Fall 2008 through 2010

ARC: North American Wildlife Crossing Structure Design Competition

www.arc-competition.com

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Edmonton Community Foundation, Western Transportation Institute, USDA - Forest Service, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials; and the Federal Highway Association.

ARC will engage the best and most innovative international, interdisciplinary design teams—comprised of landscape architects, architects, engineers, ecologists, and other experts—to create the next generation of wildlife overpasses for North America’s roadways. In doing so, the competition will raise international awareness around wildlife movement and protection while promoting feasible, buildable context-sensitive and compelling design solutions for safe, efficient, cost-effective, and ecologically responsive wildlife crossings.

Summer/Fall 2009

Evaluation of BeHeard!: Strategic Communications for Stronger Nonprofits

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Nike Foundation, Packard Foundation

Since its launch in 2006, the strategic communications initiative BeHeard! has been considered an effective model for helping to shape the messages and thereby strengthen the brand of the organizations participating. But no evaluation to date has brought rigor or specificity to these general impressions. Even where some specifics might be known, conclusions have not been shaped to be easily shared with colleagues in other foundations and organizations.

This evaluation will discern and describe the most valuable lessons in general from BeHeard! and express these as narratives -- as opposed to strictly numerical outcomes -- that can shared with other interested parties. We hope that the final product will serve as a conversation piece with other funders and organizations and as a stimulus for greater focus by foundations on strategic communications.

To learn more about BeHeard!, see an excerpt from the Ford Foundation's Grantcraft guide on communications.

Fall 2008 through Fall 2009

BeSeen!

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation and the Magnum Foundation

In a media saturated world, not-for-profit organizations and socially responsible enterprises must find new ways to promote and make visible the results of their efforts in a distinct and compelling manner.  Often, they also need to document instances of injustice – from human rights abuses to environmental degradation to the ravages of poverty and disease – in an accurate, nuanced, and effective way.  The photographers of Magnum Photos created The Magnum Foundation to build on Magnum’s longstanding and pioneering tradition of photography in the public interest.  The Foundation strives, across various program areas, to use visual imagery in the documentary style to advance social justice and socially progressive causes and to promote a deeper understanding of current issues.

Woodcock is partnering with grantee Magnum Foundation in a pilot effort called BeSeen!, a program designed to help innovative not-for-profit organizations build their media capacity.  The goal is to help these individuals and entities develop visual campaigns that create tipping points of perception, thereby connecting them to a larger public.

Mission Related Investing

In 1996, in what is now considered a legendary conversation, the trustees of the F.B. Heron Foundation posed a simple question to themselves: “Should a private foundation be more than a private investment company that uses some of its excess cash flow for charitable purposes?” Their answer was “yes,” and in the last decade the Heron Foundation has been in the vanguard of the Mission Related Investing movement wherein funders use a portion of their corpora to support market-based solutions to existing social problems.

In 2008, Woodcock was involved in two strategic collaborations with other foundations in furthering this burgeoning movement and at present has close to ten percent of its assets invested in mission-related investments.

November 20, 2008

The New New Economy: Investing with a Climate Change Lens during Challenging Times

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors MRI brief

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Merck Family Fund, Generation Investment Management, CUNY Graduate Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Federal Street Advisors, John Merck Fund, Park Foundation, Sidney Frank Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Environmental Grantmakers Association, Philanthropy New York, Overbrook Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund

The New New Economy symposium, held in New York City on November 20, 2008, examined the principles of MRI and its implications for climate change. Al Gore, Van Jones, and other speakers discussed how despite recent financial losses, there is still some $520 billion in the endowments of U.S. private foundations that can act as a catalyst for social change through market-driven investments that promote funders' missions and program objectives.

Over 400 foundation representatives, investment professionals, green investment executives and press attended.

February 2008

Mission Related Investing: A Policy and Implementation Guide for Foundation trustees

Download the guide

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, F.B. Heron Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Flora Family Fund

This guide, now in it its second printing, uses case studies from such funders as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Robin Hood Foundation and F.B. Heron Foundation to outline how to invest assets to achieve both social and financial returns.

Fall/Winter 2007

Yellowstone to Yukon Stocktaking

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Kendall Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation

This report rendered a probing overview at the ten-year mark of the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative as an organized effort to protect one of the world's last relatively undisturbed landscapes. Rather than performing an impersonal "evaluation" using imprecise metrics, the Stocktaking, undertaken by Dr. Mark Walters, DVM, and professor of journalism at the University of Southern Florida in St. Petersburg, was journalistic in tone and rich in human voices so as to convey the essence of Y2Y, not only as it exists on the ground but as it exists in the minds of Y2Y residents and outside observers. The goal was to provide readers – both those familiar and unfamiliar with Y2Y – the true story of the landscape: how it has evolved over the past decade, how its inhabitants relate to it and each other, and where it will be 100 years from now.

October 13, 2006

Picture A Province 2006: Natural Landscapes and the Future of Alberta Southwest Region

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, The Calgary Foundation, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Suncor, Energy Foundation, Max Bell Foundation, Kendall Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Alberta Ecotrust Foundation

A one-day event for funders and environmental groups to learn about opportunities to engage in shaping Alberta’s landscapes. The event focused on Calgary and its environs, as well as the Rocky Mountain foothills and mountain regions.

Program highlights included:

• Exploring the integral role of southwest Alberta in the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative, a large-scale collaboration for conservation.
• Learning about and discussing timely issues and innovative approaches in community efforts, applying new research to practice, land use planning, and more.
• Opportunities to meet leading thinkers and practitioners who are active in the region.

Spring 2006

The BeHeard! Initiative: Strategic Communications for Stronger Nonprofits

Co-sponsors:  Woodcock Foundation, Nike Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Gimbel Foundation, Horizon Foundation, Packard Foundation, as well as individual donors who wished to remain anonymous.

Grantee Collaborators: Acumen Fund, City Year/ New York, Common Good Ventures, International Women’s Health Coalition, National Institute for Reproductive Health, PHI, REDF, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, and Young People For.

Over the course of 2005, the trustees, staff and grantees of the Woodcock Foundation took stock of the increasingly complicated and crowded information/advocacy environment in which not-for-profit organizations are working.  We canvassed the organizations we support and heard repeatedly that they needed help understanding and responding to the rapidly changing media environment in which their advocacy efforts take place.  They needed, they told us, better tools to BeHeard!

The Foundation engaged the services of Doug Hattaway of Hattaway Communications, who in addition to providing strategic communications consulting for over 20 years to political, not-for-profit, business and government clients, was also national spokesman for Al Gore's 2000 Presidential Campaign; and Larry Biddle of PlanningWorks, who over his career has raised over $350 million for nonprofits, and over $32 million for political candidates, and who served as deputy national finance director for Howard Dean's presidential campaign where he worked intensively in the area of internet giving, direct mail and telemarketing.

Each grantee was selected on a competitive basis through an application process and was required bring to the table another foundation willing to put $25,000 into the implementation phase of the program. Starting with a pilot group of five, and later adding a second cohort of four, Doug and Larry undertook a communications assessment of each grantee to evaluate communications capacities, advocacy strategies, public awareness, and constituency building.  Once the assessments were complete, Woodcock then matched the $25,000 provided by the partnering funder to help implement some of the consultants' recommendations.

A preliminary evaluation of the initiative was completed in April 2007 and a final evaluation  will be available in Fall 2009 (see above).

June 30, 2004 & June 9, 2005

Pitching Your Ideas in South Africa: A Brief Workshop in Financing Your Dream

Co-sponsors:  Woodcock Foundation and City Year

In two successive years, Woodcock gathered other funders and members of the philanthropic community to meet with eight South Africans who participated in the Woodcock-funded City Year Clinton Democracy Fellowship.  The fellowship helped to build a citizen service movement in South Africa, and each fellow prepared a three-minute proposal for a service idea and then worked one-on-one with an attending funder to strengthen the presentation.

February 1-3, 2005

Yellowstone to Yukon Funders Meetings in Calgary

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Kendall Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation

Several meetings gathered funders from the U.S. and Canada to discuss ways to collaborate and leverage funds in support of efforts in the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) region. The meetings led to several of the collaborations mentioned above and significantly increased investment by Canadian funders for Y2Y efforts in the Northern Rockies.

September 29, 2004

Needed: A New Social Financial Services Industry

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation and Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

This event was designed as a conversation to discuss the best ways to change the dynamic of the capital markets available to social entrepreneurs. It arose out of a belief that Woodcock shares with Ashoka that the social capital market is fundamentally inefficient. Social entrepreneurs, even ones with proven impact, are constantly struggling to find the capital to build their institutions and spread their impact. At the same time, people with high net worth have difficulties finding opportunities for philanthropic investments that will produce the kind of social return that they expect. This event was organized to look at how Ashoka is creating ways to make this market function more efficiently and pursue strategies to change the dynamics of the market as a whole.

April 30 - May 2, 2004

Large-scale Conservation: Exploring Challenges, Perspectives, and Opportunities in the Yellowstone to Yukon Case

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Kendall Foundation, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and The Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative.

This workshop brought together the best minds working on large-scale conservation issues, using the example of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in the Rocky Mountains, one of the highest profile, most referenced conservation efforts on the planet.  Nearly two dozen leaders of environmental organizations from Canada and the U.S. spent two days assessing progress in the Y2Y initiative, and identifying what more needed to occur if large-scale conservation is to have a successful long-term effect. The workshop employed the Q method and was facilitated by Steve Brown of Kent State University and Kimberly Byrd of the University of Minnesota.

December 11, 2003

Bringing Scale to Social Entrepreneurship

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Acumen Fund, Ashoka, Common Good Ventures and Women's World Banking.  

Woodcock invited grantees to join our board and a half dozen other funders in a conversation about the extent to which the world is prepared to take advantage of the capabilities that these four entrepreneurial nonprofits have built up, what financial instruments are currently available to them, what kind of financial institutions their own clients will need in five years, and what philanthropies can do to meet those needs.

November 20, 2002

Just Buzzwords or Meaningful Models? The Latest Look at Social Enterprise and Venture Philanthropy

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

For some time, Woodcock and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors had been active in the debate about the merits and value of venture philanthropy and social enterprise. With over 120 individuals in attendance, this symposium brought together top thought leaders and practitioners in the not-for-profit and philanthropic fields to reflect on new data, research and experience.