Capacity Building is a prioritized investment area because skilled, adaptive and resilient leaders are crucial catalysts for organizations and coalitions pursuing their goals within the interdependent landscape of health and well-being. Vitalyst has long prioritized improving the effectiveness of community-based leadership and effective organizations along with the development of health-focused coalitions that together strengthen civic infrastructure.

During FY2018, Vitalyst completed a year-long Results-Based Leadership program to help a collective of coalitions work more effectively on reaching their long-term goals. Vitalyst also provided Facilitation For Accountability training for 15 individual community partners. The training delivered skills for moving groups from talk to action, and directly impacted their ability to set and reach results-focused goals. The effects of the trainings were not only promptly felt due to an emphasis on immediate real-world application, but have been seen as those partners’ subsequent work has rippled and spread as well.

This year Vitalyst also stepped back and reflected on much of its work in this area, and a number of publications have been prepared to summarize the learnings. These include:

• Storytelling Guide and Systems-Change Brief: Storytelling is a powerful strategy to foster input from community members on needed changes to systems in society. Lived experience is the missing ingredient that is crucial to propelling community-driven changes to practices, policies and systems. Two publications identify how to use storytelling to enhance the effectiveness of social sector organizations:
  • The workbook, Storytelling for Resident Leaders provides a wide variety of exercises to collect and share powerful stories.
  • The brief, Storytelling as a Catalyst for Systems Change, examines how storytelling can be leverage for policy and systems change.
• Agents of Community Transformation: For the past several years, Vitalyst provided funds to train master facilitators working with nonprofits, government agencies and other social change entities. This work started out with individual facilitators, and then burgeoned into teams representing diverse coalitions. An evaluation of this work and the results are here.

 

 

 

Photo credit: Scott Griessel/ Creatista