Last week at the Bringing It Home conference, the Co-owners of Partners for Impact, Beth Bordeaux and Stan Holt, led an interactive session on organizational capacity building. The session introduced participants to the Marguerite Casey Organizational Capacity Assessment. It is one tool among many that organizations use to assess their organizational capacity. It has four overarching domain areas: Leadership Capacity, Adaptive Capacity, Management Capacity and Operational Capacity. Partners for Impact shared specific recommendations on how to use the assessment in your organization.
In the session, each participant had the opportunity to complete the form for their own organization using a simple 1-5 Likert Scale. 1 indicated that the organization had not started or did not have that capacity. While the 5 represented the ideal and their organization did not need to make changes. 47 people completed the assessment.
Based on the responses, some simple averages were calculated. The characteristic with the highest average was the clear expression of the organization’s mission and purpose. This was in-line with the fact that the overall Leadership Capacity had the highest average of the four domains. Human resources planning that includes an HR plan and expert staff scored the lowest average and indicated the greatest need. The second lowest average was the funding model and the ability to have sustainable revenue going forward.