What is Community Leadership?

Over the past 20 years, we have defined community foundation work in Canada through three fundamental roles: endowment building and donor service, grantmaking and community leadership.

We have worked hard to build our assets and forge strong relationships with new and existing donors. But it is the third of these core roles – community leadership – that has challenged us the most.

Each of us thinks about and defines community leadership in a different way. And each community foundation, as an organization, thinks about, and defines, our community leadership role, in a different way. There are lots of reasons for this including the fact that ‘community leadership’ is an inherently vague concept – exactly what IS it, anyway?

What do we have in common?

We are all passionate about our communities. We all believe that those communities have inherent strengths and assets that we can build on. We all believe that community foundations are a powerful vehicle for good.

We also share common ground with our ability to be effective community leaders, whether that’s through convening, developing local knowledge, working with like-minded partners or finding creative solutions to shared challenges.

Why are we needed now more than ever?

The global economic decline has brought some of our assumptions into question. For most of us, our assets have declined with declining markets. The ability to do grantmaking has therefore lessened, too. And with fewer assets to manage, and less money to grant to community organizations, some community foundations are asking, 'so what do we do now?'

The opportunity for community foundations to be community leadership organizations has never been more apparent; the need for our community leadership abilities has never been more profound. The challenges our communities face are deep. And we have the power to convene, to collaborate, to bring 'strange bedfellows' together, to mobilize philanthropy in creative ways, and to engage parties in meaningful dialogue, around complex issues.

We are already playing this role

  • Some of us are already explicitly doing community leadership work (think: convening, tackling issues, Vital Signs reports) Some of us are already doing it, but perhaps don't call it community leadership (think: funding a study on homelessness or sponsorsing a meeting of local nonprofits)
  • And some of us may think 'we are not doing community leadership
    - we are too small/don't have staff/are stretched too thin'

If we stop and think about how we spend our time as a community foundation, about where our resources are going, about the power and potential of our role as a funder, catalyst, convener, partner and (sometimes) leader...then almost invariably we are doing community leadership. We just need to think about it that way.