Consider high school for your strategic succession planning
I still see organizations that plan strategically for programming, often scheduling exhibitions and performances years in advance, but when it comes to planning ahead for inevitable leadership transitions, especially volunteer leadership, their approach is often reactive. One place that is thinking creatively about planning for the future is the all-volunteer women’s philanthropic organization Impact the Palm Beaches; full disclosure, I evaluate Impact’s grant applications. Impact has a president who serves a one-year term and a vice-president who is the designated successor. Impact also has various committees led by women who often move into positions on the board and sometimes into the most senior leadership positions. Pretty straightforward and a common setup at many organizations. But Impact was also concerned with what their sustainability looked like way down the line. Many organizations have created young professionals memberships and programming, and sometimes this includes a junior council that can provide upward feedback on young donor engagement. Impact wanted to plan beyond that.
The vice president and I talked through how we might get teenagers not just interested in the mission but actively part of it. Our solution, create a teen giving circle with the same core responsibility as the parent organization—pool donations, evaluate candidates as a group, and award funding. We met with the founder of collective giving platform Grapevine to discuss logistics for how we setup and organize a giving circle that wouldn’t require the same administrative apparatus as Impact, something manageable on a teenager’s schedule. The goal here was to hand responsibility for recruitment, member engagement, and evaluation of prospective recipients over to the teenagers, with the Grapevine platform handling the collection and distribution of funds. Unlike every young professionals committee or board that I’ve come across, this group is essentially self-sustaining and executing on the same strategy as the grownup organization.
After a full year of running this next gen group, the members recently awarded an impressive $700 donation to a local organization. And in the process, these teenagers have demonstrated a commitment to Impact’s values and learned the governance and leadership skills that will help them succeed as future Impact leaders.
