San Antonio Area Foundation

The San Antonio Area Foundation is the region's community foundation dedicated to honoring donor's charitable wishes while improving community outcomes and preparing for the future. As a result, the Area Foundation is focused on the following objectives:

1. Alignment to community dashboards, metrics and outcomes to establish clear pathways to understanding whether funding is improving lives.

2. Coalescing with the philanthropic sector to influence and create intentional strategies to ensure effective funding.

3. Sharing our deep understanding of the nonprofit ecosystem with Area Foundation fund advisors to magnify and amplify funding strategies within aligned fields of interest.

4. Realign the Area Foundation's six primary fields of interest where funding is allocated into four areas of greater impact.

The Area Foundation's strategies for preparing for the needs of our community, include:

1. Partnering with community organizations to align to the city's dashboard of measures and population-level outcomes to create synergy and an understanding of collective funding impact.

2. Working with the top philanthropic entities in our community to create intentional approaches to aligning funding.

3. Analyze unmet needs within our community and working with fund advisors within the Area Foundation to create impactful, aligned grant-making opportunities. Share our knowledge of the nonprofit ecosystem (our core competency) with donors to ethically influence funding approaches.

4. Through a strategic planning process launched in 2017, the Area Foundation determined through a collaborative process within community that its current six fields of interest (where funding is aligned) should be realigned to four areas and made available to nonprofits in 2019.

The Area Foundation, with over half a century of service to our community has experienced unprecedented growth. From this growth, we have a unique opportunity to create a greater impact. Internal enhancements to meet this increased role in community are already in process, such as additional staff, improved technology, and the creation of a balanced scorecard performance management system. Further, we are investing in our staff through training programs focused on competencies aligned to a Leadership System, as well as race, and equity awareness to create a new lens of grant-making.

Our balanced scorecard will be in place by the end of 2018, and project prioritization and management was deployed throughout 2018. Alignment to the community dashboard will occur by the first quarter of 2019. A pilot of top funders in relation to aligned outcomes, race, and equity training is already in process and should be measurable in 2019. Our efforts to align to philanthropic entities to create intentional strategies to align funding are in a pilot stage, with results determining next steps in 2019.