Hello!  I’m Renee and I am going to admit this is probably my first ever public blog post.  Yeah, not a blogger.  So Bootcamp is a great way for me to push my boundaries and practice being more transparent without the need for as much polish.

I am a Program Officer at the General Service Foundation, an awesome family foundation committed to social justice grant making.  I manage a portfolio to build a strong, multi-issue progressive base in Colorado by strengthening a set of core civic engagement grantees and connecting them via infrastructure innovations.  I work with a large network of other funders and organizations to inspire similar local infrastructure efforts and innovations in other states. You can read more about my program here.

I signed up for Bootcamp to gain tools and practice supporting groups (of grantees and funders) to create and achieve collective vision.  The organizations I work with increasingly intersect with each other to create a network – whether intentional or unintentional – in service of similar goals.  I find myself often leading processes to illuminate the shared purpose of the network, make it more explicit, and get people working more collaboratively toward an agreed-upon outcome.  Along these lines, here’s the project I’m focusing on at Bootcamp:

To co-create a vision with my grantees and a funder partner that takes our collective work together to the next level. Ultimately, I hope to develop a new investment strategy for my program based on that united field-funder vision.

In our first Bootcamp session, Eugene asked us to think of all the questions we could about our project and post them in clusters.  I came up with a ton of “HOW” and “WHAT” questions about the process I had envisioned in my head.  Interestingly, the one that provided the most insight to me was one I didn’t ask: “Why would we co-create a vision?” and a follow-up “Why would we take our work to the next level?”

This was a great reminder about generative questions.  I have talked to several stakeholders about my project and I tend to ask “Should we do this… (e.g. co-create a vision)?” and usually they answer yes, it’s needed, feels important, etc. especially because I tend to make a pretty compelling argument for it before I ask the question : )  Oh, and I’m their funder so of course they’re going to say it’s a great idea!  But just by shifting the frame of the question, I can get so much more insight into what THEY are thinking and find ways to design a process that will meet THEIR needs too, not just my own.  This is key to one of my priority questions: “How to build buy-in from the participants ahead of time?”.

So how will I go about answering these questions?

I already have plans to interview key stakeholders before the meeting but Bootcamp is helping me rethink the frame of my questions to a generative one so I can really tap the knowledge and insight of everyone else, rather than relying on my own brain to design it.

I also will be working with the fantastic Rebecca Petzel from Groupaya on a co-creation process for this project that will include representative stakeholders in the design phase.  I’ll try to break my habit of coming to these design meetings with my ideas fully fleshed out and instead allow for generative work to happen in the design phase itself.

Can’t wait for my next workout!