Sizing Up: Strategies for Staffing Emerging Community Foundations

It is rare that a community foundation believes it has sufficient resources to create the positive impact it envisions for its community. For small community foundations, this frustration is often amplified. These organizations face important needs and potential opportunities with few staff members to do the work. From 2005 to 2011, The James Irvine Foundation invested $12 million to support the growth of a set of emerging community foundations in rural and under-resourced regions of California through our Community Foundations Initiative II. We found that one of the most delicate challenges these community foundations face is how best to structure their staff to achieve their ambitions while simultaneously controlling their operating budgets for financial stability. This group of young and rapidly growing organizations explored a variety of ways to both serve and grow when constrained by limited resources. We believe their insights, ideas and stories can serve as examples for how emerging community foundations across California and beyond might tackle the seeming conundrum of how to have community impact with just a few staff members