Linkedin Youtube
Capsules

Our Services 

Experience effective ways to learn and connect

Seize the opportunity of starting organizations for the future.
We create community, learning and coaching experiences to sharpen essential skills, share inspiring practices and generate actionable insights for your work.

1. Learning

Structured skills building experiences based on knowledge developed from practice, with contributions from international peers.

2. Coaching

Responsive support for leaders seeking to adapt strategy, calibrate program design, troubleshoot challenges or strengthen team’s capabilities.

3. Community

Curated spaces for practitioners, supporters and partners to meet in conversations that leave them more confident and connected.

1. Learning experiences

Enhance your abilities to shape a philanthropy powered by belonging, where communities tap into their own assets, leadership and problem-solving capacities.

Our approach to learning focuses on building core capabilities. 

We create accessible knowledge materials, host workshops to dive deeper into areas of practice and curate in-person visits to community foundations.

Our approach to learning

Discovering the building blocks

The knowledge base we draw from combines theory with practices harvested from different community foundation movements across the world.
Practitioners and supporters are continuously testing principles, introducing new practices and creating fresh insights that can serve the entire field, especially professionals who are currently opening up new spaces for community foundation movements to emerge.

Map key stages

Building movements is not a linear process. Seeing the big picture and key stages helps set milestones and intentionally design the steps towards building a vibrant movement.

Build core capabilities

Strengthening essential skills yields results. The learning experiences we create focus on the five building blocks of an impactful community foundation practice.

Learn by doing

Knowing is not enough to influence change. The best learning space is daily practice, as intentions are carried into your organization, your relationships and ways of working.

  1. Discover the CF model
  2. Build the support organization
  3. Develop alliances and fundraise
  4. Find and inspire future CF leaders
  5. Accompany CF initiatives
  6. Support young community foundations
  7. Support the CF movement
  8. Evaluate progress and design for the future

Each stage can be zoomed in on and broken down into steps.

For example, Capsule #1 focuses on the elements of stage 1 – discovering the CF model. 

Capsule #3 focuses on the steps in stages 2 to 4 – supporting initiative groups to become community foundations. 

  1. Community engagement
  2. Fund development
  3. Grant making
  4. Governance
  5. Strategic design

Each core capability can be zoomed in on and imagined as a learning goal. 

The Capsule #3 Booster presents learning experiences that support organizations can design into their accompaniment program to stimulate the development of core abilities.

  1. Articulate your vision
  2. Design and test experiments
  3. Reflect and iterate

Each practice can be zoomed in on to consider how it is applied in the everyday work of your organization, in different processes. 

For support organizations, the Capsule #3 Booster shows these practices at play in the process of accompanying initiative groups seeking to become community foundations. 

Knowldge Capsules

Explore video journeys into the value, practices and impact of community foundations.
The capsules are created to help you spark your partners' imagination, inspire potential founders and configure your own steps towards supporting initiative groups and community foundations.
Each capsule has around 20 anchor points organized by key stages, from the opportunities that community foundations have to be organizations for the future, to their role within a local ecosystem of development.
They include insights on the core capabilities that sustain a successful support practice.

Workshops

Dive deeper into the core capabilities of impactful community foundation work.
Zoom in on the building blocks of community foundation and support organization work to surface distinctions, discuss different approaches and apply tools that align the daily practice with the vision of transformation.
Change is cumulative. It is the result of initial choices that compound over time. Thinking through those choices and investing in finding fitting approaches for the kind of impact we are seeking generates a return as capacity, capability, connections, credibility and catalyst power.

Study Visits

See how community foundations, donors, grantees and partners collaborate in real life.
Experience the ways in which community foundations work on the ground and get an introduction into the collaboration systems they have built locally and nationally.
Concepts become palpable and communities reveal themselves as nuanced, often familiar places to the new and experienced practitioners who travel to see how their peers work in their own territories.
Powerful learning experiences, field visits are opportunities to connect with the tangible realities of community foundation work and its results.

Study Visits Testimonials

“It was so important for me, at this starting point in my country, when we are just thinking on how we can build a community foundations movement. It was really rich and important at this point to have all these conversations with the founders, the staff, board members… all the people who are part of this movement.”
Mónica MorriberonMosaico Lab, Perú
"We are so happy to have had the opportunity to see and learn about the whys, the hows and the what to implement a solution that, in our eyes, will really be valuable for sustainable and autonomous development in Colombia."
Paola CubidesAzaí Consultores, Colombia
"It was very interesting. We received information about the creation of foundations, the specifics of the work, the path and experience. Detailed information was provided on all issues. Also, the emotional side was important, we were charged with their energy, which is a bigger push for me personally. It was important to draw parallels between the situations in the two countries and discuss risk factors. Thank you for that really necessary and interesting teaching."
Amalia SarkisianNetwork of Centers for Civic Engagement, Georgia
“We are trying to learn more about community foundations because we don’t know them that well in Colombia. It has been a great experience being here and really understanding the importance of community foundations — how they actually create and strengthen the social ecosystem in a community.”
Viviana González Evaluar Consultores, Colombia
"We were lucky to meet really qualified, professional community leaders who for 4 days introduced us to the history, difficulties and ways of success of community foundations operating in Romania. You are professionals who know exactly what resources are needed to create and develop a community organization. During these days I have become convinced once again that community life needs common ground: value coherence, shared responsibility, readiness and openness to dialogue."
Tamar ModebadzeNetwork of Centers for Civic Engagement, Georgia

2. Coaching for action

Innovate in your practice effective ways of building a generous, collaborative and impactful community foundation movement.

Our coaching comes with a bias for action.
We act as partners for dialogue to help clarify distinctions, surface opportunities in changing contexts and support informed decision-making.

Courage to open new space

Creating space for a shared vision to emerge, establishing trusting relationships and acting collaboratively in environments with many stakeholders and different perspectives takes courage.
The philanthropy that community foundations cultivate in their territories can transform the way the social change sector operates. It shows the effects of pooling and giving trust, opening space for possibility and shifting the perception from scarcity to opportunities created in collaboration.
Build the capabilities of your team and partners to develop a quality-centred practice in supporting the community foundation movement.
The result could be an emergent network of trained consultants who enrich the support ecosystem. We propose a set of learning objectives and an assessment system to keep track of the ground covered and show future development needs. The program balances structured learning with flexible timeframes and methods.

Our approach

Sensemaking, experimenting, iterating

We center our coaching on articulating clear intentions, designing actionable experiments and reflecting, learning and improving.
This experimental action approach comes from our own experience as support professionals working in changing contexts. Creative responses to challenges and opportunities generate new relationships and field-tested insights, setting in motion cycles of learning, adapting and growing.

Team Coaching

Lean on guidance tailored to your own journey as a guide, advocate and field builder for the powerful architecture for change that are community foundations.
Team coaching sessions are especially useful when prioritization is in order, to make sense of the many things on your plate and focus on the most important work. Building a support system in partnership with key allies with complementary capacities is a common thread in coaching sessions.

Challenge Lab

Respond to a specific issue of practice by activating additional resources and a creative process in a lab-like space to achieve a viable solution.
Looking to sharpen your case for resourcing a support ecosystem for community foundations? .
Design an effective learning and doing program for your initiators?
The Challenge Lab helps you tap into the expertise of experienced practitioners to problem-solve together.

3. Community of practice

Discover how the field is growing internationally. 

Share practices and find answers to new questions.

Grow your resourceful people asset base. 

We curate spaces for conversations that bridge geographies. 

Connect with the pioneers helping new initiatives to emerge and with leaders consolidating transformative community foundation movements.

Our approach

Cultivating a field of strategic practice

Practicing creativity, connectedness and responsiveness – these are the threads running through the community spaces we curate for emergent and experienced leaders growing the community foundation field globally, with partners from the philanthropy sector.

In this work, we preach the power of community, but sometimes forget of our own. Counting on a community of generous peers to share experiences, address questions about practice and think together responses to new challenges gives strength.

It also gives space to reconnect to our stance as designers and strategists that cultivate quality practices in our philanthropy ecosystems.

Our ambition is to shift philanthropic practice towards building the new, expanded ecosystems where agency to drive transformation is incentivized, multiplied and distributed.

Practitioners' Map

Know who to connect with in different countries based on your current interests and flag yourself as a resource for other practitioners.
To help peers discover each other's work, questions and experience, we are building a map of practitioners supporting community foundations movement in different countries and at different stages of development.

Conferences

Join a practitioners-centred conference for philanthropy and development professionals who take an infrastructure view of community foundations and their support organizations..
It explores how a systems-level positioning opens wider possibilities for transformational action and considers the strategic and practical implications of think(ing like an in)frastructure organization..
As the annual meeting space for the international community of professionals supporting community foundations, it is an opportunity to convene around shared questions.

Practitioner Circles

Convene a group of peers to troubleshoot an issue from your community foundation or support work that resonates across geographies.
You can mobilize the collective intelligence of your fellow practitioners by submitting a question or challenge that is valuable to pursue in a group conversation focused on finding solutions.
We help you by curating a group of contributors that have experience relevant to your challenge and are invested in testing approaches developed through peers thinking together.

Examples and stories from

Thinfrastructure 2021
Thinkfrastructure 2022
Thinkfrastructure 2023
Upcoming
IF 2025

GO TO CONFERENCE PAGE

De aici incolo doar note pentru noi!!!
Conversations on practice??? Distinctia intre practitioner circles si conversations on practice nu mi-e inca foarte clara (inteleg ca la conversations focusul e mai mare pe shareable knowledge, si la cercuri pe solutii practice, dar tot e o nuanta care nu cred ca e perceputa) - as scoate asta ca serviciu acum, m-as concentra pe field vs movement si pe temele IF si that's it for now, am scos si leadership program which needs to re-emerge as Architects of Change Fellowship si nu am pus nimic legat de research inca - ramane doar harta practicienilor care se poate dezvolta in colectie de case studies si apoi in landscape mapping.

La cum e framed nici distinctia intre challenge lab si practitioners circles nu mi se pare foarte clara. Cred ca trebui reframed challenge lab.

Conversations on practice

Think out loud, in dialogue, both the field and the practical questions of harnessing community philanthropy to advance local power and capacity, enhancing how communities act on their potential.

We act as harvesters and publishers of conversations that start from the real world dilemmas and revelations of the professionals that take the time to reflect on the effects of their work

 

Our ambition is to shift philanthropic practice towards building the new, for ecosystems where agency for transformation is incentivized, multiplied and distributed.

Design Your Experience

Use this form to define your goals and preferred ways to engage in a community, learning or coaching experience with us.
We will get back to you with customized suggestions.