Creating impact by investing in outcomes

The Don Wood Foundation is driven to create impact in the areas we fund. To do this, we rely on our grantees to develop effective programs that succeed and sometimes exceed in meeting their results. Put another way, our community impact is borrowed from grantees’ success in achieving their outcomes.

As we slow down and reflect on the year, we cannot help but be grateful for the relationships we’ve built with our partners and all they’ve accomplished through their programs.  The work is demanding, time-consuming, and, quite frankly, challenging, but it is crucial to building and strengthening our community. We are both humbled and proud.
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We know the considerable time and diligence that go into creating specific programming goals. We often ask ourselves, who will this impact? Will the effect be short-term or long-term? How will this influence our local community and beyond? How do we measure that success? Are the outcomes predictive of the future, leading indicators, or are they a measure of what has happened, lagging indicators? These critical questions set the course for success and help us evaluate our investments in specific programs.

While the process can be time-consuming and, for some, the long-term outcomes not realized for years to come, this season, we celebrate and share in all the success you have achieved this year. All your arduous work and dedication, working to improve lives, inspire passion, make dreams a reality, and build our community by serving the needs of your program’s clients. 
We are proud to have partners who support our vision, mission, and community impact envisioned by Don Wood when he started this foundation. When you succeed in achieving your outcomes, we succeed. Together we are better and more robust, and the impact reaches farther. So, this season, we are incredibly thankful!