California CBOs Preparing to Thrive in the Healthcare Landscape

In 2016, the Marin Community Foundation engaged Collaborative Consulting to design and implement an initiative called Accelerating Business Capacity of Aging Service Providers (ABC). The ABC initiative would help participating community-based organizations (CBOs) strengthen their competencies in market research, healthcare financing, service design, business planning, business development, strategic foresight, and other critical business skill sets essential for pursuing and securing viable partnerships with healthcare organizations.

As five CBOs entered the program, we played a vital role in implementing the 3.5-year initiative. Our work included customizing 67 sessions via 15 convenings, while providing ongoing capacity-building assistance to each individual CBO to help accelerate the deployment of the concepts learned.

Now, as the Marin Community Foundation shares the experiences of the ABC initiative with organizations beyond the borders of Marin County, we are co-authoring a series of briefs that highlight the challenges, achievements and learnings of the five participating CBOs.

Each of the three briefs explores a different theme related to how participating CBOs have prepared for and build the competencies necessary to thrive in the changing healthcare landscape.

• Learning Brief #1 explores the Adaptive Advantage, demonstrating the importance of adaptability for CBOs by identifying three essentials for increased adaptability and showcasing how two ABC participants grew their capacities to adapt to change.
• Learning Brief #2 introduces the concept of the Two-Curve Organization and illustrates how two CBOs concurrently maximized near-term opportunities for their core operations while pursuing new models to create future growth.
• Learning Brief #3 looks at how building the competencies necessary for successfully partnering with healthcare organizations had the Dual Effect of also strengthening the core operations of three ABC participants.

You can read them below or use the link at the top of this post to download a PDF containing both briefs. You can also access all four briefs, along with other information for aging service providers, on the Marin Community Foundation’s ABC resources page.

If you’d like to know more about our work with the Marin Community Foundation and their ABC initiative, or the ways in which we work with CBOs, government agencies, trade associations, foundations, and healthcare organizations, please get in touch.