When community foundations are community leaders, they:
- pursue the community’s greatest opportunities and address the most critical challenges;
- inclusively unite people, institutions, and resources from throughout the community; and
- produce significant, widely shared and lasting results.
To become community leaders, community foundations must be intentional about manifesting the values, developing the relationships, accessing the resources, and building the understanding and skills needed to do this important work.
With their local relationships and broad community betterment missions, community foundations make ideal community partners. Their independence, permanence and public charity status make them uniquely positioned to take on a leadership role in their communities.
CFLeads has created a number of tools, resources and learning opportunities to help community foundations embrace this role and make a real, ongoing difference in the communities they serve.
Community Leadership Compass
The Community Leadership Compass is a visual representation of how CFLeads’ Framework for Community Leadership, Five Competencies for Community Leadership, and Going All In project work together to help community foundations advance their work.
Community Leadership Field Guide
The Community Leadership Field Guide contains the resources visualized in the Compass and details how community foundations can measure their community leadership progress using Candid’s Community Leadership Assessment Tool.
We also offer a short version of the guide, which provides a high-level overview of the Framework for Community Leadership without the building blocks and metrics.
The Five Competencies
As a part of our ongoing community leadership work, we have identified five competencies that are critical to effective practice.
The Framework for Community Leadership
The Framework serves as a foundational document on community leadership for the field, incorporating levels of building blocks essential to consistent, effective leadership.