Narrowing Our Focus

April 26, 2023

Last month, we found common ground among our group’s motivations and values, and today we gave ourselves a chance to review and reconsider them, but we generally stuck to our initial thoughts and re-articulated them as follows:

  • Community.  Includes connection, family, collaboration.

  • Dignity.  Includes love, kindness, empathy.

  • Justice.

  • Equity.  Includes empowerment, accessibility, growth.

We then set out to study different issues and causes where our values could be reflected.  Our facilitator brought “issue cards” prepared by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society including:

  • Animal-related

  • Arts

  • Culture and Humanities

  • Civil Rights and Advocacy

  • Disaster Preparedness and Relief

  • Education

  • Environment

  • Food and Nutrition

  • Health

  • International Development

  • Law and Society

  • Social Services

  • Other—select your own

Each issue card had “focus areas” listed under the issue to help us imagine where the selection of an issue might take us.  Example: Civil Rights and Advocacy offered focus areas that included civil liberties, civil rights, democracy, intergroup and race relations, and voter education and registration.  There was space for us to add more focus areas under the issue. 

Each of us sat alone studying the cards, considering the group’s motivations and values as previously identified, and selecting our top three issues and causes.  Then we presented our selections to each other with our personal reasoning and found consensus that our issues and causes would be one or more of these four: Health, Civil Rights and Advocacy, Social Services, and Environment. 

Our next task was to consider focus areas provided and more focus areas that we brainstormed, and identify up to five that were of interest, and then we were forced to narrow our choices to two, and then we presented our choices to each other.  After facilitated discussion, we identified eight focus areas that we were excited to pursue:  Mental Health, Reproductive Health, Civil Rights, Civic Engagement, Housing and Shelter, Children and Youth Services, Environmental Education and Justice, and Conservation.

And finally, we talked about the benefits of a “focus statement” that would frame our values and motivations and connect them to our causes and issues, all to serve as a guide to a strategic philanthropic plan.  Each issue needed a focus statement that followed this format:  “We aim to address [WHAT] for [WHO], [WHERE], because this aligns with our commitment to [WHICH VALUES].”  We broke into small working groups, one for each issue, to write our focus statements.  Some examples:

  • We aim to address mental health for young adults from underserved populations because this aligns with our commitment to dignity and equity.

  • We aim to address housing and shelter issues in Lynn and Salem because it aligns with our commitment to dignity and equity in our community. 

LIz Drake