Introducing a Model for Community-Driven Organizational Capacity^TM

Organizational Capacity Planning is a process for keeping your board proactively accountable for ensuring the organization has adequate capacity to provide ongoing service to the community.

Capacity Planning eliminates your organization's obstacles to providing more impact to the community, giving you the means to ensure a greater level of service than you ever dreamed possible.

• How often does your board assess the organization's capacity in each functional area, to ensure the mission can be accomplished to the degree the community needs it to be accomplished?
• How often do they consider risk and liability issues in each functional area?
• How often do they consider obstacles as just that - things to get around, to get where you want to be?
• And do they know they are accountable for all that?

The purpose of Capacity Planning is to ensure your organization does have the capacity to do its job, in all areas, not just "most" or "some." Without that overall plan, it is easy for the organization to get caught in a cycle that rationalizes why they can't get something done, rather than quickly determining how they can.

The Community-Driven Model for Organizational Capacity^TM is a distinctly new approach for creating sustainable capacity, within the context of improving the short and long term quality of life in our communities. The model is part of a larger model developed by Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes - an overall Community-Driven model for running nonprofit organizations.

The Community-Driven Model aims for long term health at all levels of the organization, not just the finances. By re-thinking how we develop and execute the day-to-day of our operations, the model focuses all aspects of the organization's work - their mission work and their internal operational work - on making the community a better place to live.

Using this Community-Driven approach to internal capacity, an organization will find fewer and fewer reasons why they can't accomplish more. The old thinking (We can't do any more. We can barely serve the current need!) is replaced with a solid sense that capacity is being proactively addressed on an ongoing basis. The approach keeps boards proactively accountable not only for ensuring the organization has adequate capacity and is avoiding risk and liability, but for aiming that capacity at creating significant improvement to the community's quality of life. For Training Programs on Community-Driven Organizational Capacity Planning