CLIENT
anti-poverty policy nonprofit
THE CHALLENGE
rapid growth and change
background
After the 2016 Presidential election, a leading anti-poverty policy nonprofit, saw a growing threat to low-income people. The organization began planning how they would fulfill the need they saw for smart policy advocacy. Almost overnight they received a significant increase in donor support and moved quickly to expand programming. The rapid growth brought several organizational challenges to the surface, which HGVenture came onboard to address.
You’ve done so much for us, by gathering and integrating such useful information, helping us use it to set out a process, and bringing such passion, skill, creativity, and empathy to the task of designing and facilitating the conversations we need to have to move forward.
—Executive Director
our approach
The goal was to understand the organizational strengths to uncover opportunities for change while hewing closely to stated commitments to racial justice. HGV began the engagement with a process of deep listening. HGV collected data through surveys and focus groups targeted at management, staff, and stakeholders. At the end of the listening process, HGVenture provided a comprehensive report reflecting what was heard and observed.
HGVenture released the report and facilitated a meeting for all staff during which they did some processing of and offered their perspectives on the report. They also prioritized actions for improvement. From that meeting, committees were formed to address the top three priorities: developing an onboarding strategy, building IT infrastructure, and improving horizontal and vertical lines of internal communication.
the impact
In developing, compiling, and prioritizing specific recommendations for action, HGV modeled a data-driven approach to organizational change.
HGV and the client’s HR team collaboratively developed a comprehensive onboarding program that was launched in 2019. The organization conducted a thorough staff-driven assessment of IT needs; and staff piloted new communication tools to promote knowledge sharing, improve collaboration across teams, and increase transparency within the organization. HGV also facilitated the transformation of the organization’s racial equity committee, which resulted in the hiring of a first-ever Director of Racial Equity.