Civic Engagement Agenda
Community Conversations Informing a $16M Strategy
Synthesized 36 community conversations with 400+ participants across nine South Carolina counties into a civic-engagement report that informed a $16M grantmaking strategy.
At a glance
- Scale
- 36 conversations, 400+ participants, nine counties
- Role
- Research Fellow · lead synthesis and report author
- Methods
- Community listening · qualitative coding · thematic synthesis
- Outcome
- Published agenda informed a $16M grantmaking strategy; findings presented to the Board grantmaking committee
Listening across nine counties
In my final year of undergrad, I was a Research Fellow at the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina. The Foundation wanted to recalibrate its grantmaking around what communities across its nine-county region actually cared about. Working with 1000 Feathers consulting and dozens of trained facilitators, we held 36 conversations in firehouses, community centers, and schools across the region using the Harwood Institute’s community-conversation model.
I analyzed all 36 conversations, working through hundreds of pages of notes and transcripts, coding themes, checking patterns back against the conversations they came from, and turning qualitative material into findings a grantmaking team could use.
From research to a $16M strategy
I authored the resulting Civic Engagement Agenda and presented the findings with our VP of Grantmaking to the Board grantmaking committee in May 2018, right before graduation. The report became a foundational input to the Foundation’s $16M grantmaking strategy, and it is still available on the Coastal Community Foundation’s website (see below).
Little did I know that this was my first ever needfinding project (the Stanford d.school’s term for design research). Different training, different focus group setup, but same core principle: before making any moves, listen deeply.