We work with community foundation leaders and national funders from across the country to identify, design, and execute learning opportunities for community foundations that strengthen our collective community leadership and, ultimately, our community impact.
Through our collaborative approach centered on peer learning, we’ve built a growing network of community foundations from coast to coast who invest in CFLeads. An investment in CFLeads signals support for our community leadership work and an interest in ensuring that community foundations have unique and valuable learning opportunities that aren’t available anywhere else.
Learn more about some of our generous community foundation investors below.
Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo
What do you appreciate about your community foundation’s partnership with CFLeads?
We see tremendous value in partnering with and investing in CFLeads. The relationship allows us to better serve our community by advancing our long-term, transformative systems change work while giving us an opportunity to learn from peer community foundations doing similar community impact work.
As part of that, we value the opportunity to be part of focused cohorts, such as the Economic Mobility Action Network, that support our work in areas related to our community goals. These cohorts offer unique learning opportunities to leverage partner expertise. In this case, our participation continues to be a valuable educational tool to fine tune our goal and work to promote economic mobility through educational achievement, workforce readiness and access to family sustaining jobs for residents living in low-income households.
Additionally, CFLeads has introduced us to opportunities to bring new resources into our region. Through CFLeads, the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo was able to participate in an effort to enroll families in the federal child tax credit program. We were connected with a national funders network that provided our Foundation with $50,000. We matched it for a total of $100,000, which we used to fund Say Yes Buffalo and a team of government, faith-based and community partners who assisted families in filing taxes and claiming their refunds. That investment was leveraged to provide over $2 million in federal and state refunds for families in our community. We also had the opportunity to train our community on how to make the case for racial equity with technical assistance from The Case Made, funded by CFLeads.
What are some of the community leadership accomplishments or impacts that your community foundation is most proud of?
We envision a vibrant and equitable Greater Buffalo region where every individual thrives, and are proud of our community leadership work that is grounded in a framework originating from our learnings with CFLeads.
For example, we applied that framework in 2015 when we convened the Greater Buffalo Racial Equity Roundtable to work toward closing racial equity gaps in our community by changing policies and practices and strengthening key systems. We brought together leaders from public, private, nonprofit and faith institutions and, grounded in data, the Roundtable has established 10 initiatives engaging 350 partners with a common goal to drive systems change in order to create an expanded, inclusive economy.
Through our work with the Roundtable, we joined the Buffalo Niagara Partnership in spearheading the implementation of the Benefits Cliff Calculator, a free tool to educate employers on how compensation and promotion practices affect low-wage earners. This resulted in a $10 million pilot project from Erie County to help individuals bridge over the benefits cliff.
Additionally, when Buffalo Public Schools students were graduating at a rate of only 49 percent in 2011, we applied the leadership framework to play a key role in launching Say Yes Buffalo, which works to remove barriers to educational attainment, workforce participation and economic mobility. Its collective impact partnership provides a postsecondary tuition promise and cradle to career comprehensive support to increase the rates of high school completion and the achievement of fulfilling professional employment. As of 2022, the graduation rate climbed to 79 percent.
What do you perceive as the biggest opportunities or challenges for our field in the next 12-24 months?
The June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reversed affirmative action in higher education has created new challenges in our field, which we need to navigate together.
At every level of our organization, we are firmly committed to advancing racial equity to create a vibrant and equitable Greater Buffalo region where every individual thrives. We will continue to leverage our national and CFLeads partners to find solutions until we achieve racial equity and to ensure accurate information is shared with our community, in the wake of disinformation and fear.
We also see raising the collective profile of community foundations at the national level as a tremendous opportunity to aid government in addressing long-standing community change as a partner. We can harness the power of CFLeads to educate government leaders about the work community foundations do on the ground as trusted conveners and partners.
For example, community foundations are uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in ensuring the unprecedented federal funding available, through bills such as the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is used effectively. Community foundations are embedded in their communities; combining extensive research, community engagement and data analysis enables community foundations to fully understand the needs of the regions they serve. This deep local knowledge allows community foundations to effectively leverage partnerships to collectively address these issues and utilize federal dollars to best benefit a community.
Submitted July, 2024.
If you are a CFLeads Investor and would like to be highlighted in our Investor Spotlight series, please reach out to Danka Klein at dklein@cfleads.org.