Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment

This renewal grant would support legal and community organizing to ensure that California’s San Joaquin Valley finally attains air quality levels that meet federal health standards. The community organizing models and legal precedents established through this work may eventually benefit efforts in other parts of the country that are similarly failing to meet federal air quality standards, particularly in the upper Midwest, where the Foundation is supporting a myriad of approaches to retire some of the nation’s oldest and worst-polluting coal plants.

The Center on Race Poverty, and the Environment is seeking a strategic planning consultant to help the organization revise and update its existing Strategic Plan, based on a survey to help determine how is CRPE viewed externally by allies, opponents, and decision-makers. A consultant funded by the OE grant will: • Work with staff, management and the board to refine the key questions that need to resolved during the planning process. • Provide a recommendation on the degree of refinement needed to create a strategic plan for 2012-2014. • Conduct limited external/internal scans on key questions that emerged from the staff/board retreat. • Work with Executive Director and sub-committee of board/staff to plan and facilitate a staff/board retreat. • Work with the staff and board to answer the key questions and create a process for addressing long-range questions that cannot be answered immediately. • Write a realistic strategic plan document that builds on our previous strategic plan, but moves our work forward internally and externally. • Help draft implementation plans for each component of the strategic plan.

We recommend this grant will allow CRPE's Executive Director to benefit from Spitfire Strategies Executive Communications Training "Enhanced Technical Assistance" program. This is a training program specifically for Executive Directors of non profit organizations that takes place over the course of a year. However the program is designed to benefit the entire organization and build lasting communications capacity. The webinar and follow-up consulting includes other members of the organization, and will help the entire organization to improve its communications skills.