Good Neighbor Committee Get to Know the Community

Get to know the community:
There's much value in spending time in the community and encouraging members to get to know who’s doing what, what the needs are, and how your organization can help. That’s a continuing activity, well worth keeping up throughout the year. But in preparation for a round of grantmaking, it may be wise to undertake a more thorough, organized reconnaissance, in which members deliberately seek out as many local leaders and organizations as possible to gather ideas about how to shape and focus the grantmaking effort. Your neighborhood inventory will grow and change constantly, and members should be encouraged to add information to it regularly as they reconnoiter. But even if the list is never perfectly complete, it can be useful to try to capture as good a picture of the local universe as possible. That’s one good way of deciding on subject areas for grantmaking, dividing up responsibilities among members, and soliciting proposals from eligible recipients.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Building Community Inside and Out.

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