Capacity Days

You spend your time working hard on behalf of your clients and community. Now take some time to work on your organization.

This 3 workshop series is designed to help you and one other person from your organization frame an intentional capacity building plan for your organization. We encourage a leader from the board and a leader from the staff to participate together.

Using the Standards for Excellence as a lens, you and your colleague will work together take stock of what is working, and what is the next thing you need to work on to better deliver on your mission.

At the end of each workshop, you will have access to an online assessment tool, where you can review your organization's practices. If you complete all three workshops, you will be given an hour with one of our facilitators to go through the results of your assessment and determine what you want to work on right now.

Workshop 1 will look at:

• Mission, Strategy, and Evaluation - How do your programs reflect your mission?
• Legal Compliance and Ethics - Do you have procedures in place to be compliant with applicable authorities?

Workshop 2 will look at:

• Finance and Operations - Are you sharing the right financial information, and do people on the team know what to do with it?
• Resource Development - Where do your funds come from and are you happy with that?

Workshop 3 will look at:

• Leadership: Board, Staff, and Volunteers - How does your team function, and is that the right balance?
• Public Awareness, Engagement, and Advocacy - Are you telling the story of your organization and your clients?

Facilitators:

Martha Collins: Martha is a licensed consultant with the Standards for Excellence. She has dedicated her career to working with social justice organizations that focus on building power within marginalized communities. For nearly two decades, she has had the opportunity to collaborate and strategically develop several coalitions to help create public policy groundwork for advancing social and economic agendas. Martha also has extensive nonprofit advocacy experience in the areas of protecting work-family friendly policies, promoting an electoral process that is free, fair and accessible for all, and fighting for race and gender-based equity that benefits everyone in the community.

Rob Meiksins: Rob is a licensed consultant with the Standards for Excellence. He has served in just about every role in the sector from volunteer to intern to program manager, to executive director, to board director, and consultant. He has also been a newswire writer for the Nonprofit Quarterly, and a licensed governance trainer with BoardSource.