Government
project type
Strategy
client type
Community-Based Organization
How a homelessness prevention organization aligned around a five-year aspiration and refined its priorities to enhance its impact
Amid the stress of daily tasks, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Sometimes, you need to step back and gain a broader perspective to move forward with purpose. This can be particularly true for community organizations involved in high-stakes work. Adopt A Family of Marin engaged Collaborative Consulting to help the leaders take a pause and clarify their organizational purpose, strengths, and goals, as well as to identify strategic focus areas and priorities for the future.
The Client
Adopt A Family of Marin (hereinafter referred to as AAF) is a nonprofit organization in Marin County, California, focused on preventing homelessness and providing stability for families in crisis. AAF provides short-term financial assistance and connects families with support for housing, credit repair, food assistance, auto repair, and other services that stabilize crisis-torn families and intervene to prevent homelessness.
Project Highlights
- Analyzed AAF’s program and impact data, financial data, staff feedback, and publicly available data to give the AAF leadership a clear picture of its current state, including service demand, funding needs, and scope of services. This created the groundwork for strategic thinking and planning.
- Interviewed clients, donors, and partners to provide insight into the strengths and unique value of AAF and areas for improvement, guiding how best to position services in the future and determine strategic priorities.
- Facilitated sessions with the board and leadership, supporting them to define a 5-year aspiration and identify five strategic focus areas.
- Helped AAF align on strategic priorities, setting a path toward achieving its mission.
Project Goals
AAF hired Collaborative Consulting to facilitate a strategic thinking process that would produce a shared aspiration for the future and strategic focus areas.
The project focused on:
- Providing AAF leadership with an impartial view of its current state.
- Identifying trends, organizational strengths, and challenges that informed the design and delivery of the strategic thinking sessions.
- Aligning board and leadership around a future aspiration for 2024–2029.
- Determining priority focus areas to create a base for a future strategic plan.
How We Helped
We began by establishing a strategy team comprising a select group of AAF board members and staff. We synthesized program performance data, the organization’s financial information, and staff surveys to assess the organization’s current state. We interviewed clients, donors, and partners to gain broader insights. This helped us identify trends, opportunities, and improvements related to service demand, fundraising opportunities, service delivery, partnerships, and areas within the organizational operations that could be optimized for greater efficiency and impact.
The findings informed recommendations focused on strengthening the organization’s capacity to serve more clients, developing outcome measures to showcase impact, raising community awareness, and streamlining services.
We facilitated strategic thinking sessions with the strategy team and the board of directors. The sessions helped the leaders align around a future aspiration for the next five years, agree on priority focus areas, and determine the actions needed to move the organization toward its goals.
Key Outcomes
As a result of our work together, Adopt A Family of Marin created a five-year aspiration to shape the organization’s future and have a greater impact on the people it serves. They identified and agreed on five strategic focus areas and the priorities required to achieve them. This provided them with the basis for building a forward-looking strategic plan, which they are currently developing.
