Worksheet: Anthropologists Game
Get past what your organization says it values to uncover the hard-to-see, hidden values deeply ingrained in your current culture.
Resource Type: Guide
Worksheet: Culture Mascot
Create a clear picture of the culture that your organization aspires to have.
Culture Resource Guide: Understand
A productive internal culture aligned with a foundation’s mission and goals is essential to support nonprofit resilience and success. In other words, if we are striving to have more impact, we should look not just at our external strategies and theories of change, but also at the ingrained behaviors, assumptions and values that drive our daily work and our interactions with grantees and other partners.
Culture Resource Guide: Overview
After more than 15 years promoting grantmaker practices that support nonprofit results, GEO is convinced that a strong culture inside foundations is critical for effective philanthropy. The following sections of this guide provide more perspective on each of these phases of culture change: understand, assess, shift and tend.
Worksheet: Culture Lily Pond Activity
Culture is the collective behaviors and underlying assumptions of an organization. How does your culture manifest at your organization?
Culture Resource Guide: Assess
Once we have gained a good understanding of the culture of our organizations, it’s time to assess the degree to which that culture supports our values, goals, mission and vision. This means asking tough questions about which aspects of our current culture reflect and reinforce the values and strategies at the heart of our work, and which aspects do not.
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: The GEO Community at 20
Over the last 20 years, the GEO community has worked to transform a desire for results into real improvements by creating spaces where grantmakers learn together and use that learning to drive concrete changes in the way grantmaking work gets done. As a field, we’ve made progress. And, as we continue learning together, our understanding of effective philanthropy evolves.
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: The Implications of Implicit Bias
Focusing on equity necessitates reflection on ourselves and reckoning with the impact of our actions, regardless of our intentions. Understanding how implicit bias can manifest in behavior is crucial to understanding how our organizations may perpetuate the very inequities we seek to reduce.
2018 National Conference Discussion Guide: Centering Philanthropic Change in Community
Organizations seeking to support authentic change on complex, multi-layered issues often find that listening to and being in relationship with impacted communities is central to the work.
GEO’s Resources on Culture and Change Management
In your first year of GEO membership, to help you stay informed of the emerging trends and promising practices from the field, I’ll point you to GEO’s publications, research and peer conversations. Below, find links to tools and resources on collaboration. I hope these are helpful as you explore how GEO can support your work.
Leading Change Conference 2017 Discussion Guide: Home Team Meetups
Leading change requires us to be bold, yet transformation can be intense and exhausting. Linking up with peers can rejuvenate us to do the work, and the Home Teams at the Leading Change Conference 2017 were designed to help you prepare to lead change efforts no matter where you sit in your organization.
Leading Change Conference 2017 Discussion Guide: Finding the Power to Drive Transformational Change
Hear individual grantmakers in different organizational roles share inspiring stories of how they used their personal agency to advance change within their organizations.