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Bridging the gap among cultures: interview with Brett Lalonde, vice-president of the Jewish Community of Florence

Simona — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:46:28 +0000

We consulted with the Jewish Community to develop their start up in terms of fundraising and organizational development.
Beyond the initiatives related to funds, the hybrid model developed to set up the Development Unit saw the active engagement of the governance together with a group of young volunteers selected among the Community members upon a call for applicants.
The initial training and volunteering collaboration had the purpose of creating a solid group of dynamic volunteers who could manage the Community’s fundraising activities.
Two years later, the group counts five operational participants who are actively committed to developing a multi-target and multi-vehicle fundraising initiative to support the Jewish Community. A significant part of the Board of Directors itself, too, is actively engaged into the whole process.
Of course, the best has (always) yet to come, but the basis was laid.

Enjoy this interview with Brett Lalonde, who is currently Vice President of the Jewish Community of Florence.

Brett, first of all I would like to let the space to introduce you. You are from Seattle, it’s a long way to Florence!
Would you tell us some more about you?

Like many young American students, I came to Florence on a study abroad program to learn Italian and it was on this trip that I met my husband and decided to continue my studies in Italy, first at the American University of Rome where I studied International Relations, and then at the University of Florence, where I studied Languages and Foreign Literature.
I must say that it wasn’t actually our plan to stay in Italy, we had always envisioned ourselves moving back to the United States together after University, but at that time we both found jobs in the fields we were interested in and it become increasingly difficult to leave that lives that we were building here.
Judaism has always been an important part of my life, in various degrees at different stages, but ever-present.
In fact, one of the first places I came to in Florence was the Jewish Community, where I immediately felt at home.
Over the years, raising a Jewish family in Florence, the Jewish Community became an increasingly central part of my life, starting with the Jewish School, and then the Temple and the Community as a reference point for the Jewish holidays. At a certain point, I decided that I wanted to get involved and I looked into volunteer opportunities, and in 2020, I decided to run for the elections for the Council of the Jewish Community of Florence. In these last three years I have worked to improve internal and external communications, trying to find new ways for people to stay connected.

We consulted with the Jewish Community in Florence starting from a contact message where you asked us about possible lines of development for the fundraising initiatives led by the Community. At that time, you were mostly engaged on major donors, but you thought your activities needed a boost and, most important, a more organized structure.
I remember that among our first questions for you was about how your governance were onboard, so we started talking from this perspective and then broadening the conversation to the whole organization. You are the one responsible for taking your Board … on board, just to use the name of this blog.
Can you tell us your starting point to raise your idea of a well-structured development and took the responsibility to stimulate the other Board members to engage in such process?

My first mission after the new Council was installed was to analyze how fundraising activities were organized and carried out; the basics in terms how donor data was maintained, how relationships were being cultivated, how we engaged with our donors, and what channels of communications we had with them. My goal was to understand what was working well, and what areas needed improvement.
What I found was that the Community had been very successful over the years in raising money through foundation grants, with a good network at a local and national level, in particular thanks to Opera del Tempio Ebraico, a foundation dedicated to restoring and preserving of Jewish monuments in Florence, Siena and Monte San Savino, and thanks to an internal staff member, who is now the secretary of our Community, who had a lot of experience researching and obtaining grants from bank foundations and funding from public amministration. At the same time, it became clear that for the Jewish Community, donor relations, in particular retaining current donors and keeping them engaged in our organization, was an area that needed improvement. What we were missing, at an operational level, was coordinated effort and internal manpower to actually carry out the actions needed to engage with individual and private donors, basically we were missing communicators.
At the same time, there was also generational change underway: within the Community there was a group of tech-savy “millennials” with strong communication skills seeking ways to be active and involved in the Community. As you said, getting the Board…on board was key, but even more importantly was building a bridge between the board with the next generation of board members, so engaging tomorrow’s community leaders in the process: broadening the conversation in both directions, with the board, but also with future board members.

In the introduction to this interview, it was mentioned the hybrid model of our consultancy aimed to set up a Development Unit within the Jewish Community in Florence. You told me that there were several enthusiastic, proactive young members that we could have involved into the process offering them an opportunity in terms of training and taking part to a consultancy path we were about to start, so we arranged a call for applicants delivered by the Community.
We were – and still are – really impressed by the proactive and skilled approach of that group, that started as volunteers and increasingly became fundraisers and communicators.
What was the feedback you received about this way to frame the development of the organization?
This active group of young members of the Community became the development unit. Each team member of this unit contributes specific skills: in addition to myself, there is another team member who is a native English speaker who curates the translations, there is another team member who is a social media manager and expert in professional management of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and other social media as well as webmaster and site builder, there is another team members who majored in intercultural studies and brought experience in crowdfunding. Within this development unit we also have a board member who is active in writing thank you letters.
At the same time, the training that we did with ENGAGEDin was with a wider group of participants who responded to the call for applicants that also included the currenty secretary, a member of our Culture Committee, our vice Rabbi and and broader group of participants who are now part a of wider pool of resources that the development group can count on: for example, one of the participants thanks to her expertise in Excel helped us map our constituents, another participant thanks to his expertise in finance and economics helps us when we need to come up with a business plan for a specific project. So while we created a development unit, we also created a wider pool of resources within the organization with a wide range of specializations that we can count on when we need them, a sort of circle that encompasses the development unit.

Among the participants at both the assessment and training session there was the whole Board of the Community. We were aware that most of them was quite far from fundraising in terms of personal history and competences, but we appreciated their – I mean: your – will to contribute to development. You raised up many ideas and suggestions that were, from our perspective, concrete signals of an engaged, or eager to participate, Board of Directors. What happened then? Are your Directors still engaged in the process?

The entire Council and all employees of the Jewish Community participated in the training, the idea was to get as many people within the organization on board as possible. I think that each board member and each employee brought out of the training an important “take away message”: that we all have to be involved in this process, fundraising is not a one-man show. Since then, part of the board has become involved, specifically with writing thank letters, this is a small but extremely significant sign, and with the employees we have been able to define specific procedures e that positively support the fundraising activities.

You are a perfect mix of two different cultures and, most important as far as this blog concerns, two different approaches to fundraising. What did you bring from being the one that started this peer-to-peer engagement process? What worked best and what didn’t?

I can start by saying that in my personal experience managing two cultures is not easy! In terms of communications, translating the message is never enough, our communications have to be declined in different ways in terms of tone, pitch, approach and timing.
One example is the project to raise money for the restoration of our Synagogue. One example is the project to raise money for the restoration of our Synagogue. We found that our American audience was more familiar with GoFundMe and were more inclined to accept it as a safe and valuable tool, many American donors already had accounts and regularly donated through crowdfunding platforms, where some of our Italian donors were reluctant to use these.
There is one funny episode that I can tell you about regarding a project that got off to a “rough” start. We had set up a stand in the garden of the Synagogue during a cultural event with hundreds of visitors and we were asking people to leave their names and email addresses for our mailing list. To attract their attention, we printed out a huge QR Code on front of an oversized t-shirt that said “SCAN ME” and once scanned, it brought users to a Google form where they could leave their contact information to sign up for our newsletter. Then we had one of our board members wear the t-shirt and mingle in the garden with visitors, asking them to scan him. Well, unfortunately, our timing was off, because we were just coming out of the lockdown in Italy and at that time people automatically associated the QR Codes with the “Green Pass” (the European equivalent to the U.S. vaccination card) and many people mistakenly thought that our board member was on safety patrol sent out to check people’s green pass status. If the project were done today, it think that it would be successful, but at that time it had the opposite effect. Obviously this was not a cultural problem, but one of timing.
Going back to your question about culture, on a more general level, in America professional fundraising is a well established industry, but I feel like this is taking off in Italy too, especially in terms of establishing a fundraising “culture” with private donors. In the past, our organization has relied predominantly on funding from bank foundations and government funding, but we are now trying to shift the focus to increasingly include support from private donors as well. This has entailed a major change in our organization’s mindset, we’ve had to restructure ourselves to accommodate this new role that private donors play in our Community. The training and consultancy we did with ENGAGEDin helped our organization to prepare for this cultural change so that we, as an organization, could better manage donor care and cultivate relations with individual donors.

To conclude, would you let us know your plan in terms of fundraising and development? What are you working – and going to work – on?
Like many organizations in Italy, we are facing rising operating costs, and at the same time, we are dealing how to fund new capital projects – two, in particular that have surfaced in the past two months, one regarding the restoration of the tower of the Synagogue in Florence and the other regarding the repair of damage to the Synagogue in Siena following the recent earthquake last February. Both the Florence and Siena Synagogues are part of our Community’s “jurisdiction”. We have been quite unlucky as these two major problems both require significant capital investments and they have both emerged at the same time. We are actively mobilizing two campaigns to fund both of these emergencies.

For Florence, the cost of the restoration work is estimated at just over 80k. We will receive approximately 40k in funding from Italian bank foundations and 20k from the company that manages our our Jewish Museum, but in addition to this we have decided to bridge the difference by launching a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe with the goad of raising the remaining 20k from individual donors (this goes back to what we were saying before about changing our level of attention to individual donors and the shift including private donations in our fundraising mix).
For Siena, the situation is more complex, the work is estimated at over 300k. We are currently in the process of carrying out preliminary research and planning our fundraising strategy.
Our fundraising goal of raising at least 20k through private donations, to provide a quick update, was very successful: we ended up raising 28k in private donations and we were able to cover the entire amount needed to move forward with the urgent restoration work.

Brett Lalonde is currently Vice President of the Jewish Community of Florence. Originally from Seattle, she has lived in Italy for more than 20 years. She works for a Florence based tech company that operates in the area of Online Brand Protection where she manages Domain Recovery service that operates in several European countries. As a board member for the Jewish Community she has worked apply her skill set and knowledge of new technology to improve internal and external communications, finding new ways for people to stay connected. She has led a range of fundraising activities including building relationships with donors, maintaining donor data and communications, organizing a yearly Sustainer Program, crowdfunding for specific projects, as well as organizing fundraising training for tomorrow’s community leaders.

L'articolo Bridging the gap among cultures: interview with Brett Lalonde, vice-president of the Jewish Community of Florence proviene da Engagedin.

Engagement and fundraising: interview with Giancarlo Della Luna, corporate donor and Board member of the Foundation “Archivio Diaristico Nazionale”

giustieventi — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:24:18 +0000

A few weeks ago I trained a class of the Advanced training course “Talenti per il Fundraising”, run by Fondazione CRT (an Italian Foundation based in Turin), on corporate fundraising. This lesson followed another one, a couple of weeks before, dedicated to “Board and fundraising”.
Preparing the lesson on corporate, I was looking for case histories able to provide practical examples: I thought it would be interesting to bring out the point of view of someone from companies, often viewed with a certain awe by fundraisers. At the same time, I also wanted a perspective that, in some way, had to do with the aspects connected to the strategy of both sides – company and nonprofit organization. And also, just so as not to miss anything, even a point of view that “demythologizes” the (alas) very widespread thought on “easy” or “impossible” causes – I perfectly know that there are more complex or less “popular” causes but this does not imply that they can not find their donors – not for this reason, at least.
This way, I thought of the “perfect case”, the one that crossed all the dynamics I had in mind and that, in my opinion, could have offered a useful perspective for those who are learning – and many more, to tell the truth.

We met Giancarlo Della Luna, entrepreneur and founder of L.A. Sistemi, an Italian company based in Tuscany that designs and develops telecontrol and telemanagement systems for technological networks, industrial plants, and local areas, during our collaboration with the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, as a corporate donor.
Such definition, to be honest, does not give evidence to the approach of a person who embodies many roles, all connected to the culture of giving and engagement with a cause: personal engagement, progressive awareness, interest in the development of the cause , involvement in the definition of the strategic plan as a Board member. All steps that took place over a few years and that today see Mr. Della Luna to be both a corporate donor and a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, embodying the idea of an “ambassador of values” which is associated – or should be – with the role of a Board member.

Here is an excerpt of his words during the abovementioned lesson: I believe that the ideas emerged can give an idea of what it means to be “on board” of an organization.
Enjoy the reading!

Giancarlo, would you tell us something about yourself, who you are and how and why you approached the Archive?

I am an entrepreneur, my company works on the design and production of remote control and remote management systems for the management of technological networks, industrial plants, the territory and the environment. I am an active member of the non-profit organization Transafrica Sviluppo, an NGO that works Education and provides water supply to Mali and Niger, in particular by working with Tuareg families and communities.
More than 30 years ago, I met Saverio Tutino, an Italian journalist who was a foreign correspondent in Latin America, founder of the Archive of the Diaries. Upon his return to Italy he understood that history must not be made only on history textbooks, rather on “common people”. For this reason, he founded the Archive of the Diaries in Pieve Santo Stefano, close to Arezzo (Tuscany), a small village heavily bombed during)he II world war that, in stories of ordinary people, has a chance to reborn after that wound.
My fascination comes from this. My father was imprisoned in Mauthausen, and his story is the one of an ordinary man who did exceptional things for that historic moment.
Finding myself in Pieve, then, in a place of memories where these “exceptional” ordinary lives are the ones that I always heard myself being told at home, prompted me to join the Archive, the Pieve Award (“The Day of the Diary”, nda), to establish relationships with all those who meet annually at the Award, in September, and with whom I share an empathic love for the inner values that stand behind the stories as a work of collective memory.

You didn’t start as a donor of the Archive, but you got there because you felt the cause close to your life values. What was your first time with the Archive as a donor, from being a person who went to Pieve to becoming a donor?

I started involving the people I work with in the Transafrica Association, bringing them to Pieve; I also involved friends, let them know that place to which I felt so close, and they too, somehow, felt this magic.
Then I met the wonderful group of volunteers and the staff who work with passion in the Foundation. I am an entrepreneur and I know, however, that passion is not enough in the long run. So I started ask myself how these people (the Foundation) managed to move forward, how do they make their passion agree with the needs required year after year.
When you take part, for example, in the Pieve Award, you realize that it is a very emotional event and that emotions are what keep people together – the participants as well as the staff and volunteers; on the side of costs and expenses, however, there is always a kind of modesty, although the commitment it requires is evident.
In a “brutal” way, then, I asked them directly how the “economic matter” worked, how they managed to make the whole activity sustainable, given that the Archive works not only on the occasion of the Pieve Award, but throughout the year and that the budgets needed, in my opinion, a fairly massive corroboration.
I thought I wanted to help in some way.

This need to “help out” combines your interest towards the cause with your entrepreneur mindset. I find it particularly because you are among those corporate donors who are not stuck simply on projects but, in a most long-term perspective, think at how to make the organization (and its mission) sustainable through giving to cover the structural costs. Your motto seems to be “if I want to support them, I want to do it from a structural point of view”.
What determined you to focus on the mission rather than on one-shot projects?

Back to my NGO: to fund its projects, I organize events and I’m happy when I can find a sponsor and guarantee the visibility that sponsorship requires. However, these are spot initiatives that are useful, but do not give continuity. When you draw up a budget, spot revenues cannot be the only ones – they are certainly fine for initiatives like the Pieve Award, but they must be accompanied by more stable actions. Why do newspapers, for example, ask for subscriptions? Because this is what allows you to plan – and without a proper planning you can’t go on.
From my point of view as an entrepreneur, having a clear idea on costs means being able to focus your efforts, to involve other partners and try new activities – the Piccolo Museo del Diario, for example, is a project set up in the recent years that is raising up its importance as a museum. I care about how to ensure its sustainability, both through sponsorships and recurring gifts.

In your “journey” with the Archive, which I find interesting because it is linked to the issue of giving continuity to the organization’s mission, progressive awareness has made you become from “close to the cause” to donor, then a corporate donor, and finally a Board member. What is your approach to your role within the Board?

The first thing the Board had to this year was whether or not to realize the Pieve Award, in September, and how, because – for the first time in its history – the event was in doubt. We have taken on some responsibilities, but the inner spirit of being part of the Archive is this: being there, for the community.
My first objective, as a Board member, is to urge the Board itself on how important relationships are for the continuity and development of the mission. The great privilege connected to being on the Board is “making things go well” and, to do so, you need to be proper funded. My second commitment, then, is to look for donors following a peer to peer approach: I have already gone ahead in this direction so that, for example, the funds needed to arrange the next Pieve Award have already been secured; or the staff dedicated to fundraising is adequately trained and sized, so as to be able to properly develop the fundraising strategy .
Last thing: there are more than 9.000 diaries filed in the Archive; there is the need to expand and find new spaces to allocate the materials. It is an ambitious goal that can involve the whole community. It is necessary not to be afraid to go seeking for money because the Archive is a national value that must be developed more and more and this means, in my opinion, facing things with an entrepreneurial mindset.
We have a civic duty not to stop receiving people’s memories, and my job as a Board member is to “look” at the staff’s projects and seek for the money to make them happen. The Archive is an asset of the community, and this is how we have to consider the issue of development.
There is no economic advantage to staying on the Board of Directors, just the interest in doing well and showing that you can do things wisely.

Your story is what is usually told in the books – fundraising as it should be, progressive involvement, closeness to the cause, asking yourself the question of the sustainability of the cause over time, being a Board member who thinks in these terms and who personally goes to seek further resources.
Is there a suggestion that you feel you can give to fundraisers starting from your dual role as Board member and entrepreneur that look at the theme of fundraising from both sides?

On the subject that belongs to me most – that of continuous corporate supporter – we need to think about the reasons why an entrepreneur approaches a cause. Because it is a local entrepreneur who somehow wishes to make his presence felt? Or because it has affinity with these themes – in my case the theme of humanity, memory, being together?
I believe that we need to look for the “philosophical function” that brings us closer to the cause, and the fundraiser ‘s task is to understand the sensitivity of the “institutional” entrepreneur, the one that can be a long-term donor.
Go and look for what this connection is and then make sure that through it we can find a common thread, a way to go together: and this is the thing that may seem more difficult but, at the same time, is the essence of fundraising and the challenge for those who deal with it professionally.

L'articolo Engagement and fundraising: interview with Giancarlo Della Luna, corporate donor and Board member of the Foundation “Archivio Diaristico Nazionale” proviene da Engagedin.

Governance and women leadership: interview with Helene Wolf, co-founder of FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders

giustieventi — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 16:17:10 +0000

I met Helene at IFC, where she lead an interesting session on women leadership … that I could not avoid to participate!
Helene is one of those people with whom share a common ground of thoughts and projects about meaningful questions – sometimes it happens and generate lots of new ideas!
I appreciated her approach to feminist leadership and the possibility to develop projects even in Italy (I will keep you updated about it soon) with the NPO she co-founded – FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders.
It is a pleasure, then, to have her on this blog to gather a few thoughts about governance – since she is a Board member – and women leadership. Four questions are very few compared to the complexity of the whole issue, I am perfectly aware of that; however, I am going to resume the conversation in the forthcoming blogposts – and, of course, I am eager to listen to your feedback and comments.

Enjoy the reading!

Helene, the payoff on your website says “We call on all civil society organisations to match the percentage of women in leadership positions to the percentage of women in their staff”. What is the situation both in Europe and globally, from your perspective?

Women are underrepresented in top leadership positions of civil society organisations; both globally and from what we know so far also nationally. Based on the data we gathered in our FAIR SHARE Monitor, a man is currently 5 times more likely to rise to a senior management or board position than a woman. Considering the fact, that the workforce in the civil sector are largely women, this gap is outrageous and illustrates the inequalities in our workplaces.

But it is not only a gap in representation. I think, the credibility gap between the external goals of the sector around equality, social justice and human rights is even worse. How can we legitimately claim to work towards a more equitable world, if we do not manage to live up to these objectives within our own structures?

The word “feminist” is often perceived as somewhat intimidating. I personally find that it is among those words that require to be contextualized in order to grab their strength. There is a huge need to talk about what being feminist – and feminism in general – implies nowadays. What is your way to define a feminist today?

Anyone who believes in and aims to advance equal rights for all genders is a feminist. This is why we also advocate for feminist leadership as the new paradigm for the civil society sector – it strives for intersectionality, representation and collective decision-making and can be practised by men and women.

The UN Secretary-General and the Canadian prime Minister call themselves feminists so others, especially men, should follow their example and take a stand on gender equality.

This blog is focused on governance and its relationship with development of nonprofit organizations. You are a board member at FairShare, which is an NPO that has a multi-national all-woman Board of Directors. Which are the main features that, in your daily job at FairShare, are capable to express your leadership?

Our ambition is to explore feminist tools and practises also in our governance and decision-making to experiment and hopefully lead by example. This is a challenge for me to keep all the different streams of work and ideas focused and work with a large number of enthusiastic individuals to ensure that we have the best approach possible. Collective decision-making is time-consuming and sometimes exhausting but also a lot of fun and rewarding and I truly believe in the power of the collective voices and perspectives. I have already benefitted so much from insights and advice from the FAIR SHARE Action Circle – the collective decision-making body I established together with Emily Bove, the founder of The Feminist Leadership Project – and others who believe things can be different. FAIR SHARE as an organisation and me personally would not be where we are today without the amazing group of people around us.

We will have the first Italian Nonprofit Women Camp at the beginning of March. Would you provide any suggestion to women in the Third Sector to encourage their organizations to put more efforts in advance this issue?

I think, it is time we claim our seat at the table – on our own terms. One reason we started the FAIR SHARE Monitor was to give women in the sector the evidence about the gap in representation so that they can make a strong argument for organisational change. We will not significantly change the number of women in leadership without re-thinking our cultures and structures that have over-benefitted men for decades. So we have to get organised, act in solidarity and define new rules for leadership. A FAIR SHARE Monitor that looks at the situation in Italy could be a powerful starting point to mobilise around our shared goal of gender equality in the civil society sector. We would be happy to support such an effort.

Helene co-founded FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders e.V. and has been leading the setup of the initiative on a voluntary basis since then. Over the first year, she built a coalition of organisations and individuals committed to gender parity and feminist leadership in the social impact sector. The FAIR SHARE Monitor measures the number of women in leadership positions with the aim to achieve gender equality in the sector by 2030.

Before founding FAIR SHARE, she served as the Deputy Executive Director at the International Civil Society Centre where she managed the development from a start-up phase to a mid-sized organisation. In this capacity she also worked closely with the top leadership of the largest internationally operating civil society organisations on issues such as governance, accountability and cooperation. She lives in Berlin, Germany and has two sons.

L'articolo Governance and women leadership: interview with Helene Wolf, co-founder of FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders proviene da Engagedin.

Interview with Luigino Vallet, President of Fondazione di Comunità della Valle d’Aosta

giustieventi — Mon, 20 May 2019 10:46:56 +0000

Community Foundations are recently created philanthropic intermediaries, which, conceptually speaking, are one of the most interesting new developments in local community-based philanthropy of the last few years.
Their experiences are interesting and it is helpful to look at the approach to governance of people active in a Community Foundation.

Founded in 2008, its activities cover the territory of the Aosta Valley – a small region distinguished by different identities, a feature that makes it a good place to test activities stemming from a long-standing philanthropic tradition (an interesting book on this subject was published in 2013: Solidarité et Subsidiarité en Vallée d’Aoste: une symbiose séculaire).

Luigino Vallet* has been President of the foundation since it was formed, and, consequently, has promoted its formation, its consolidation as a community player and its development. Above all, he is someone with a deep passion for everything to do with “care for the community”.

We developed a board coaching consultancy program with the foundation, which has led to a number of significant changes in the perception of board members’ role, starting inside the board itself.

I’d like to ask you how one can acquire a clear understanding of one’s role as a member of the governing body in the development of an organisation?

The answer could be that this understanding is acquired almost automatically through a certain experience in the management of organisations – in the profit sector, in government and in the voluntary sector. The important thing is to be clear about the mission of the organisation and to plan activities in a coordinated fashion between the board, the operating structure and the recipients of the organisation’s mission.

One of the often critical issues for management bodies is the “relationship” with fundraising, which is often (mistakenly) seen as “begging from one’s friends” and as such experienced with ill-concealed irritation.
Whereas since one of the core objectives of the Community Foundation is to “foster a donation culture”, it has always encouraged the diffusion of appeals for donations, thus fulfilling its role as a philanthropic intermediary in the community.
But how is fundraising seen internally?

In the last few years, there has been a change in the internal view among the foundation’s directors. Initially, fundraising was seen as a way of doing charitable work at an aggregate level. Over time, by working on the perceived needs of the community, we have tried to move to a fundraising approach that supports local players in the voluntary sector and also to catalyse other resources, not only of a financial nature, and to steer the funds raised to projects and activities with effective impacts on the territory.

Some of the work of the board coaching program envisaged a more “international” approach, with the assumption of formal commitments by board members, both those already in office and as a platform for the selection of candidates for the board in the future.
Have you seen a change in board members’ understanding of their role, in terms of participation, sharing, and real commitment?

Our work with you was met with a certain degree of enthusiasm at the start of the program.

My perception is that things were slowly acquired, especially after the identification, discussion and approval of the “directors’ guidelines”. The guidelines have been a great help in recent weeks with the imminent arrival of potential new directors, who will probably join at the next board meeting.

There is also a greater willingness to donate at personal level.

Finally, the program envisages a commitment by the foundation to provide periodic training – and for the directors to take it up – thus creating more occasions for discussion to understand the importance of the role of the directors in their own community and consequently to act as “ambassadors” for the foundation.

I’d like to end by asking you for a suggestion for your “colleagues'” – presidents or directors of Voluntary Sector organisations – on the issue of boards and fundraising, meaning fundraising in its wider significance as a sustainability tool that brings together, creates development, encourages virtuous relationships.

Giving suggestions to “colleagues” in other organisations that differ greatly is a difficult task and could conceal a certain presumptuousness on my part. For example, there are clearly many differences even among the community foundations (take the most recent Assifero meeting in Brescia last October).

I would simply suggest that the boards of the organisations take great care in choosing both “political” and “technical” directors, and once they have chosen them, that they follow their development and motivation with meetings to discuss activities to be planned and implemented. This should create a climate of mutual trust that can be made tangible to donors.

Also, as regards directors, time should be devoted to discussing the pursuit of the organisation’s mission and building up a shared vision among the directors of the organisation’s role.

Therefore, on the specific question of fundraising, I would say that a donor-oriented approach should be constantly followed, which means providing donors with advance information on what they are being asked to support, and, later, with meaningful reports on how the funds raised have been used. I think this is also a way to strengthen the ties of trust between donors and the fundraising organisation, without which it is impossible to activate virtuous processes that foster sustainable and consistent community growth.

*Luigino Vallet. Born in Aosta on 23 June 1942. After completing his high-school studies and obtaining a degree in business management, Vallet worked at Enel, notably in middle manager training, at the Aosta Valley Regional Authority as director of the Employment Agency, and later as a consultant on active employment policies in institutions in and outside Italy. He has always been involved in voluntary work and social cooperation. In 1999 he took part in the formation of the Aosta Valley CSV voluntary services centre, and was a member of the Italian CSV coordination team for a number of years.

L'articolo Interview with Luigino Vallet, President of Fondazione di Comunità della Valle d’Aosta proviene da Engagedin.