Alberta Culture has launched a new toolkit aimed at helping organizations in the not-for-profit sector to find and sustain lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with corporations and other financial champions in the private sector.
Last Wednesday, Culture Minister Heather Klimchuk launched Building Corporate Relationships – A Toolkit for Non-profits as a free online resource for all. When she took over the Culture portfolio from Lindsay Blackett three years ago, she conducted a forum that included sustainability in its discussion.
It is intended to help the province’s approximately 24,500 non-profit groups and registered charities to overcome some of their biggest challenges, including the huge task of standing out in such a crowd.
“Right from the beginning, you know you’re in a big pool. The challenge is telling your story,” she said. “We all know groups are doing tremendous work and they’re all volunteer-driven. The challenge is improving those outcomes and then making sure that you know what you want.”
“When I travel all over Alberta, whether I’m meeting with a heritage group or a sports group or a social services group or an arts group, it’s the same question: ‘How can we find a champion? How can we find someone so we can become sustainable and be more predictable in our funding?’ ”
The toolkit has been in development for a year with input from the corporate sector and from stakeholder groups like Volunteer Alberta. It is meant to benefit both sides of the equation by facilitating the necessary relationship-building between private groups and the non-profits.
“Effective relationships are based on each partner contributing to the success of the other. This toolkit helps bring nonprofits and corporate sector partners together to achieve common goals and build on that success to discover new opportunities to work as a team for the long-term benefit of the community,” she commented in a prepared press release.
Pat Phelan, the director of volunteer services at the Community Information and Volunteer Centre, or CIVC, added that this has the potential to ease the workload of a lot of volunteers and employees in the non-profit sector.
“In the non-profit sector, we are constantly looking for funding to keep our doors open and to keep our programs going. We spend a lot of time writing grants and justifying our existence. [The Minister Heather Klimchuk] decided that the non-profits could use some help in developing relationships with the corporate sector.”
“This is a real culmination of putting something together that I think is going to be very useful,” Klimchuk said, adding that it is intended as a living document as well, meaning that it will evolve along with input from its respondents.
“Let’s all work together to improve it as we move forward. There’s real meat in this. There’s lots of things that’ll help a non-profit.”
The toolkit is available at culture.alberta.ca/community-and-voluntary-services/resources-and-links/tools. There is a link to it on the CIVC’s website as well.
The site also includes a Financial Assistance Summary, a directory of approximately 200 granting foundations and their programs.
