Case Study: Thriving Through Challenge
Background
Center for Healing & Hope (CHH) is a nonprofit healthcare and advocacy organization focused on providing affordable care for the uninsured and support for immigrants living in the community.
They have a decades-long history of growth, providing critical services for underserved populations, making a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of the communities they serve.
But when Center for Healing & Hope came to us, they were in crisis. Operating out of an inadequate facility, they were contending with the fallout from the abrupt departure of their former executive director, and experiencing revenue challenges that threatened their fiscal solvency – and that was before the COVID crisis struck.
Exacerbating issues, a gulf existed between the staff and the board. There was a lack of trust, of transparency – an “us versus them” mentality.
Our Approach
At Ad Lucem Group, we helped CHH tackle their challenges through several key steps:
- Meeting regularly with the executive planning committee to support them in their communication and strategic planning work
- Surveying CHH stakeholders in the broader community
- Facilitating multiple focus groups, with both staff and community members
- Convening a strategic planning summit with all staff members, board members, and several external community stakeholders to catalyze key strategic initiatives and revitalize relationships.
Through these actions, we helped conversations happen that broke down barriers, and provided an opportunity for a clear, shared strategic vision to emerge centered on key goals and the purpose of the organization.
The Results
The results were transformative: revitalized relationships between the board and the broader organization, and greater alignment to purpose and clarity that drove their strategic initiatives that lay ahead.
Over the course of a year, Center for Healing & Hope was able to:
- Identify and move into new, upgraded facilities;
- Launch a successful fundraising campaign;
- Develop new, sustaining revenue streams;
- Become state affiliated COVID-19 testing site that performed over 25,000 tests to help combat the pandemic;
- Solidify and expand their capabilities to serve the most vulnerable in the community.
These results CHH was able to achieve over the course of the year – following as a result of their collective efforts – far exceeded any expectation they held when we first engaged with them.
“Patrick, and everyone at Ad Lucem group, combine the right amount of critical strategic thinking with organizational empathy that is rare among consultants. We felt challenged as well as supported throughout our strategic planning process. We were equipped to have important, and sometimes hard, conversations that have brought us to a place where we have a better understanding of ourselves, our board, our staff and our mission. We were able to break out of our arrested development as an organization and take the next steps toward becoming a sustainable nonprofit with a vision for how to serve our community. We learned that being strategic isn’t static; the tools we received from Patrick will serve us well into the future as we continue to grow.”
Missy Schrock