Mission, Vision, Impact, and Services

Mission

The mission of Fieldstone Alliance is to strengthen the performance of the nonprofit sector.

Vision

Intermediaries who support the sector--through training, funding, education, consultation, or network management--will improve their own practices as well as those of the organizations they serve.

Nonprofits and networks of nonprofits will improve their performance and achieve greater mission impact.

Funders will increase their effectiveness at supporting nonprofit and community work, and communities will be better able to address their needs through better linkages and relationships among nonprofits and between sectors.

The sector as a whole will benefit, from the individual nonprofit organization working at the local level, to the national umbrella organization with hundreds of affiliates, to the thousands of funders and donors who contribute resources to support this work.

Impact

The nonprofit sector in the United States has demonstrated remarkable success and persistence over the last thirty years, and is often emulated by other countries. But the continued healthy existence of the nonprofit sector is not a sure bet. The sector is a weak sibling of business and government. It is now beset by powerful economic, political, demographic, and technological challenges. Among these:

1. A weak financial model, especially underfunding of organizational and sector infrastructure, ineffective use of technology, and a mindset that “good” nonprofits should perpetually be “poor.”
2. A lack of widely accepted and employed nonprofit business tools; a public perception that the sector lacks good business practices and is not accountable.
3. A lack of awareness of itself as a sector (equal to business and government) and of its unique role in leading across all three sectors to build better lives for people.
4. Weak ability to make broad change across large regions and systems.
5. Poor alignment among its academic institutions, research institutions, consultation providers, and funders, which do not agree on practice standards, goals, and technical needs of the nonprofits they serve.
6. Aging leadership within the sector, and inattention to building a better-equipped generation of younger leaders.
7. Poor capacity to adapt quickly to rapid economic change.

All these factors limit the sector’s ability to live up to its promise. To meet these challenges, the sector needs new ways of doing business, increased emphasis on performance and results, increased investment from the private sector, stronger professional networks, and better research and sharing of promising practices across industries and geographic areas.

Fieldstone Alliance can’t solve these problems and challenges alone. But it can work to improve the effectiveness of the intermediary groups that are positioned to solve these problems. These intermediaries need help developing strategic plans, collaborative partnerships, alliances, leadership, and approaches to evaluating and improving impact. They lack a shared knowledge base, agreement about what works to improve organizational effectiveness, and a clearinghouse for conceptually sound, practice-based ideas and techniques. They need practical resources that they can deliver to their constituents--the nonprofit and community-based organizations that make up the sector.

Archimedes observed, “Give me but where to stand, and I will move the earth.” This observation sums up Fieldstone’s approach to its mission. We believe that by choosing the right strategies and the right partners, we can make major changes in how the sector functions. Moreover, we have demonstrated success with this approach.

Fieldstone Alliance staff have a history and unique set of relationships and capabilities in consulting, training, publishing, and demonstration projects that will help it determine “where to stand” to make some important changes in the sector. Indeed, it already has used its mix of capabilities to:

• Professionalize nonprofit practices in strategic planning, marketing, collaboration, and evaluation (among other practices)
• Foster the development of several key sector networks
• Form important information dissemination alliances with other knowledge developers
• Improve the practice of large numbers of capacity builders
• Lead changes across regions and sectors that result in improved service delivery

Fieldstone Alliance has the demonstrated ability to scope out what the sector needs, provide practical tools and resources, and strategically link the resources of multiple partners and delivery systems to surmount the challenges the nonprofit sector faces.

As a result of the work we have done (and the work we will do in the future) intermediaries who support the sector—through training, funding, education, consultation, or network provision—will have a research- and experience-based set of resources that will improve practices on the individual, organizational, network, intermediary, and systems level.

Services

We have a twenty-four year history of providing consulting, publishing, training, and research and demonstration projects that deliver solid results for customers, clients, and communities.

Through our consulting services, we help organizations, collaborations, networks, and other joint efforts become more effective and increase impact. Customers include grantmakers and grantmaking affinity groups, large-scale initiatives, intermediaries, networks, associations, and collaboratives.

We serve individual leaders, board members, staff, and volunteers within the nonprofit sector through training and through publishing books and articles that help nonprofits function more effectively.

We continually research new promising practices. At the same time, we work to package established effective practices so that nonprofits everywhere can quickly benefit from them. And we evaluate our own processes and publications to be sure that they deliver the results we promise.

The net impact of this combination of services is a stronger nonprofit sector.

Our work is collaborative in style, tailored in approach, and effective in results. We are known for focused, effective, and accessible services and products delivered with passion and commitment.

Fieldstone Alliance began operations as an independent organization in June 2005 after spinning-off from the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, which housed us for twenty-three years. We are an independent 501(c) 3, incorporated in Minnesota with a national board of directors.

For more information, please contact Sandy Jacobsen at 651.556.4510 or email her at sjacobsen@FieldstoneAlliance.org.