Our Story

Fieldstone Alliance started in the early 1980s as a program of the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the years, while we were a part of the Wilder Foundation, we were known by different names: Management Support Services, Wilder Center for Communities, National Services, and Wilder Publishing. In June 2005, the publishing and consulting programs of the Wilder Foundation spun-off into a new, independent nonprofit organization called Fieldstone Alliance (if you're wondering how we came up with that name, read the story).

During this twenty-six year history, we have evolved through four phases characterized by our changing mission: 1) improved management, 2) mission impact, 3) vital communities, and 4) sector impact. The history is instructive. It shows how we've increased our impact through constant innovation and by deepening and broadening our core competencies..

1982-1985: Improved Management

During our first years (1982-85), our focus was on helping nonprofit organizations become better managed, including better planning and strategy, leadership and governance, resource development, and systems and operations. The underlying assumption was that better managed nonprofits would better serve their communities.

During this period, we offered an extensive curriculum of management training programs, organizational consultation, and client accounting services to nonprofits across the St. Paul/Minneapolis Twin Cities area. Everything was rigorously evaluated. Demand for these services was high, clients’ evaluations of services were excellent, and we grew.

1985-1990: Mission and Impact

From 1985 to 1990, other providers joined us in strengthening Twin Cities’ nonprofits. But for some organizations, better management had become an end in itself. We refocused to emphasize mission accomplishment—community impact—as a goal.

Various Wilder Foundation programs involved in capacity building were consolidated or linked into a range of services that included consulting and training to nonprofit organizations, evaluation and research services for nonprofits and government (through Wilder Research Center), conferencing, and capacity-building assistance to social networks in neighborhoods and congregations.

All of this work emphasized increased impact. In concert, we formed a loose partnership with a university-based research network around “service effectiveness” and packaged that material for general use.

During this time, we also:

Established a Marketing Center and a Community Collaboration Center to help nonprofit organizations develop stronger capabilities in these areas.
Spun-off our client accounting services to another technical assistance organization.
Began developing and distributing practical, "how-to" publications for use by nonprofit organizations and technical assistance providers nationally and even internationally.
And, in response to demand stimulated by our publications, we started national training and consultation on a very limited basis.

1991-1996: Vital Communities

In 1991 a new Wilder president, with their board, refocused the Wilder Foundation’s work on improving the vitality of St. Paul’s core neighborhoods and on increased opportunity and quality of life for low-income residents in these neighborhoods.

We reshaped our local capacity building work to achieve this goal. In addition to working with nonprofits to increase their general effectiveness, we put more emphasis on how nonprofit organizations work together—along with business, government, and other community groups—to improve neighborhoods and the region.

We began focusing a portion of our consultation work on national organizations, networks, and systems, while continuing to deliver services locally.

We conducted our first research on success factors in collaboration and community building, continued extensive local training programs, and formalized the publishing program into Wilder Publishing Center.

1997-Present: Sector Impact

In 1997 The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a supporter of our publishing efforts, suggested that we dramatically expand our national work. In 1998, with Packard’s support, we formally began marketing and delivering consultation and training to national audiences. At the present, our consultation and training work is distributed approximately 40 percent to the local Minneapolis-Saint Paul community and 60 percent to national networks and intermediaries. During this period the Publishing Center greatly expanded its offerings and actively sought out field leaders as authors.

Our international work is growing as well. Recognizing our role in creating a vital nonprofit sector, foundation, nongovernmental organization, and other leaders from across the world meet with us to learn and trade notes, and return to their countries with an expanded vision for their nonprofit sector. Our publications are now used across seventy countries. Corporations like 3M and McKinsey & Company have shared what they have learned about knowledge building and innovation, in the hope that together we can extend these tools to others across the country and world.

Today, we continue to work with nonprofit organizations and networks to improve their performance, but we also help develop larger research or demonstration projects to study emerging aspects of capacity-building work, and to demonstrate application of new approaches to strengthening nonprofits and communities.

Through these projects, we've found that helping clusters and networks of organizations achieve a shared goal is a more effective capacity-building strategy than simply responding to scattered technical assistance requests from individual organizations; it is also less expensive. Helping intermediaries around the country do this will be the major part of our work as Fieldstone Alliance moves forward.