Help strengthen mexican community foundations

Comunalia and its member community foundations were quite busy in closing out 2023! 

In the last 6 months, Comunalia continued hosting three communities of practice, where members of the community foundations, grouped by area of work, share experiences, brainstorm ideas and solutions to help each other's obstacles and learn together. Six people received small grants to participate in training or conferences. We also opened our scholarship application process! This program allows each community foundation to identify workshops and events of interest for their particular needs and gives them small grants to help cover part of the cost of attending. In the past semester, there were 6 grant recipients. They participated in events including Fundraising bootcamps, national summits on non-profit strengthening, and promoting addiction prevention in youth programs, as well as international summits on #Shiftthepower and #DíadelasBuenasAcciones.

In addition to these external events, Comunalia also organized other internal opportunities: Starting in July, we selected four more community foundations to receive accompaniment and funds to undertake the Vital Signs methodology. Vital Signs, a Community Foundations of Canada initiative, allows community foundations to gather important data on their communities and explore it with all community stakeholders, giving them a better base for their strategic planning, programming, and alliances. Comunalia will guide the community foundations through this process, culminating in publishing their reports in June 2024. We have also been supporting 4 other community foundations in their journey to learn about The Funding Network collective giving model and plan their events for this coming year! We also continue to support community foundations with tools to implement sustainable development strategies aligned to the 2030 Agenda; this semester we implemented a project to map the contributions of the 17 community foundations to the Agenda that will be published in 2024. Finally, in November 2023, Comunalia held its annual assembly in Saltillo, Coahuila. Meeting together allowed us to have important strategic discussions about the future of the organization, strengthen our bonds, and offer a four-hour leadership workshop. 

We are very excited for the year to come, and continue working and learning together with our members!