9/1/20 — The Bonner Foundation is excited to announce the release of new Capacity Building Step-by-Step Guides for students, staff, and faculty to work with communities across the Bonner Network.
“I hope that my capacity building guides will provide a way for volunteers to assist their organization, especially in a time of virtual service. I hope that Bonners will grow their skills in order to better their programs and their service partners. ”
Recognizing the unique and challenging circumstances institutions across the nation are facing regarding online and remote community engagement in the fall and beyond, these guides are designed to support Bonner Scholars and Leaders, working individually or in teams, to take on capacity-building projects with their community partners, but they can also be used by staff and faculty in the context of programs, center-led initiatives, and courses. All guides are written to allow both remote and in-person project work with schools, nonprofits, government agencies, and social action causes and projects. As Rachayita Shah, Bonner Foundation’s Community-Engaged Scholarship Director, says, "these guides offer great opportunities for students to leverage their leadership and organizational skills to collaborate with community partners for substantial and sustainable solutions. The process of working on capacity-building projects will also help strengthen campus-community partnerships, and support students’ developmental journey."
These guides are designed to work in concert with a process led by staff and students in which they consult with community partners to identify organizational and program needs, using Capacity-Building Opportunities Form, survey, and focus groups. Additionally, these guides support Bonners to take on capstone projects that they develop over multiple years. All guides are accessible in the Bonner Learning Community (https://bonner.mn.co/) as self-paced Webinars, where students, staff, and faculty can follow them and share their work and ideas using the activity feed. The topics for the guides include survey design, program evaluation, and the creation of an operations manual, among others. See the full list below.
The 15 topics were selected from the full list of capacity-building categories across the areas of event management, fundraising, marketing and communications, program and curriculum development, research, technology, and volunteer management system.
The creation of the guides was one of the projects the 2020 National Summer Interns worked on, in collaboration with Bonner Foundation staff Liz Brandt, Community Engagement Director, Dr. Ariane Hoy, Vice President, and Dr. Rachayita Shah, Community Engagement Scholarship Director. Other 2020 Summer Intern projects included new Bonner Connect how-to tutorial videos, expanding graduate school partnerships, and developing online orientation materials. When it comes time for Bonners to use the guides, Brandt is "hopeful that the guides will not only train users on important capacity-building skills but also might spark ideas on remote projects that can be done with community partners."
“I hope these guides inspire community partners for how they can use Bonners at their organizations and our Bonners can make even more of a positive impact in the community.”
Each guide has been developed with research on source material, literature, nonprofit, and Bonner Network examples and reviewed by Foundation and Network staff. The Foundation staff would like to extend its gratitude to the network staff members who took the time to provide feedback and pilot the guides. Sophia Lombardo, Bonner Coordinator at Centre College, was among these staff members. She stated, "The capacity building guides will be incredibly helpful this Fall as we transition to virtual service projects [...] Bonners will have a wider range of skills that will support their service sites and keep everyone healthy at home.” She expressed that she is “also excited that Bonners can see examples from other schools and collaborate with other Bonners across the network by using the chat function on the Bonner Learning Community."
The guides consist of the following features:
An overview of the project
Individual steps needed to complete the project
Lessons within each step to help clarify and build upon some of the overarching ideas presented in the steps.
Visuals (Charts, Videos, Screenshots) that illustrate what the guide is describing
Resources for best practices
The capacity-building guides are now available on the Bonner Learning Community.
To further support the development of capacity building projects with community partners, the Bonner Foundation also created new resources including:
Capacity-Building Opportunities Steps: This document suggests steps to start a conversation with your community partners and identify or develop CB projects.
Bonner Program Community Partner Survey: This document includes text for the survey as well as an exhaustive list of potential capacity-building projects in seven categories, which you can copy and paste into a survey tool that you can share with partners in hard copy form, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc.
Capacity-Building Opportunities Menu: This document is a simplified and visually appealing version of the more exhaustive list of capacity-building opportunities.
All the resources above can be found on the Bonner Wiki here.
Press Release written by Aly Bonilla, 2020 Bonner Foundation National Summer Intern, University of Lynchburg Bonner Leader ‘22