B01: Building Internal Culture to Achieve External Results
Track
Leading Change in Philanthropy
Session Designer
Rachel Mosher-Williams, Community Wealth Partners
Session Description
Grantmakers increasingly seek to be more transparent and collaborative, as well as to have greater impact with their grantees. They are also anxious about recruiting and retaining the best talent as they navigate the retirement of baby boomers and the emerging leadership of millennials. Amid these changes, funders have an opportunity to intentionally build and reinforce an internal culture that promotes values, norms and daily behaviors that create the conditions for transformational change in their work. More than periodic team-building exercises, culture is how people work together every day and the (often unspoken) rules about acceptable actions. This session will help you understand how explicitly focusing on internal culture makes achieving external change for your organization, grantees and communities more likely. Speakers who have worked hard to build and maintain a “change-making” internal culture will introduce a framework for culture building and share advice, challenges and outcomes of their efforts. Through a small-group exercise, you will assess your current organizational culture and what might be needed to create better conditions for transformational change both in your organization and with grantees.
Session Designers
Rachel Mosher-Williams, Community Wealth Partners
Speakers
![[photo]](https://8ca84662c5b8f0cff50d-4baaaf97d63fd7b01243e1b1c57f0cc1.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/1119/profile_39c9fcf138aa9d64f5c5150aa22080f4.png "Sara Brenner, Community Wealth Partners")
Sara Brenner, Community Wealth Partners
Biography
As President of Community Wealth Partners, Sara Brenner guides the organization’s strategic direction to solve social problems at the magnitude at which they exist and oversees the firm’s partnerships and consulting business. With 20 years of experience in consulting for nonprofits, for-profits and the government, Sara has worked extensively in the health, education, and human services sector. She is a frequent speaker and writer on topics of transformational change, collaboration, sustaining impact and innovation, culture and leadership. Sara is currently the Board Chair of the DC Chapter of After School All-Stars. She received her MBA from Georgetown University and her BA with Honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
![[photo]](https://8ca84662c5b8f0cff50d-4baaaf97d63fd7b01243e1b1c57f0cc1.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/1127/profile_360329da6795ddf08fe4dbdfc2fde9b4.png "Laura Weidman Powers, CODE2040")
Laura Weidman Powers, CODE2040
Biography
Laura Weidman Powers is the co-founder and CEO of CODE2040, a nonprofit that creates pathways to success in the innovation economy for Blacks and Latino/as. She brings to this work a background in entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, youth development, and technology. Laura started two education organizations, one nonprofit arts education organization and one for-profit tutoring company that gave rise to a book. She first explored the tech space as a project manager in a small web development shop in New York. Laura is a 2013 Echoing Green Fellow and a 2013 Stanford Social Innovation Fellow. She has been recognized by many publications and organizations, including Goldman Sachs, The Root, and Fortune Magazine, which named her one of 10 Female Executives on the Rise. Laura sits on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She has a BA cum laude from Harvard College and a JD and an MBA from Stanford University.
![[photo]](https://8ca84662c5b8f0cff50d-4baaaf97d63fd7b01243e1b1c57f0cc1.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/1118/profile_484ccd16902db275723da03bac2dadd2.png "John Esterle, The Whitman Institute")
John Esterle, The Whitman Institute
Biography
John Esterle is the Co-Executive Director and a Trustee of The Whitman Institute, an independent foundation based in San Francisco that will sunset in 2022. TWI’s mission is to advance social, political and economic equity by funding dialogue, relationship building and inclusive leadership. A strong advocate of multi-year, unrestricted funding, John began working at TWI in 1988 and became its Executive Director in 1999. In 2004, John led TWI’s transition from an operating to a grantmaking foundation. John serves on the boards of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), Images and Voices of Hope, and the Germanacos Foundation.