The Community Foundation for Southern Arizona (CFSA) strives to strengthen the southern Arizona nonprofit community by providing resources for organizations to operate at their highest level. Through our efforts to support local nonprofits, CFSA understands organizations may find themselves limited on means to invest in internal learning and growth. To help meet this need, CFSA offered the Culture of Learning grants in 2018. Eighteen Grants of up to $3,000 were awarded to organizations to work on a variety of capacity building and learning needs, including board development, conference travel, staff training, and more.
The goal of Culture of Learning Grants was to foster ongoing learning within organizations and, as a result, the community. At the end of the grant cycle, 15 of the 18 grant recipients gathered to share their individual experiences with the grant process and learning opportunities for which their team utilized the grant funds.
CFSA’s Community Investments staff developed an interactive feedback session in place of a traditional written grant report. Staff and board from each organization worked through five stations exploring questions around capacity building, how they used the grant money, barriers they encountered and strategies to overcome those difficulties, what they learned, and stories of success. In this environment, grant recipients had the opportunity to learn from each other, creating and strengthening connections between and within themselves. Participants shared how much they enjoyed this creative, interactive process, and that they found it refreshing to engage in a report format that encouraged interaction, collaborative learning, and participation. We are so grateful for each organization’s participation in this unique process; their investment of time and willingness to share is invaluable, both to CFSA and the other participating groups.
CFSA is excited to continue cultivating a culture of learning within the southern Arizona nonprofit community. This year, we offered a unique grant opportunity through a partnership with Catchafire.org. Through this collaboration, we will have the opportunity to support 100 local nonprofits in ways unique to each organization. This grant round recently closed, and we are looking forward to walking through the process with the selected organizations.
You can learn more about the 2019 Catchafire grants here.