By Ashley Alston, BBA 2018
It has been two weeks since “Pitch Day,” and the teams are finally making the difficult decision of which organizations to do site visits with. My team, whose primary focus is on health, poverty, and nutrition education, has narrowed the search down to three organizations. During this process we took time to consider the vision of the organization and compare it to the goals we hope to accomplish by giving this grant.
In class this week, each team built a logical model for each non-profit they were considering. We based this model off the ideas of Peter Frumkin, who described the model to be a formal explication of how a philanthropic intervention proposes to achieve its ends. The model consists of the three theories: the theory of leverage, the theory of change, and the theory of scale. These theories help paint a clear picture of what our goals and objectives are as donors. In class there was an emphasis placed on breaking down the theory of change. We learned that the theory of change is further broken down into three categories: activity, outputs and outcomes. The activity category breaks down what the organization plans to do if given the grant. The output category focuses on immediate results given the plan proposed during the activity category is successful. Lastly, the outcome category demonstrates the long term effects of goods and services being delivered and output being met.
After fully understanding each category, our groups went through every organization and discussed their main activity, what their immediate results would be, and the overall outcome they wish to achieve. As we continued to narrow down organizations based off of their visions compared to our goals, we were able to use the logical model to help us decide which ones we wanted to further pursue. Each group focused on three or four organizations they wished to meet to explore further collaboration. We are in the process of contacting the directors of each organization and setting up site visits. This will help us better understand each of our potential grant recipients vision. I am excited to continue learning about how to strategically give to others while also having the opportunity to make a significant impact on both an organization and those lives it touches.