Profile of a public innovator - and a catalytic organization - on the American frontier
Monday, February 20, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)The Las Vegas-based Nevada Community Foundation
(NCF) is currently engaged in a partnership
with The Harwood Institute to deepen their
capacity as a catalytic organization to help
build the public capital of America's fastest
growing region.
Bret Bicoy, president of
NCF, recently spoke with The Harwood Institute
to share his views on our work
together.
Q&A with Bret
Bicoy
President, Nevada Community
Foundation
Q: How has your partnership with The Harwood Institute helped your organization?Bret, like many people who work for organizations we partner with, is a past participant in the Harwood Public Innovators Lab. For more information on NCF's efforts, contact The Harwood Institute or visit the NCF Web site.
A: Community foundations are supposed to be first and foremost about building and strengthening community. Central to that work is an ability to understand and engage the voices that comprise the neighborhoods of southern Nevada. This has been exceptionally important to our staff in thinking through philosophical approaches but also turning them into operational steps in how to gather information and collect the voices of the community.
Q: One way we are working together is to help you think about how you make grants in a way that builds the civic strength of the community. Could you tell me more about that?
A: Nevada Community Foundation is undertaking an experiment that is unprecedented in terms of its size and ambitiousness. Our goal is to create a community-advised funding process in which the values of the community itself will be reflected in decisions that are made and the investments themselves.
The are many different organizations that have developed processes to work toward that goal but The Harwood Institute has been instrumental in slowing us down to the degree to which we are able to listen more closely and not focus on policy choices of “A” or “B,” but rather, to understand the underlying values of the community in making our decisions.
Really I don’t know of anyone who has spent as much time talking about a process in which money was never even mentioned. We’ve spent 10 months now dreaming up ideas and exploring the culture that makes up Nevada and reconciling that with a process to distribute charitable assets. I don’t know entirely where this is going to end but already the experience has taught us how to approach the community.
We in the foundation community have been overly obsessed with how to distribute dollars and efforts to engage community targeted toward developing operational steps.
We’re coming to believe that to truly get at the community’s values, you need to have a series of conversations, and the result will be less some radical new process, and more of a different lens through which we will look at our established process.