Focus Areas

Leadership, Planning and Collaboration

Leadership, planning and collaboration: LPC has worked with a number of organizations in the development of leadership, planning and needs assessment. This has included both facilitating and evaluating collaboration within an organization, as well as holding workshops on evaluation and logic model development.

One of our biggest success stories for these services has been with the Nonprofit Resource Center in Sacramento, CA. Since 1995, LPC has trained and facilitated workshops for the organization. The renowned CEO-Link program is the culmination of this work. This program brings together 15 nonprofit executive directors each month for a year of training and development. Program evaluation is one of the cornerstones of this leadership development and training program.

Similarly, planning is often a formal activity required by some funders.This may include funding for 1-2 years to convene stakeholders and partners, to conduct a thorough needs assessment study, to design a program approach, and to develop the infrastructure for a new program initiative.

Similarly, strategic planning and other internal self-assessment processes often include some form of needs assessment to identify strengths and weaknesses, and to revisit priorities and practices. LPC has participated in numerous needs assessment activities in conjunction with evaluation work as well as in stand-alone assignments. These consist of a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis tasks, depending on the size and scope of the topic.

LPC often includes the facilitation of focus groups as part of evaluation. To address the many languages and cultures in the community, we actively recruit and train youth and individuals who are community-based and bilingual/bicultural to facilitate focus group meetings, thereby building capacity in the community.

LPC has worked closely with several active collaborations, primarily at the local level. As collaboration becomes an increasingly important component of new grants and new approaches to meeting community needs, LPC develops methods for documenting, describing, and assessing the effectiveness of collaborative partnerships.

Samples of the leadership, planning, and collaboration work include:

• CEO-Link (Nonprofit Resource Center)
• Raising the Standard (Nonprofit Resource Center and Sacramento Region Community Foundation)
• Needs assessment studies (City of Sacramento Unified School District mental health integration; The California Endowment’s Healthy Start; Sacramento Children’s Home Crisis Nursery)
• River Oak stakeholder interviews
• Family Support Collaborative (for Birth & Beyond Community Resource Program)
• Destination Family (partnership between Sierra Adoption Services and Sacramento County DHHS)