One Foundation's Story: The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation Makes a Significant Impact With Public Policy

This paper, "One Foundation's Story," was prepared for the first Community Foundation Colloquium, which has been organized by the Aspen Institute's Nonprofit Sector Research Fund to encourage community foundations to develop their organizational capacity for effectiveness beyond traditional financial measures of success, such as asset size and grantmaking. This particular paper tells the story of how the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation developed as an organization to make a significant, positive, social impact on the state of New Hampshire by employing activities that helped shape public policy as a means of addressing issues on a systemic level, and securing broader social change. While this should be viewed primarily as one organization's story, and not a prescriptive model for all foundations, the paper's secondary goal is to inspire spirited discussion, offer suggestions for performance, and share information that might be useful to other community foundations interested in broadening and deepening their community impact by becoming involved in government-related decisions that shape social programs and influence the lives of people in their states