Challenge
The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), one of the nation’s largest private funders, seeks to help build better futures for millions of disadvantaged children and their families. Its Leadership Development Unit is tasked with striving to build a field well resourced with leaders capable of leading innovative community and government efforts on behalf of these children and families. In 2002, the Foundation surveyed 130 of its community-based grantees. Eighty-five percent of the executive directors responding stated they were likely to leave their positions in the next five years. Concerned about the potential leadership crisis these responses implied (not only among their grantees but for the non-profit sector), AECF launched an extensive research effort to better understand nonprofit executive transitions. In collaboration with the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr., Fund, AECF hired Strategic Communications & Planning to manage the development of a monograph series exploring key aspects of leadership transitions for nonprofit organizations.

Approach
Working closely with three leading groups in the field, CompassPoint, Transition Guides, and the Building Movement Project, SCP has helped to write, edit, and design a comprehensive series of monographs exploring the a variety of issues around nonprofit leadership transitions:

• Capturing the Power of Leadership Change: Using Executive Transition Management to Strengthen Organizational Capacity

• Founder Transitions: Creating Good Endings and New Beginnings: A Guide for Executive Directors and Boards

• Up Next: Generational Change and Leadership of Nonprofit Organizations

• Interim Executive Directors: The Power in the Middle

• Staying Engaged, Stepping Up: Succession Planning and Executive Transition Management for Nonprofit Boards of Directors

• Next Shift: Beyond the Nonprofit Leadership Crisis

• Building Leaderful Organizations: Succession Planning for Nonprofits

In addition, SCP has worked with the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network to create two additional monographs focusing on the views of younger leaders about executive leadership and the future of the nonprofit sector.

Click here for PDF versions of these monographs.

Results/Impact
These relevant and timely documents have provided AECF with a growing set of tools and resources the Foundation and its partners are using to help prepare other funders/co-investors, practitioners, nonprofit organizations, and leaders themselves to handle the growing number of leadership transitions that lie ahead. This information has helped AECF grantees deal more effectively with transitions, ensuring that the organizations that AECF invests in remain focused and strong. In addition, the knowledge base represented by these monographs has helped AECF establish itself as a leader in the field of nonprofit leadership transitions, building on AECF’s commitment to developing strong leaders for organizations and public systems serving disadvantaged children and families.