So when I think about long-term success, for me it's about
keeping core questions front and center.
And for me those questions are why, what, and how.
Some of that sounds obvious, but let me explain a bit more.
Why are we doing the work that we're doing?
What are our priority areas?
And then the question that I think is most interesting for
all my team to think through is, how can we have the most impact
using the resources that we have in service of our mission?
The mission of the foundation is to nourish and transform the
lives of children who face adversity.
But there's a lot of sub-questions which come from
that, bigger "how" questions. How do we know that we're having
an impact?
We need to measure that.
What are the resources that we have? Obviously the foundation
grant money is a lot of the resources we have, but there's
also other forms of resources.
What can we do beyond the check to help our grantee partners? If
we can't tie the activities that each of us are doing as a team
back to that question and to our mission overall, the why and the
what, then
I think we're erring out of long-term success and we're too
focused on just doing what's in our inbox and things like that.
So that's certainly how I try and remind the team and how we
set our objectives.
And I'm really happy to say so far we're, we're seven people,
we are quite small, but we're really focused on that question,
I think, and it's going really well.