WELCOME TO OUR GROWING CAPACITY PROJECT -

PROGRAM 1: GATHERING RESOURCES IIN HAWAI’I FOR HAWAI’I PAGE!

Based on community survey responses (from our field) that suggested some of the biggest needs for nonprofit museums, library archives, and other museum-like cultural organizations in Hawai'i have to do with strategic fundraising, board development, grant practices, and retaining nonprofit workforce, we developed our first mentoring and training program.

For six weeks, the Program 1 cohort  explored, shared, pooled, and provided  resources and content tied to the issues identified in the survey. Each week, we focused on a different aspect of nonprofit capacity building. We prioritized making space to discover our shared needs and crowdsource solutions to the challenges we face. Participants had the opportunity to explore solutions with peer organizations in the state as well as interact with thought and practice leaders who were able to help overcome some of our struggles.

Each week, participants met online with the program facilitators and guest presenters to identify the capacity-building needs represented in the cohort. Nonprofit GrowthGen offered instructional tools and templates for fundraising strategy, donor prospecting, grant-writing, reporting practices, program evaluation, and project management. From that foundation, participants and featured community members added their own resources, insights, and materials to the growing collaborative toolkit while engaging with one another in problem-solving our collective challenges and needs. Our continued hope is these digital resources and the ongoing synergy from the cohort will continue to grow capacity among participating organizations well beyond the program.

We highlighted the following topics and prominent community members and experts in the six-week program: 

• Strategizing our Fundraising Approaches, with Lisa Chow (CEO and Owner of Leina’ala Consulting) and Elizabeth Lentz-Hill (Program Officer in Arts & Culture at Hawai’i Community Foundation)
• Activating and Managing Boards, with Maja Grajski (Vice President of Collections and Research at Bishop Museum) and Jennifer Cornish-Creed (Director of Professional Development Hawai’i Alliance of Nonprofit Organizations - HANO)
• Centering Community Needs in Our Work, with Healoha Johnston (Director of Cultural Resources and Curator for Hawai’i and Pacific Arts and Culture at Bishop Museum) and Sarah Kuaiwa (Curator for Hawai’i and Pacific Cultural Resources at Bishop Museum)
• Building Healthy and Collaborative Partnerships, with Mina Elison (Curator at the Donkey Mill Art Center) and Eric Chang (Arts Program Manager at East-West Center)
• Developing and Expanding our Toolkits

If you would like to explore and/or share presentations and discussions from our program, please check out our YouTube Playlist. This contains shareable content from our guest presenters and live class sessions (tied to the topics above). If you do, we'd love for you to let us know what you found useful!

During early program design, we sifted through community suggestions and incorporated the following:

• Targeting participants at different levels of leadership.
• Practicing cultural humility and self-reflection as a lens throughout the training.
• Shifting the live meeting times to group sharing and dialogue and leaving the top-down learning material (videos, articles, resources) for homework between the synchronous sessions. 
• Using the sessions to crowdsource materials, templates, tools, and examples to meet group needs.

See our full report on the early community needs survey here.

We're currently wrapping up our first program evaluation and will be updating this page with a few highlights and findings soon.