Funders have increasingly required nonprofits to show how they are building sustainable partnerships (with the community, their clients, other nonprofits, public services system, etc.) to expand the impact of their programs. Effective partnerships require trust-building. Yet, trust seems elusive, and there appear to be few easily accessible ways of examining the process of building trust within nonprofit systems.
In this interactive workshop, led by Angie Donelson, Ph.D., AICP, we will explore a framework demonstrating how trusting relationships can be conceptualized and measured for sustained partnership engagement. Several cases are presented validating the framework and providing space for participants to reflect and share how trust is embedded in their work.
An assessment tool with sample metrics will be presented demonstrating enhanced and sustained engagement through citizen self-organized, directed, financed, and independently implemented community development and public health improvements.
About Our Expert:
Dr. Donelson has more than 25 years of professional experience assisting nonprofit organizations and local governments with research, planning and implementation of community development strategies and programs. She specializes in outcomes-oriented program evaluation and coaching as well as community development planning and financing strategies.
For the past decade and a half, she has consulted with local and regional nonprofits, foundations and local and state governments.
From 1999-2004, Dr. Donelson worked as the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) representative to Arizona’s colonias. In this role, she assisted dozens of underprivileged, rural US-Mexico border communities and nonprofit organizations with various capacity building needs. Before that, she worked as a city planner in southern Arizona, New Jersey and Kansas.
Dr. Donelson holds a doctorate in economic geography from the University of Arizona. Her dissertation work, which addressed innovative community development approaches to fighting US-Mexico border poverty, was sponsored by a fellowship from the Rural Poverty Research Center and Annie E. Casey Foundation. She has a master’s degree in community and regional planning from Kansas State University, and bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science from the University of Arizona. She also has received community development training from the JFK School of Government at Harvard University and is certified by the American Planning Association as a professional planner (AICP).
Dr. Donelson has published two academically refereed books on US-border community development and academic research that has appeared in book chapters and peer-reviewed journals, addressing housing policy, rural poverty, public health and community development in inter-cultural contexts.