Civic Engagement Agenda
Community Conversations Informing a $16M Strategy
36 community conversations synthesized into a $16M grantmaking strategy.
I was a Research Fellow at the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina in my final year of undergrad. The Foundation served a nine-county region, and the team wanted to recalibrate their grantmaking strategy through a series of listening conversations.
We ran 36 community conversations across the nine-county service area, using the Harwood Institute’s community conversation framework. I partnered with 1000 Feathers consulting and dozens of trained facilitators to coordinate conversation scheduling and data collection. I then spent months on synthesis, coding hundreds of pages of transcripts, pulling themes, testing them against the conversations they came from, and writing up findings the board and grantmaking team could actually use.
I presented our findings to the Board of Directors along with our VP of Grantmaking in May of 2018 right before graduation. The published Civic Engagement Agenda became the foundational document for the Foundation’s $16M grantmaking strategy, and is still available on the Coastal Community Foundation’s website (see below).
The full Civic Engagement Agenda I authored at the Coastal Community Foundation.
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.