Organizational Effectiveness

Organizations, from foundations to nonprofits and public agencies, are effective when they are responsive to their communities’ needs and develop the capacity to achieve their goals, learn and continuously improve to advance equity and social justice.

Our Approach

Effective organizations strengthen their leadership, develop powerful strategies, as well as evaluate, learn, and continuously improve their strategies and efforts. We treat every organization as a living system with interconnected parts and work to integrate inclusive practices into every part. We also know that organizations are made up of people, and their relationships with one another—and expectations of each other—are foundational. As part of our approach, we assess the state of these relationships and expectations and help organizations develop solutions that will lead to a more inclusive and equitable environment. We also recognize that every organization is part of an ecosystem—a complex web of organizations that interact with one another, affecting the communities and constituencies they serve individually and collectively. Our methodology to building effective organizations examines this ecosystem to ensure that the organization develops strategies that are aligned and integrated with its environment.

How We Can Help

Our team of experts in strategic planning, equity strategy development & implementation, and data & evaluation capacity building are available and capable of providing nonprofit, public, philanthropic, and private organizations the following:

  • Design and facilitate a strategy development process that centers equity and social justice
  • Assess the organization’s current state of relationships, functions, and practices, and facilitate the development of a plan that connects the organization’s mission and strategy
  • Design and implement a course of action to build the organization’s leadership and staff capacity to assess, reflect on, and revise their policies, operations, and management structure to be more effective
  • Build and strengthen the organization’s continuous learning and strategy improvement system
  • Evaluate and strengthen leadership development program
  • Coach the organization’s executive leadership to implement and practice inclusive and equitable principles
Let’s do some good work together.

Related Projects

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary’s Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities included a priority to assess and heighten the impact of all HHS policies, programs, processes, and resource decisions to reduce health ...
The Just Imperative, established in 2018, is a vital way the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (MacArthur Foundation) works towards its goal of making the world fairer, greener, and more peaceful. It’s based on the Foundation’s values—empathy, integrity, ...
The NAS Change Network program engagement launched in July of 2021 centers around continuous learning and evaluation process to understand the local and regional impact or “the network effect” of multiple cohorts of leaders’ social change efforts centering equity. The ...
Living Cities developed a theory of change and measurement framework to assess its own performance and that of its local government partners. To enhance its capacity to continuously learn and improve, it engaged Community Science to assist its staff refine ...
The Institute for Nonprofit Practice is scaling its programs and is committed to self-evaluation and continuously learning about ways to improve its delivery of high-quality content to strengthen leadership in the social sector. At the same time, it is building ...
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sought to understand the demographic characteristics of the principal investigators and leaders of organizations that received its grants. Community Science is working with the foundation to develop, pilot, and administer surveys to capture the racial, ...
The Barr Foundation’s Barr Fellowship is a two-year program designed to invest in exceptional civic leaders, to strengthen their organizations, and to cultivate a network of leaders committed to Greater Boston. This fellowship was conceived in 2005 and has since ...
Community Science is proud to partner with the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) Program. The goals of the program are to: Recruit graduate students of color and other underrepresented groups to extend their research capacities to ...
Banyan Communications wanted to build their internal capacity to identify the root cause of inequities in their company, have necessary uncomfortable conversations, so that they can determine what actionable choices are possible in their daily activities and decisions to practice ...