Centering Families' Voices in Systems Design, to Allow Them to Flourish - Part 1

I just finished my five-year anniversary.

It was a couple of weeks ago of being the president and CEO of the Steelcase Foundation.

And when those moments hit, you hit certain milestones, you think back, you reflect on where things have been, where you've come, what you're doing, things you would do differently.

And one of the real reflections and going back and thinking about the first six months, the first year on the job, I was I'm an educator by trade.

I was an assistant principal and a middle and high school principal in Grand Rapids Public Schools in Michigan.

And and then led a nonprofit here in West Michigan as well for years and came into philanthropy with a lot of questions.

And I would say with a healthy amount of critique of the system and the processes.

But also with curiosity and also really wanting to try to show up in a way that I had wished people showed up when I was spending the other 20 years of my career.

You know, at the table and.

So what that meant for us early on was that meant me getting out and talking to people, engaging with over 65 one-on-one meetings with all kinds of people, grantees, folks who'd gotten in the system and didn't complete, and we wanted to meet with them and figure out why, what was in the way, people who had never even heard of the Steelcase Foundation, our board members, community folks, just as many people as I could.

And I Took all that information and coded it into a system and identified themes and really worked through that to identify, like, what are we hearing? What are we seeing? What are people saying? What are leaders of nonprofits saying? We did that same important work with our board.

And then... moved into some really important values-driven work.

What are the values of the community? How are they identifying what they want, what they want to see, what they need, what they care about? What does our board and our staff feel and see and need and care about? And how do we use our language, all of our language, when we're pulling that together to help support A way forward and what that what that meant for us and how that informed our next steps was working together with the board and with community to completely reimagine our vision, our mission and our guiding principles and then develop our work into three.

key strategy areas.

One that was about elevating community brilliance and expertise, which was really focused on how do we support the work and the vision and the voices of community members who are like in these smaller early stage nonprofits? Um, how do we, we heard from leaders that they were, um, tired and needed respite, needed a place.

They were lonely, that leadership was lonely.

Uh, so we created under that pillar of work, a, uh, something called the Brilliant Leaders Fellowship.

We reimagined and sort of leaned into our language with a second strategy around partnerships to meet community needs.

That was more of our traditional grant making, but we did a lot of work to hone in on that language and what that meant and what people were hearing in our language and trying to work in both those strategies to kind of close the distance between us as a foundation and people on the ground.