To Be Useful Is To Serve

Capacity Building

The Four Steps

Mission: Congruent with founding core beliefs.

Guiding Principles: Animating work to ensure mission fulfillment.

Strategic Plan: Aligned with mission and guiding principles; reviewed regularly.

Plan of Work: Tactics to fulfill strategic plan.

Effective capacity building, upon the foundation of realizing these four steps, and understanding the dynamics of the invisible and the philanthropic spirit, is much more art than science and much more theology than ideology.

Lukenbill & Associates is a consulting practice working to strengthen transformative human service nonprofit grassroots organizations.

In our daily lives we are called to service, and for many of us that service involves providing leadership to a grassroots community organization whose mission is something we care deeply about and to whose work we bring great passion and commitment.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of grassroots work is the spiritual toll it can take on us, the difficulty in finding and sustaining financial support for our organization, and the often endless array of problems confronting the communities we are trying to help.

Our practice's mission to provide help to grassroots organizations is as deeply important to us as is your work to you.

The well of moral strength, spiritual refreshment, and increased organizational capacity is a well drawn on with some effort. Our work revolves around reducing that effort, while increasing the richness of the well you are able to draw upon.

"It is hard to imagine making any important change in life without an inward journey. Think of Christ going into the desert for forty days. It was in the desert that he dealt with his own doubts and temptations and from which he emerged having chosen his freedom and his destiny. It is in our own internal deserts that we remember what really matters. It is on the inward journey, taken over time, that we develop the capacity for intimacy with ourselves and with others, with the environment, and with the world. It is deciding that we are deep human beings with inner lives that defines who we are and brings our ideals back into focus." (Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, p. 76)

"A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people's hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further - if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person - then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision." (Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, p. 206)