Partnering to Drive Change
We believe that publicly accessible and actionable outcomes data is key to strengthening the cross-sector collaborations that ensure that working-class Americans can thrive in ways that matter to them. Our granting reflects a commitment to this reality and strives to advance these beliefs.
What changes when we focus on outcomes?
Our Giving Pathways
We implement our mission by funding efforts, convening collaborators and sharing learnings that strengthen pathways to economic mobility while also allowing us to learn alongside our grantees. Our granting is grounded in three key pathways.
We fund efforts that strengthen community capacity for implementing outcomes-based approaches.
This pathway is specifically grounded in the Six Effective Practices and ONLY funds projects that align with one or more of those practices and one or more of the seven domains of thriving
This includes funding to:
- Develop community dashboards in partnership with place based partnerships
- Leverage the 6 effective practices to tether local policy and collaboration to chosen outcomes
- Increase technical capacity and access to tools and training that support dashboard maintenance and sustainability
Public data is the essential core of our work. Non-profits and place-based partnerships rely on federal data to understand the longitudinal patterns and shifts within their communities. Without this infrastructure, the social sector is flying blind. We fund work that ensures the resilience and reliability of public data including:
- Funding organizations working to protect public data
- Funding regional data collection efforts
- Supporting organizations building up local data infrastructure
This pathway will fund activities that support movement building: strengthening the awareness of the value and impact of an outcomes-driven approach while disseminating learnings and best practices from our grantees. This includes funding to:
- Support research, convenings and co-publications
- Motivate collaboration between sectors
- Galvanize regional commitment to shared outcomes
Who We Fund
Finding Common Purpose grants to a variety of organization and entities to further an outcomes movement.
Those working towards improving systems and economic outcomes within their communities.
Partners who are developing tools or practices for sharing and leveraging outcomes for systems change.
Partners developing approaches, codifying learnings, and contributing to sector knowledge.
Partners sharing learnings within the social sector field who have the influence to impact policy and practice.
If your organization does not clearly fall under these categories but you see strong alignment between your work and our mission, we would love to hear from you.
Our Grantees
At Finding Common Purpose, we provide direct funding and thought partnership to community initiatives committed to sharing measurable outcomes openly and honestly through community dashboards. We strive to turn aspirations into strategic actions to track tangible progress that everyone can see and feel.
The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet is working toward a single goal: connecting more than 5,000 young people and their families to postsecondary and economic opportunity by 2033. With FCP support, they built a community dashboard and developed a locally grounded thriving wage metric to make sure progress is measured honestly.
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United for Brownsville convenes families, schools, healthcare providers, and social services in Brooklyn around one mission: closing gaps in access to housing, early childhood education, and maternal health. Their FCP-supported dashboard tracks cradle-to-career outcomes and gives the whole community a shared picture of conditions on the ground.
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For more than 40 years, the Naugatuck Valley Project has organized congregations, unions, and community groups across Western Connecticut around housing, healthcare, and worker rights. Their FCP-supported dashboard makes that work visible to state policymakers, framed around NVP’s own analysis of what the region needs.
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In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, rising housing and childcare costs were pushing out the teachers, nurses, and tradespeople the town depends on. FCP built a public affordability dashboard, and the shared understanding it created led directly to the founding of Steamboat for All.
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St. George CDC focuses on workforce readiness and improving affordability for their rural community. FCP’s grant supports their starter dashboard which tracks progress towards community envisioned outcomes through the use of strategic indicators across its core partners. The dashboard monitors education, workforce readiness, and affordability—the three areas critical to keeping St. George livable for current and future residents.
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Aligned Impact Muscatine works to support improved outcomes for children, families, and the local workforce in Muscatine, Iowa. With funding support from FCP, Aligned Impact Muscatine is building two tools for Muscatine County, Iowa: a community dashboard tracking cradle-to-career outcomes and a workforce mapping initiative linking education to family-sustaining jobs.
Learn MorePartnership with FCP has pushed us to clarify which indicators matter most, align them with our long-term strategy, and anticipate the supports residents will need to confidently use the [community] dashboard themselves.
How We Fund
We do not currently grant through open application calls. We are interested in connecting with and funding organizations whose goals and efforts are in alignment with our mission or those whose work can help us better understand the issues we are focused on solving. If you feel that your organization’s work, current projects and goals fit into any of our granting pathways, please fill out the contact form and a team member will follow up with you.
What to expect as an FCP Grantee
We cultivate strong relationships with our grantees that support their vital efforts while providing opportunities for us to learn from each other. Our partnerships afford us the opportunity to gather credible evidence about why certain approaches are successful and how. We will engage with you through:
- Check-ins and site visits to understand local context and share ongoing learnings
- Convenings or learning cohorts with other FCP grantees
- Learning and evaluation processes to understand your impact, challenges and opportunities for improvement
The Six Effective Practices
Based on a review of over five hundred place-based initiatives, we have identified six effective practices that ensure that community dashboards and other outcomes-sharing infrastructure are instrumental in improving regional collaboration and resource allocation, and can ensure public accountability while remaining accurate and sustainable in the long run. These practices include:
A theory of change that is focused on a northstar outcome and illustrated with a limited number of holistic, interconnected outcomes that advance a community-driven vision for what it means to thrive within a defined geographic area.
Strong, trusting, outcomes-based relationships with key institutions with power who work on outcomes included in the dashboard.
Continuous community enagement, participation, and collaboration to support successful design, continued relevance, and long-term sustainability.
Longevity requires dedicated infrastructure — staff and funding — to sustain data collection, tracking, sharing, and storytelling.
Dashboards should be used as a tool to advocate for public policy, resource allocation, and increased program delivery effectiveness.
Leverages media and storytelling to strengthen awareness, accountability, and sustainability.
Place-Based Initiatives growing use of community dashboards
Place-based initiatives enable a cross-sector of community leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to coalesce and collaborate around a common set of goals to meet basic needs and improve education, economic, and health outcomes for people, particularly people of color and families with low incomes who live in a defined geographic area.
Effective Practice #3: Community Engagement
The best practices outlined here focus on how place-based partnerships (PBPs) can embed community engagement throughout the life cycle of their dashboards – from design to use to long-term sustainability. They reflect a shift from community engagement as input-gathering, to community engagement as a pathway for developing local leaders, building trust, and mobilizing community-led action.
Effective Practice #1: Theory of Change
How can we ground collaboration in a strong Theory of Change (ToC)? This resource focuses on using community dashboards to make the North Star and Theory of Change visible and actionable, while communicating progress on meaningful, measurable, and regularly updated population-level outcomes.
Get Involved with Finding Common Purpose
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