Minnesota Grantmakers Learned How Funding Civic Engagement Can Help Their Cause
Building off a workshop piloted in 2015, FCCP partnered with the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) to refine a dynamic workshop for a new funder audiences that is geared to attract new resources to the field. Our highly-interactive and customizable curriculum demonstrates to grantmakers the importance of supporting nonpartisan civic engagement as a strategy for achieving policy change on the issues they and their grantees care about. Seventeen local institutions participated in May in conjunction with the FCCP 2016 Convening and in partnership with the Minnesota Council on Foundations. George Chueng (The Joyce Foundation) facilitated the event and our panelists included local funders Catherine Gray (Minneapolis Foundation) and Bill Graves (Graves Foundation) along with FCCP’s current Advisory Board co-chair Connie Malloy (James Irvine Foundation). The workshop was very well received and plans are currently underway to deliver it to communities in the Southeast in advance of FCCP’s 2017 Convening in Atlanta. 
We Customized This Workshop for the Needs of Our St. Paul Audience
- Demystified and de-politicized what civic engagement is and how it can help any cause
- Addressed barriers that foundation staff may face in getting buy-in on funding civic engagement among grantees
- Used case studies and an ask-an-expert panel to demonstrate how other grantmakers are making civic engagement a part of their portfolios
This highly interactive workshop also included a history of the fight to protect and expand voting rights, handouts that participants could share with colleagues, and a self-assessment tool to evaluate their institution’s readiness to take up this work.
The Workshop Achieved the Following Goals
Thank You, Partners!
