History

In September 2003, the executive directors of two Lancaster nonprofit organizations approached us to discuss what they identified as a gap in organizational and leadership capacity building opportunities available in the local nonprofit sector.

These executive directors, both of whom had recently moved to Lancaster County from more populous communities, expressed concern about the lack of available opportunities to network with their peers and to advance their own professional growth.

As one of these individuals asked during our initial conversation with regards to the local nonprofit community, “Where’s the infrastructure?  Unable to satisfactorily address that question, we invited them and several of their peers to discuss their concerns in greater detail.

Through the course of subsequent meetings this ad hoc advisory committee, which subsequently became the advisory committee for our capacity building initiative, agreed that it was necessary to define a plan by which the Community Foundation, in conjunction with other local groups, would generate dialog with existing service providers to create programs that address the need for local training and networking opportunities.

To direct the advisory committee’s efforts, the Community Foundation’s board of directors agreed to commission the Polk Lepson Research Group of York, PA to survey executive directors of local nonprofit organizations in order to determine their education and training needs, the education and training needs of their boards of directors and staff, the availability of education and training opportunities locally, and the likelihood that they would attend or send board members and/or staff to attend future education and training opportunities.

The results of the Polk Lepson survey indicated that the vast majority of respondents (70%) had an unfavorable or highly unfavorable opinion of the ability of local education and training opportunities to meet their needs and that local service providers were particularly ineffective at providing services on topics related to fundraising and board governance, which were identified in the survey as two of the five topics that were most likely to motivate executive directors to attend education and training opportunities in the future.

Encouraged that they were designing a program that would address an identified need within the nonprofit sector, the advisory committee completed a draft goal statement in April 2005 based on the hypothesis that the community can empower executive directors to become highly effective leaders of successful, more stable organizations by adopting the following objectives:

1. Identify the program and training needs of executive directors that are not currently being met 
2. Allow executive directors to gain greater access to information, resources, and support from peers 
3. Facilitate healthy, productive relationships between executive directors and boards of directors
4. Equip executive directors with the ability to increase the public’s awareness of the impact of the nonprofit sector and of their organizations

To determine the most effective way to operationalize the tools that are identified in the goal statement, the advisory committee voted to create three subcommittees around objectives B, C, and D. Believing that their work would benefit from fresh perspectives, the advisory committee invited additional participants to serve on the subcommittees, including executive directors of nonprofit organizations, representatives of organizations that currently provide services to the sector, such as Leadership Lancaster and the Lancaster Chamber, as well as nontraditional partners such as Millersville University, whose resources might be utilized to address the objectives outlined in the goal statement.

In December 2005, at the conclusion of the subcommittee planning process, the advisory committee reconvened to evaluate the recommendations advanced by each subcommittee and to discuss potential partnership opportunities that had coalesced during the planning process.