Kari McCann Boutell, President, Iowa Council of Foundations

Happy new year! Many of us are making resolutions and setting personal goals for 2017. Now is also a good time to begin laying plans and setting goals for your affiliate and community foundations as well. One thing I do each year is create a calendar with important activities for my staff and one for my board. This helps give us a look at our activities for the full year and makes things manageable by breaking them down into monthly tasks.

If you don’t already use a tool like this, it is easy to create your own. I will help you get started by sharing some important dates and activities that ICoF has planned for you in 2017!

January: Capacity Building Grant Webinar (17th)
February: Capacity Building Grant Idea Submissions Due (17th); Peer-Learning Call (15th)
March: Community Foundations Legislative Breakfast (28th); Peer-Learning Call (15th)
April: Capacity Building Grant Proposals Due (1st)
May: CF Boot Camp (15-16, West Des Moines and 18-19, Cedar Rapids)
June: Capacity Building Grants Awarded; Peer-Learning Call
July: CF Assets Reports Due
August: County Endowment Fund Reports Due (15th); Peer-Learning Call
September: CONNECT Conference (13th)
October: Idea Implementation Grant Proposals Due; Capacity Building Grant Applications Due (1st); Peer-Learning Call
November: Idea Implementation Grants Awarded; Capacity Building Grants Due (15th); Peer-Learning Call
December: Endow Iowa Resolutions and Accreditation Notifications Due (Host and standalone CFs only)

Ellie Horst, Former Intern, Iowa Council of Foundations

Internships can bring a wide variety of experiences, but I doubt many students are blessed to have the experience that I have had at my internship with the Iowa Council of Foundations (ICoF). My name is Ellie Horst, and I am a senior at Loras College and have interned for ICoF this past semester. I met Kari McCann Boutell (President, ICoF) while interning at the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, a member of ICoF. I had a great experience at the Foundation as well. My experience with Kari seemed to fit so perfectly into the frame I have for my future career in the nonprofit sector.

Throughout my short time interning with Kari, she showed me how to treat each project as a way to gain new information and learn about the bigger picture of the organization and field while completing a task. I have had the pleasure of completing a few small projects for ICoF that have not only taught me hard skills on navigating and maintaining software and databases, but this work has also taught me to be curious; to dig deeper and reflect on why the project is necessary, what bigger picture items it can help accomplish, and to find deeper learning outcomes and objectives.

For example, researching webinar and video conferencing tools not only helped me learn about the softwares themselves, which I may need in the future, but also taught me how to compare and budget different resources, what information can and should be shared through video or screen-sharing technologies, and the most effective ways in which to get member participation. Since my internship at ICoF I have actually used the same webinar service we selected for ICoF to host my own webinar on planning orientations for incoming classes at Loras, and multiple times for Loras College Dance Marathon, an organization I am a part of.

My work at ICoF means so much more than the technical skills I learned, however. It has been an incredible blessing for me; it helped to prepare me for graduate school in Philanthropic Studies and has helped me to foster the passion that I have for foundation work in the nonprofit field. I have learned so much more than I could have imagined in such a short amount of time, and I genuinely appreciate this opportunity. I look forward to keeping informed about ICoF’s events and programming, and I will be sure to take the information I have learned here with me as I go. Thank you to Kari and the ICoF Board for your support and the opportunity to intern with ICoF and foster my passion!

Kari McCann Boutell, President, Iowa Council of Foundations

October was a busy month for Iowa Community Foundations! Many of you attended the Annual Connect Conference on October 5th. As you know, the next day we learned the 2016 Endow Iowa Tax Credits were depleted. This is the earliest point in a given year that the tax credits have been used. Community Foundations have been asked to adjust their messaging for the remaining days of 2016.

A group of representatives from the Iowa Community Foundations Initiative met with Governor Branstad on October 17 to discuss the Endow Iowa Tax Credit program. This year, we will be asking for a $2 million increase in the program, so we do not continue to run out of credits and amass a large number of carryover gifts/credits from year to year. We used this Endow Iowa Fact Sheet for our conversation with the Governor and invite you to use it with your board members and local legislators as well.

In addition, the Iowa Council of Foundations has recently launched a new project to collect data to help us articulate the value and benefit of the Endow Iowa and County Endowment Fund programs. We will be sure to share information with everyone once the project is complete.

We have scheduled our Community Foundations Legislative Breakfast for March 28, 2017 from 7:30 – 9:00 am at in the Capitol Rotunda. Please mark your calendars! We hope you can join us to help demonstrate the positive impact this program makes throughout Iowa. We will share additional information with you as we move closer. Thank you for your continued partnership and advocacy for this important legislative program.

Tony Macklin, Consultant, Tony Macklin Consulting

This month’s CF Story can be found on Tony Macklin’s website by clicking here.

Kari McCann Boutell, President, Iowa Council of Foundations

I spent the early part of last week in Chicago at the Joint Policy Institute hosted by the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers and the National Council of Nonprofits. We spent our time together discussing state and federal policy strategies, approaches to working with policy makers and understanding how funders and nonprofits can work together to advance public policy as it relates to their missions.

I had conversations with many nonprofit association leaders who work closely with nonprofits throughout their states. Without question, the number one thing they urge funders to do to support advocacy and policy work is – you guessed it – fund it. There are a variety of ways funders can support advocacy:

• provide planning grant funding to develop policy agendas
• support nonprofit convenings that bring together nonprofits and form collaboratives
• invest in communications efforts for nonprofits

And supporting nonprofits in this way can lead to the results your foundation hopes to achieve:

• educating the public on the importance of your issue and/or the nonprofit sector
• sharing effective solutions to public problems
• developing tools and techniques to help scale effective programs

Most importantly, all of this must align with your foundation’s mission, but if it does, public policy and advocacy can advance your mission in ways not possible though programmatic grants. To learn more about how other funders are supporting advocacy efforts, click here.