We are thrilled to share our new strategic plan that will guide our work moving forward.
There are two things we know to be true: Rose Community Foundation has a rich history of living its values through grantmaking, advocacy and philanthropic services in pursuit of making our community a better place for all. At the same time, through nearly every conceivable lens, the seven-county Greater Denver region – and the world around us – has changed dramatically in the quarter-century since Rose Community Foundation was created.
The dynamics of our ever-changing region obligate us to ensure that the Foundation’s work – and the ways in which the Foundation conducts that work – continue evolving to meet the community needs and philanthropic best practices of today and tomorrow.
Understanding this important responsibility and the opportunity presented by an era of new leadership at the Foundation, while embracing a values-oriented legacy with roots stretching back to the opening of General Maurice Rose Memorial Hospital in 1949, the board and staff of Rose Community Foundation spent 2019 engaged in critical reflection, exploration and aspiration to inform the development of a strategic plan for our future work. Through interviews, focus groups and surveys, we engaged hundreds of diverse voices to provide feedback and insights on the strengths, needs and opportunities both within our region and our organization.
As our board affirmed at the outset of our strategic planning process, we remain steadfast in three core commitments: we are committed to strengthening the seven-county Greater Denver region, we are committed to supporting the local Jewish community and we are committed to supporting the philanthropy of our donors, whose generosity is a powerful force for regional good.
For those who have long histories with the Foundation, we trust you will find much that is familiar in these pages. Our core DNA is very much the same but expressed more boldly and with specific intention and relevance for the world in which we all live today. For those who are less familiar with Rose Community Foundation – or who have historically known only one part of our work through a particular program area or department – we hope these pages will illuminate a more cohesive and integrated picture of our multi-faceted work.
The challenges our community faces do not fit neatly into buckets, nor do the solutions. As such, we are removing the silos that have historically defined (and today, perhaps, confine) our work and are instead organizing our efforts in pursuit of three important and ambitious impact goals that recognize the intersecting nature of community needs.
We will lean into the unique roles afforded to us as a community foundation: our ability to support donor philanthropy and be a catalyst to grow the charitable resources dedicated to strengthening our region, and the opportunity we have to support and leverage policy and advocacy work in pursuit of our mission.
This strategic plan represents our shift from acting as a knowing organization to a learning organization. We will know enough to ask the right questions, but not so much that we don’t listen to the answers. The data and feedback we collected during our strategic planning process in 2019 was truly a gift. Ensuring that we create ongoing opportunities for learning, community engagement and input to continue to shape our future work is of critical importance to us.
The key elements of this plan are refreshed Mission, Vision and Values statements that clarify our role and aspirations in serving our community and new Goals and Strategies to guide our work, accompanied by the rationale behind our priorities. Grant opportunities aligning with our new goals will still exist in the historic areas in which we have funded, and opportunities will become available in some important new areas as well.
With the publication of this report, we end our strategic planning journey and begin an exciting new phase for the organization. We are eager to shift our focus now to setting the necessary pieces in place as we animate the ideas spelled out in our plan. Thank you for your ongoing partnership as Rose Community Foundation enters an important new chapter.