The Metcalf Foundation advances its mission through three primary approaches: practice, policy, and collaboration. Our work begins and is rooted in community-based efforts at achieving tangible outcomes. We use our grant-making programs to support initiatives and organizations that are modeling innovative approaches to intractable problems. We focus on efforts that are community-based and address existing challenges in new ways. We are particularly interested in approaches that can serve as models for other communities or that show potential to be applied on a larger scale.
We seek to contribute to system-level reform by generating strong policy ideas. Since much of our work is rooted in community experience or is derived from the field, the Foundation often acts as a conduit, connecting both bottom-up and top-down perspectives around ideas and recommendations. We see great value in supporting intellectual risk through the solicitation and dissemination of new ideas that probe the edges of knowledge and current practice.
We believe that large-scale social change requires collaborations of all kinds, particularly those that cross sectors. We try to move these ideas and models through a range of activities including efforts towards organization or constituency building, initiatives in thought leadership, projects that help people understand key drivers of change, opportunities that build trust across sectors or perspectives, and endeavours to build broad alliances and networks.
Underpinning our approach is a conviction in the importance of integrative thought and action, and that interconnected responses – those that employ a variety of strategies concurrently – can be helpful in moving an issue.
At all times, we seek to augment the capacity of people and organizations in order to enable them to learn, adapt, and flourish in their work.
Our strategies continue to evolve as we learn from our work, our collaborators, and the ever-changing environment in which we work.