While the “three-legged stool” of endowment building, grant-making, and community leadership are common to all community foundations, each individual foundation decides for itself how to best balance these three functions in a way that meets the needs of the local community.

Impact Strategies has developed the Impact Model to guide community foundations as they identify and seek to fulfill their desired role in their local communities.  Through facilitated planning sessions with foundation board and staff members, the model is used to identify specific areas of foundation work that can be enhanced to move the foundation toward its stated mission.

Additional tools are used as needed to support the planning process.  Click on the links below to view those tools.

Continuum of catalyst tactics

Catalyst roles

Grantee partnership continuum

Community foundation areas of emphasis