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This file, “Building Engines for Rural Endowment: An RDP Thinking and Action Framework,” is a “beta-test” version (January 2003) from The Aspen Institute’s Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Network. It serves as a guide for community foundations to strategically build permanently endowed assets focused on vitalizing rural areas. The framework is divided into six steps:
- Step 0: Orientation Introduces the concept of Rural Development Philanthropy (RDP) and explains why community foundations and endowments are crucial for rural communities. It also defines key terminology.
- Step 1: Know yourself Guides community foundations in assessing their current capacities, history, fund mix, donor base, board, and organizational culture to set realistic goals. It includes exercises to evaluate assets, operating budget, staff capacity, board make-up, mix of endowment funds, past rural donor targets, and past rural endowment-building successes and failures.
- Step 2: Know your environment Helps teams survey the external economic, social, political, and philanthropic conditions influencing rural endowment building. It covers rural giving and giving potential, area competition, and area culture and economy, including sources for gathering this information.
- Step 3: Determine your market position and set your accompanying rural endowment goals Focuses on understanding how the community foundation is currently perceived and defining its desired market position. It outlines seven questions to assess current position and introduces four prevailing community foundation “positions” (community vitality, nonprofit vitality, regional vitality, and donor service emphasis) to help in this process.
The document emphasizes that RDP is an inclusive and intentional effort to create a shared, dynamic, and capitalized vision for a community’s future, stressing the long-term nature of endowments and the need for “engines” that continually generate and renew RDP.
