Organizational Strengthening - Community Science

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.

Get in Touch!

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 disparities. An action to support this priority is the recommendation that HHS program grantees submit health disparity impact statements as part of their grant applications. In response, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Office of Behavioral Health Equity developed a strategy to reduce behavioral health disparities, which included the requirement of a Disparity Impact Statement (DIS) from grantees. In their statements, grantees are expected to describe how they would determine, analyze, and ensure access to, use of, and outcomes from behavioral healthcare services and activities for disparate subpopulations (i.e., vulnerable groups of people within larger populations of focus who experience disparities). Community Science was engaged by SAMHSA to assist with advancing the implementation of the agency’s policy of requiring a DIS from grantees by: Developing an approach to determining the problem and solutions for addressing behavioral health disparities and eventually, elimination of such disparities. The approach is aimed at assisting service providers, technical assistance providers, state and local agencies, and other types of organizations to consider how to go about analyzing the nature of the behavioral health disparities affecting the people they serve, the contributing factors, and the appropriate solutions that are sustainable and meet the National Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards. Developing, testing, and implementing a framework and strategy for assessing a sample of DISs in order for the agency to have baseline data about how the DIS requirement was understood and operationalized by grantees during the pilot phase. Based on findings from the assessment, Community Science will design a searchable database for SAMHSA to support future standard and ad hoc analyses to continue to monitor and inform the policy’s implementation. This project provides Community Science with the opportunity to reflect on how service providers and state agencies understand the individual, organizational, and systemic factors that affect behavioral health outcomes of people and communities that experience a disproportionate amount of barriers and bias, and use data to inform their interventions.

Foundation for Louisiana

Evaluating Progress: The Just Imperative’s Journey Toward A Just Verdant, and Peaceful World

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, ...

ohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

CCP Leadership program in The Dakotas Seeks to Create a Network of Leaders

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 ...

National Arts Strategies

Living Cities Learning Liaisons Receive Evaluation Training from Community Science

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 ...

Living Cities

Institute for Nonprofit Practice Looks to Scale Data Analysis

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 ...

Institute for Nonprofit Practice

Understanding the racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and disability identifies of grant recipients

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 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Advancing Leadership in Greater Boston

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 ...

The Barr Foundation

Building a Pipeline of Culturally Responsive Evaluators

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 ...

American Evaluation Association (AEA)

Cause-driven For-profit organization seeks deepening their commitment to equity

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 ...

Banyan Communications