On Friday, June 14, 2013 Women Give San Diego hosted our
first conference titled, “Women Cultivating Community Connections,” for our
members and grantees.
Whether you attended or not, I invite you to grab a cup of
coffee, wine or your beverage of choice, find a comfy spot to sit and get ready
to immerse yourself in this blog because there was so much value offered at
this conference and we have captured it here for your benefit!
Our intention for Women
Cultivating Community Connections was to host a conference where we could
enhance our circles of influence by bringing our existing relationships together
to collaborate further and provide greater impact to those we serve. The result
was rich content, experiential learning and sage advice from individuals and organizations
that are creating impact and changing our world.
One of our first speakers was Nancy Jamison, Executive
Director of San Diego Grantmakers. Nancy shared that we must “act bigger” and
we must “connect better” as non-profits and philanthropists. In order to create
greater change, we must activate our networks and weave the various expressions
of philanthropy that we all offer together in a way that goes beyond money. We
must incorporate our voices, powerful research and the sharing of intelligence.
Nancy recognized Women Give San Diego for being an organization that is leading
by example for this new wave of philanthropy and that our impact will continue
to grow.
Prior to the conference we surveyed our grantees that work
within non-profits to better understand the areas within their organizations where
they struggle and thrive. Let’s
take a look at some of the results including the most popular answers:
1. What do you
struggle with most as an organization?
Expansion.
2. What do you feel
most optimistic about with your organization?
Growth.
3. What do you need
most?
Funding and staffing.
These results show interesting commonalities and also opened
up a perfect forum for a panel discussion with two of our grant partners, The
Barrio Logan College Institute and Casa Cornelia Law Center
Session 1 Panel with
Grantees:
Johanna Schiavoni, WGSD member and moderator for the panel,
shared that our survey showed organizations struggle with expansion yet they
remain optimistic for growth. So how do you grapple with strategies to expand
while believing in the organizations mission and ability to grow?
Carmen Chavez from Casa Cornelia commented, “In order for us
to stay focused on meeting the needs of our community we look to actions not
words.” Casa Cornelia like many other small non-profits recognizes that in
order to be successful you have to focus on the growth of your impact, “meeting
the needs of our community” not necessarily the size of your organization in
staff or funding. Though funding and staff are integral to an organizations
success, the long-term growth of an organization depends on its ability to
expand impact.
On the topic of managing a non-profit organization
successfully there was much advice shared from our panelists and audience
including the following:
Being an Executive
Director is like being the Chief Energy Officer, you have to learn how to
effectively manage the energies of your staff and your board.
It is important to be
accurate and transparent with accounting.
Use volunteers on the board, eventually incorporate staff or an
accounting firm but always focus on financial accuracy and transparency. At minimum Executive Directors need to
understand the words and concepts of the organization’s financial position and
be able to read financial statements.
Gratitude is a
practice that must be a priority and be ongoing. Some organizations have
ongoing gratitude events, emails, calls, etc. but all of them find creative
ways to say thank you to the people and other organizations that make their
impact possible. Additionally, the more specific you can be about the impact
delivered because of the time and money your donors and volunteers gave, the
more profound your thank you will be.
An executive director
needs to get out there and build relationships but make sure your passenger
seat is never empty. Constituents should have a relationship with at least two
or three people within the organization so when transitions occur no one falls
through the cracks.
Always put a volunteer
between you and the problem— it strengthens relationships with volunteers and
takes pressure of the executive director.
Create a strategic
plan and then commit to it being a living organic document. It needs to be a
continuum and constantly be evolving. If possible leverage community resources
to support pro bono with strategic planning. Further, set specific objectives,
tasks and committees. Each committee has to hit certain goals by specific dates
and then set quarterly reviews to hold people accountable and for
recalibrating.
Use the strategic plan
to guide your board retreat.
Board members should
have terms but once a year have a “state of the union” allowing all past and
current board members to come together and listen to the current vision and
weigh in on the next phase of growth for the organization.
We hope these words of wisdom are insightful and useful in
your organization and are grateful to our panelists and audience members for
sharing.
The next session of the conference was an experiential
learning through a World Café setting.
Session 2 World Café
-We are all here for the same reason:
The world café allows an opportunity for small groups to
convene around a table to share ideas, actively listen and connect perspectives
around topics addressed through questions. After the group has a chance to
share and connect, individuals rotate to another table to further the
collaboration. Once the groups
have completed answering a few questions and rotating tables a few times the
group is guided through a Harvest.
During the harvest, a facilitator captures the common themes and writes them
down where the entire audience can see the culmination of ideas and perspectives
around the key questions asked.
Renee Herrell, WGSD Member facilitated the World Café
experience and asked our participants three questions. Why are you here? If you could create a world
where all women and girls had economic self-sufficiency and security, what
would that look like?
What
leap can we make together?
Here
are just a few examples of what the Harvest looked like:
We are here to collaborate on
solutions for the issues that face women and girls
We can stop judging ourselves
and others
We can stop competing and
start collaborating.
We could have an equitable
society.
Leaders need mentors too.
We can share the load, we all
play a part.
Acknowledge girls for being
intelligent, not pretty.
Lunch and Learn
After completing a world café the group was ready to dive into
a lunch and learn where we enjoyed a healthy meal thanks to Jimbos and
beverages from Zevia while listening to Florence Quinn discuss the importance
of self-nourishment. Here are some of her key thoughts on healthy eating:
Cooking is one of the
few times you can stimulate all five senses. It is about movement, eating and
breathing and it is also about creation, connection and transformation.
In order to eat
healthy, you must make cooking and preparing food important. We find time for
the things that are important in our lives so if you make eating healthy
important you will find time to cook.
Focus on natural food
not processed.
Buy food at farmers
markets. Produce loses its nutrients he longer it sits on a shelf so purchasing
produce at a farmers market increases the probability of it being fresh. Also,
San Diego produces 150 crops per year and has the most organic farmers out of
any city in the country.
Explore seasonal
offerings and the best seasoning you can add to your food is mindfulness.
Here are some other tips from Florence on “how to eat”:
- Put utensils down after each bite
- Eat in silence for one meal per day if possible or at least take your first few bites in silence.
- Eat when seated.
- Eat separate from watching TV or reading.
Session 3: Community
Resource Mapping
Women Give member, Patricia Sinay, took on the hardest part
of the day in the afternoon following lunch. Most people start to drift at this
part of the day but Patricia’s sessions had members on the edge of their seats
and interacting with one and other.
Patricia took participants through a process called asset
mapping and used Women Give San Diego as an example. Patricia asked WGSD
members to answer a series of questions ahead of time so she could assess what
assets we as a group have to offer that can leverage our success as an
organization. Let’s take a look at the process and results:
Women Give Asset
Mapping:
The first question provides context, “What do we do?”
Advocacy, grant
making, women and girls, economic self-sufficiency, creating gatherings,
recruiting members, mentoring, etc.
Next, ask your members, volunteers, staff, donors, etc. “What
do you enjoy doing?” You don’t want to have volunteers sign up for things they
don’t enjoy so instead of asking them how they want to help ask them what do
they enjoy.
For Women Give members and grantees the top answers were:
1. Solving problems 2. Meeting new
people 3. Connecting people
The lowest three areas we checked off were:
1. Planning event 2. Throwing a party 3. Raising
money
When reading these results Patricia found an interesting
result: the things we like to do are actually what we do through the activities
we listed that we didn’t like to do. In other words, though we don’t like
planning events, throwing parties and raising money we end up doing all three
of those because we love solving problems, meeting new people and connecting
with people. The key take away here is that you may have a need for event
planning and your volunteer may be good at or able to plan an event but that
isn’t their passion. However, if you can find out what they are passionate
about, say for instance meeting new people, then you can ask them if they would
be interested in supporting an event where they can meet new people. Now you
get what you need and the volunteer is happy because they get to do what they
actually enjoy doing.
Other questions you can ask when conducting an asset mapping
for your organization are:
What do people like
doing outside of work? How can we tap into that for what we need?
What are your talents?
When conducting an asset map you must consider who is in
your circle of influence. Here is an example of a list of some of Women Give’s
Circle of Influence:
Philanthropist
Foundations
Small business owners
Large company execs
Elected officials
Government employees
Teachers
Economists
Academia/researchers
Banking executives
Leaders from other
organizations
The final session of the day was a reflection opportunity
for participants to look back on the conference and discuss the areas that they
could take back into their communities and their organizations to support the
causes we serve. It was clear that the most common take away was the importance
of collaboration and partnerships. Participants walked away with tools to take
back to their organizations in order to engage and enroll more supporters so
they can deliver more impact.
The conference ended with a networking and mingling event
sponsored by Tio Leo’s where participants were able to reflect more and
continue the conversation. The objective of the conference was to be a catalyst
for collaboration and provide a space for leaders to come together for a day
and then continue to partner off line. We look forward to watching as these
partnerships and collaborative efforts grow and as a result provide greater
impact to women and girls in San Diego and beyond.
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Thank you to our sponsors:
