Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) September 21, 2017 -- The Alliance for Strong Families and Communities will receive $1.5 million from The Kresge Foundation to help the Alliance revolutionize operations of the nonprofit sector and ultimately advance the sector’s shared vision of a healthy and equitable society.
“This generous support from Kresge reflects their commitment and passion for our sector, as well as the children, adults, and families our strategic action network serves every day,” said Alliance President and CEO, Susan Dreyfus. “And just as importantly, this support serves to recognize that we are well positioned to truly mobilize the collective power of our network and—through our partnerships—the sector itself, to accelerate progress toward establishing equitable policies and systems that ultimately will strengthen families and create and support strong, healthy communities.”
Funds will be used to engage leaders from the Alliance network and beyond to create and execute innovation projects in health and human services integration, equity, and educational success. Innovation teams will establish new generative partnerships, engage in advocacy efforts, build leadership capacity for innovation, and launch and publish effective practices. Much of the preparation to shape this work is taking place during the Alliance’s fall Innovation Design Summits, with the summit on the integration of health care and human services having taken place last week; the summit on educational achievement taking place in October; and the summit on the nonprofit workforce, including workforce diversity, taking place in November. Strategic priorities and prototypes developed during the summits will serve as the groundwork for innovation that will drive change in organizations, communities, and the sector in the future.
“We are excited to support this next chapter of the Alliance as they continue their work to strengthen the human services sector and fulfill their bold vision. The Alliance’s ability to help community-based organizations evolve and deliver person-centered services significantly impacts equality of opportunity for people,” said Sandra Ambrozy, senior program officer with the foundation’s Human Services Program.
As the Alliance works to accelerate social innovation in health, equity and education, it will lead a parallel effort to help nonprofits build the practices, approaches, and infrastructure needed to achieve change and sustainability. To do so, the Alliance will expand and refine the Commitments of High-Impact Nonprofit Organizations, its innovative framework that delivers foundational direction to human-serving nonprofits in achieving impact. A business plan will be created along with a learning enterprise to develop and implement Commitments learning tools, products, and services throughout the sector.
The Alliance also will make enhancements to its Commitments Assessment Tool as part of this strategic effort. The tool, which was unveiled in 2015, provides organizations with an authoritative and actionable report on their organizational maturity in each of the Commitments areas.
With 20 pilot sites active over three years, the Kresge-funded Strategy Counts initiative, which launched in 2011, was a powerful learning lab for nonprofit transformation, and major insights from the initiative are embedded in the Commitments of High-Impact Nonprofit Organizations.
About The Kresge Foundation
The Kresge Foundation is a $3.5 billion private, national foundation that works to expand opportunities in America’s cities through grantmaking and social investing in arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services, and community development in Detroit. In 2016, the Board of Trustees approved 474 grants totaling $141.5 million, and made 14 social investment commitments totaling $50.8 million. For more information, visit http://www.kresge.org.
About the Alliance
The Alliance for Strong Families and Communities is a strategic action network of thousands of committed social sector leaders who through their excellence, distinction, and influence are working to achieve a healthy and equitable society. We aggregate the very best sector knowledge and serve as an incubator for learning and innovation to generate new solutions to the toughest problems. We accelerate change through dynamic leadership development and collective actions to ensure policies and systems provide equal access and opportunity for all people in our nation to reach their fullest potential through improvements in health and well- being, educational success, economic opportunity, and safety and security. Go to alliance1.org for more information.
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Jennifer Devlin, Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, http://www.alliance1.org, +1 703-876-1714, [email protected]
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