Everything impacts everything in some way. This is an agreed upon concept, often referred to as system thinking, that is pretty basic to understand. And is often completely left behind in corporate philanthropy. When you somehow contribute to a community, or an organization, or an issue, that issue isn’t the only thing impacted. Tons of other things are impacted, too, and if you aren’t selecting your investments based on the entire system, you are losing potential additional impact.

Let’s say you want to focus on the issue of homelessness. So you decide to donate to a homeless shelter. However, homelessness connects to affordable housing, and food insecurity, and job readiness, and education, and mental health, and so on. So if you want to focus on the issue of homelessness, maybe you can make bigger impact by focusing on mental health, or on job readiness than on sheltering currently homeless individuals. You can take it one step further and focus on the “lifecycle” and invest in affordable housing, which also impacts education, as well as food security, which impacts a whole host of the above issues, as well as the shelter. You get the idea.

And by reading all my other posts, as I’m sure you did, when we invest in communities, we create greater impact, and when we create impact, we all win. When I build your corporate philanthropy strategy, we will “whiteboard” the system and think about where company talent, time, and dollars can go to create real long-term impact that affects the issue or area that you want to impact. And then we can measure those outcomes and talk about them in a way that addresses the whole system. Now you aren’t just building homes for Habitat, you are impacting education and job readiness, food security, and mental health. Good strategy looks at the big picture, the whole system. Give me a call and we can get started on your strategy.