Effectively Deploying Our Resources to Advance Our Mission and Vision

Our new strategy not only seeks to change the foundation programmatically; it guides our thinking on how we most effectively deploy all our resources (e.g., people, systems/tools, knowledge, financial capital and other capabilities) to best serve community. Following are highlights of how we are approaching our operations differently — ensuring that we equitably, efficiently and effectively execute our strategy to achieve the greatest impact:

• We see communication as a strategic lever to amplify and center partner and community voice, vision and expertise. We support knowledge-sharing efforts internally and externally, with a focus on being story based and supporting issues affecting child outcomes and family well-being. We seek to broaden our reach, create greater awareness and build understanding that ultimately moves stakeholders to actions that improve the lives of young children and their families.
• We continue to implement new partnership processes that shift power toward partners and remove barriers and burdens so they can be more successful in achieving their outcomes.
• The foundation’s focus on equity caused us to review and rethink our employment policies and practices for the full employee life cycle, from hiring to compensation and benefits to employee development.
• Our own culture affects our ability to achieve our mission and execute our strategy effectively. We have created a document that clearly articulates our organizational culture. It defines what an equitable and inclusive culture looks and feels like, codifies a healthy and thriving organizational culture, and sets staff and leadership expectations about how employees work.
• Our commitment to being flexible and responsive to needs that arise in the community requires us to implement processes, tools and systems that enable us to adapt to these changes. We are also building out specific organizational capabilities, including how the organization learns and manages knowledge and how we can better partner with diverse entities to fund and support their work.