Goal and progress
Community investment | A high leverage investment
We concentrate our community investment on programs that are aligned with our target causes - underserved youth and women. This has allowed us to focus our efforts, become more knowledgeable about our funding areas and develop deeper partnerships with nonprofits. But it’s also had an unintended consequence: We end up providing fewer resources for nonprofits to invest in their own development and build their own capacity.
While we have provided small capacity building grants over the last two years, we’ve decided to apply our core strategies to this effort as well. During 2008, we began developing a program pilot to build the leadership capacity of our youth-serving nonprofit partners.
We began by exploring our youth-serving nonprofit partners’ needs through a third-party assessment. These partners requested development in a number of areas related to leadership and management including: managing organizational change; setting vision and strategy; fostering leader self-awareness; and driving organizational performance.
In response, our capacity building program will leverage leadership programs originally designed for Gap Inc. executives and tailored by our Human Resources team with support from CompassPoint, a nonprofit consulting firm. Gap Inc. company executives will play a key role in program delivery, benefiting our nonprofit partners and enriching our employees as well. And of course, we’ll evaluate the program pilot to better understand its impact and identify opportunities for improvement.
The two-year program is scheduled to launch in September 2009, with a kick-off summit convening over 60 leaders from 28 of our youth-serving community partners in North America. Over the course of two days, leaders will participate in intensive learning workshops focused on visionary leadership, change management and strategic planning. They will then work in smaller groups over the next 12 months, revisiting these principles and expanding upon them. In 2010, all participants will reconvene to share learnings and begin a second phase of learning, building on the foundational elements from year one.
“Gap Inc.’s capacity building initiative is an important step toward benefiting the organizations they support in a more impactful way,” says Marla Cornelius, projects director for CompassPoint.
“In this economic climate, it is becoming more and more difficult for organizations to invest in staff development and infrastructure improvements,” she adds. “By leveraging Gap Inc.'s internal talents to identify and support the needs of nonprofits, this initiative is not only innovative in design, but is an exciting example of a creative corporate and nonprofit partnership as well.”
