Understanding Your Context

Local Organizations Working on Poverty

Poverty has been a concern of service providers and social activists for decades. Your community foundation must be careful to acknowledge that effort and collaborate with the local organizations that are most knowledgeable and experienced in poverty reduction and alleviation. You need to know who they are and what they do.

Purposes of External Scanning

To understand the players in your landscape
To help identify the unique role the foundation can play
To identify potential partners
To begin to articulate the foundation's interest/intention in expanding its role in poverty
To set a tone of collaboration and learning

Take a Broad Approach

When you think about scanning the local organizations working on poverty, make sure you don't just focus on your grant recipients or other organizations you are familiar with. Reach out to other potential partners. Ask for suggestions of whom else to contact. And don't forget the media - in many cases they have been important partners at the table on poverty work.

A Scanning Model

Vancouver Foundation took a number of scanning steps before arriving at its focus on homelessness/poverty among youth at risk in Vancouver.

First, staff gathered their own thoughts about possible directions, opportunities and risks, and shared their knowledge about current initiatives in the community. Nine internal interviews were held.
They scanned internally — assessing the existing involvement of Vancouver Foundation in the issues.
They consulted resources like CFC's poverty initiative and others
They scanned externally — conducting 26 interviews with stakeholders (community organizations, community members, other funders, people within the municipal and provincial governments) using a standard set of questions. Responses to those questions refined their thinking about the possible role(s) Vancouver Foundation might play (including as funder, convener, leader, partner), the challenges in each, and the potential for impact.
A final overview of all the scanning information, and recommendations for action, were presented to the Board.

Tool: Sample Questions - External Scan

What are your thoughts (positive and negative) about the Foundation's interest in taking a more long-term and proactive role in the area of [homelessness within the inner city]?
Do you have any suggestions about how the Foundation can best address some of the issues you have identified?
Are there particular areas within a ['preventing and addressing homelessness'] frame that you see as a particularly good fit for the Foundation?
How can the Foundation better support community-based organizations in the inner city to address issues of [homelessness]?
What are your thoughts about the Foundation's potential role as a convener with respect to [addressing and preventing homelessness within the inner city]? What convening in particular would be useful from your perspective? (content, process, participants)
What kinds of partnerships do you think the Foundation should be pursuing as we move forward in this area?
What, if any, opportunities do you currently see for the Foundation to take on a more explicit leadership role in this area?
In what ways would you be able to support the Foundation's work in this area?
How would you like to see us work as we move forward?

Thanks to Vancouver Foundation for sharing these questions.

A Lesson from the Field

As Vancouver Foundation moves forward with their plans, they are constantly adjusting their approach, based on new input and changing conditions. "In retrospect there are things we might have done differently in our community scanning," says Vancouver Foundation's Catherine Hume, Program Director, "but you have to find the right balance between research/consultation and action. It's never perfect."

More Lessons from the Field
Just Ask

When Hamilton Community Foundation planned to focus their grantmaking on poverty, they weren't sure how it would work within every field of interest. So they convened groups of grantees within a field (the arts for example) and asked them. The dialogue helped the foundation refine their guidelines. But more importantly, the dialogue allowed potential applicants to define opportunities for their work to impact poverty and to develop innovative approaches, both as individual organizations and in collaboration with others.

Attitude is Everything

Vancouver Foundation (VF) highlights a process lens in their evolving poverty work: "One key learning at VF has been the importance of taking a deliberate and consultative approach to addressing issues related to poverty by ensuring that we are not approaching these issues from a 'solution-oriented' or 'initiative' perspective but rather from a 'working with' and 'building on' perspective that is grounded in a commitment to establishing long term working relationships and partnerships."

Going deeper:

You can do a more in-depth scan of your local environment related to poverty and poverty reduction advocates. A Ford Foundation Grantcraft resource is useful: "Scanning the Landscape: Finding Out What's Going On In Your Field." Here's how Grantcraft describes the content: "Grant makers relate their experiences in surveying issues and activities in a field and testing their ideas and observations with experienced practitioners before committing resources. Learn how to get started with a scan, explore its benefits and methods, insure that it gets diverse input, and discover ways it can contribute to the field and inform people of your objectives." You can download the guide at: www.grantcraft.org/