standards needs to be housed in a permanent organization, the National Standards Board.

As one of the few “senior members” (referring to my time on the committee NOT my age), I’ve agreed to serve on the National Standard Board for a two year term to assist with the transition.  And I have to say that I’m feeling very proud of what we all have accomplished.  In a time where scrutiny is paramount, community foundations are well poised to demonstrate our integrity through transparency of what we do and how we do it, as well as our voluntary commitment to compliance with National Standards.  The process has been far from easy but I firmly believe that the donors, grantees and communities served by the field of community foundations in the United States can rest a little easier because of the rigor of the process. 

These two days will be a passing of a baton of sorts, and hopefully a milestone in the history of community philanthropy.

Managing a community foundation (or any other business) in this economy feels a little like driving through multiple poorly marked detours without a map.  Sometimes you think you’re on the right track but can’t be sure.  Thank goodness for my global positioning system (GPS).  I pride myself on having a pretty good sense of direction, but I don’t know what I’d do without my trusty “map in a box”.  Google maps are great until you hit that unexpected closed road and then things get really interesting.  But my trusty GPS always helps me find an alternate way to get to where I’m going.  The same is true for some organizations.

I’ve never been a huge fan of linear strategic planning, particularly in the world of community foundations.  The “do this – then do this” type plan works in some situations until something unexpected throws the thing offtrack.  I think community foundations need their own GPS and for the past few years we’ve been working on just that, a Goal Positioning Strategy.  The foundation certainly has our goals and strategies, but we also exercise our organizational flexibility by imagining what might be and how we might react.  I honestly believe that the scenario work we did at our Board Retreat last August helped us react quickly to the economic downturn of the 4th quarter of 2008.

I don’t know when the community will receive its next big bequest nor when this recession will end or when the next will begin.  But I’m thankful to work with a board and staff that recognize that our community foundation isn’t driven as much by our own intentions as it is by opportunity.  And a good organizational GPS certainly helps.

My father-in-law, Harley Simmons, was a banker and was my role model of a good solid community leader.  As a banker he earned the trust of hundreds if not thousands of his fellow neighbors as a steward of their hard earned money, adviser on whether or not they could afford a new car, and reliable guide on their journey from marriage to family to retirement.  He was anchored in his community and as such was an anchor for the community.  Harley served his Church and served numerous charities.  Because of the trust he earned, he was often called to serve on commissions or task forces to deal with critical problems and was once appointed to the city council.  And throughout he served without desire for thanks or accolade, but because it was the right thing to do. 

We’ve had plenty of our own versions of Harley Simmons in Lorain County.  Business leaders who were anchored in our community and constantly chose to give back to the community that helped make them successful.  Over the years we’ve watched as a generation of leaders have retired and many have passed away.  New leaders have emerged but the environment in which we live is very different than even a decade ago.  Businesses are less anchored to one community as before and people are less likely to work in one job or even live in one area for long periods of time.  As competition has forced the bottom lines of businesses to shrink, the responsibility for community leadership has shifted to other sectors including higher education, health care, philanthropy, government and non-profits.    Leadership is increasingly forming in issue-focused networks of people instead of being relegated to particular sectors as in days gone by.  The times they are a changin.

While some grieve because the “good ole days” will never return, I contend that we are in the midst of a dynamic shift regarding how communities make decisions, solve problems, and grow.  Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point)  and others have given us clues to the causes of the change, but it is up the us as members of community to decide whether to sit back and allow community leadership to simply evolve, or to be part of that change through civic engagement, active dialogue and each of us giving a little back to the community that helped us to be successful. 

If the times are a changin, I for one want to get my hands dirty and be part of helping shape that change.