CONTEXT
In 2016, Board of Directors of the Helen J. Serini Foundation spent significant time developing our strategic framework for 2017-2022; due to the ongoing public health emergency sparked by COVID-19, we opted in 2020 to extend this strategy through at least 2023 to allow time for the proverbial dust to settle and for clarity around community needs and desires to continue to emerge.
As we near the end of 2023, we are excited to step back into our strategic visioning work and share with you all, in the spirit of transparency, what that’s looked like and what it might mean for our work going forward.
THE TL;DR (TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ)
Not much is changing, but for some tweaks to our how in hopes of inching ever closer towards the kind of philanthropy we hope to see in the world. We remain committed to our mission and vision statements, as articulated in 2017, and have done further work to clearly articulate and share the values we aim to embrace and embody in our work and partnerships (and look for in the work of our partners, as well).
THE LONGER VERSION…
We remain committed to our vision:
The Helen J. Serini Foundation envisions thriving communities where all people live healthy, dignified lives regardless of means or identity.
We remain committed to our mission:
We support innovative interventions that remove or address the root causes of systemic barriers to health, safety, shelter, and opportunity in the communities where we work and live.
We remain committed to the geographies we have served for the last ten+ years:
We fund where our board lives and works, namely: Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Frederick County, and some statewide work across Maryland.
It feels worth noting that we no longer have many board members who live and work in the city of Baltimore. Despite this, the board voted unanimously to keep focus on Baltimore City for several reasons: the city’s important role in the state’s overall wellbeing; in recognition of the fact that the foundation’s wealth generated from the sale of a Baltimore-based business; and in support of the incredible work happening in and around the city to shift the systems of inequity, such as redlining, that shape so much of our present-day reality both within and beyond city limits. We hope to add additional board members in the coming years to provide deeper and more community-grounded perspective on the depth of opportunity and innovation happening within the city.
We remain committed to building partnerships with local organizations:
Our grantmaking and approach has always aimed to value partnership over investment, in the belief that there are more resources to be shared than simply financial ones. To that end, we continue to seek partners who demonstrate:
A spirit of collaboration, partnership, and alliance-building
A recognition of the time required to work in community and relationship
A desire to support community solutions by working to remove existing barriers to success
A commitment to equity, internally and externally
A willingness to be in continuous and shared learning
Deep knowledge of, and commitment to, the social sector in the geographic areas in which the foundation funds
While our mission and approach has never easily slotted into one issue area, as is often seen in funding opportunities, we’ve taken some time to sit with our decade-long grantmaking history and notice what trends seem to stand out. To that end, we recognize that our funding tends towards organizations working in one or more of the following issue areas:
Food systems & access
Economic opportunity & wealth-building
Skills-building (literacy, financial literacy, job training, entrepreneurship)
Systems navigation
Health care systems & access
Additionally, investment made be made in advocacy, policy, research, coalition-building, and nonprofit capacity building that supports the above.
We’ve articulated our values:
Though we’ve long held these values in our own conversations, we recently came to realize we’d not articulated these clearly for ourselves or to share publicly. Inspired by the legacy of Helen J. Serini, the foundation aims to embrace and embody the following values in our work and partnerships with others: leading with humanity; inclusivity; shared learning; big thinking; integrity and accountability; and collaboration. More about what this means to us can be found here: Our Values.
What That Means in Practice
That was all a lot of words, even for us (and we know we’re wordy!). And still, with all of that context, what does this mean for 2024 and beyond? In short, not much is changing (in fact, we hope that those of you with whom we already work closely will find absolutely nothing surprising in the above). As we look out over the next five years, we wanted to give ourselves guidance and goals, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to an ever-changing, and often incredibly heavy, world context. To that end, we landed on the following goals for ourselves, with some detail provided for each:
Focused grantmaking strategies: Continued financial, time, and relational investment in partners, as well as thoughtful connections across and between partners and thought partnership on larger problem solving where welcome and supportive
Practices & programs centered on the humans doing the work: Prioritization of general operating/unrestricted dollars, flexible reporting mechanisms and adjustable timing intended to support the humans doing the work rather than serving only our interests
Deep connections with and across partners: Emphasize conversation and connection with partners, create thoughtful connections across workstreams, and support/host trainings and convenings
Influence systemic changes through public policy and advocacy work: Attend to and share advocacy-related happenings with partners, and support advocacy and research work
Understand foundation contributions & indications of progress over time: Share reporting and reflections back with partners over time, invest time and energy in reflecting on the foundation’s operations and outputs, shift onus of reporting onto foundation to create space for shared learning
Share best practices, learnings, and impact of Foundation work externally: Engage in and with funder communities in conversations around shifting philanthropic practice, share our learnings, write and disseminate reflections on the foundation’s work at least once every five years
Utilize financial resources to advance the Foundation’s mission beyond grantmaking: Identify opportunities to diversify vendors, with an emphasis on local businesses where possible; adhere to our socially responsible investment policy; identify opportunities for non-grant financial investments
attributions and gratitude
With deep appreciation, language and strategies above are influenced by the Consumer Health Foundation’s Logic Model & Theory of Change, values conversations between our board and staff led by Jen Lachman, and conversations around the practice of the Equitable Evaluation Framework (TM). We are also eternally grateful to our partners — funders, grant recipients, community members, committee participants, and others — for continuing to help us learn and unlearn as we come into our own within philanthropy. We’re only ten years old, but we’re proud of what we’ve done in that decade… and even more excited for the work that’s yet to come.