Catalytic leadership

The goal of every philanthropic organization is to support meaningful work that aligns with its organizational mission. But how an organization defines “meaningful” may vary, and projects can sometimes be funded without a clear understanding of their ultimate impact on the community.

This fall, as Mid-Iowa Health Foundation celebrates its 40th anniversary supporting the Central Iowa community, our organization has intentionally adopted a practice of “catalytic leadership.” A growing phrase in the philanthropic sector, catalytic leadership asks funding organizations to move from simply being a grantmaker to fostering transformational change in their community.

Catalytic leadership involves identifying the major issues your organization seeks to focus on and convening other experts, partners and funders in the community to learn more about these issues. Catalytic leadership also means identifying areas for potential change within your community and building collaborative efforts to address these areas of significant need. In catalytic leadership, your philanthropic organization is not a silent funding partner; rather, it plays an active role in guiding how the funding can have meaningful impact and in disseminating data and research to inform further policy and programmatic changes.

Mid-Iowa Health Foundation’s mission is to improve health outcomes among under-resourced populations in Central Iowa. We aim to make an impact at a population level, which means affecting the community not by helping individuals make changes that improve their health but by changing the systems that influence their ability to be healthy. An example of this difference in approach — funding a food pantry that helps individuals put food on the table versus funding a study that examines an alternative public benefits model that could potentially reduce the need for people to access a food pantry in the first place.

Improving health outcomes at a population level requires the practice of catalytic leadership. Our foundation understands community needs through a data-driven and community-informed approach that involves using data to identify where health disparities exist and listening to those who are most affected by these issues to understand the causes and effects of these disparities. We convene a broad spectrum of community partners to examine and inform solutions to address community needs. And we support collaborative efforts addressing root causes to improve health outcomes among our community’s under-resourced populations.

As a catalytic funder, the type of initiatives Mid-Iowa Health Foundation is interested in supporting can vary widely, and the expectations on data and evaluation will also vary depending upon the project and the capacity of a grantee. We would not expect a small, volunteer-led nonprofit seeking to host an educational training would provide the same level of evaluation as a local health system implementing a new patient intervention. However, we would expect that an organization could identify and report on the specific impacts achieved related to their project. This type of approach helps us understand the value of our philanthropic investment in achieving our organizational mission. We believe it is critically important to articulate how donor investments are having a meaningful impact on our community — not just through a hunch, or an anecdotal story, but by clear data and evaluation as this type of transparency builds trust between the organization and the donor investors as to the meaningful impact that the organization supports.

What being a catalytic funder looks like in practice for our foundation has been embracing strategies around convening, collaboration and advocacy in the work that we support. We have launched the HealthConnect Fellowship designed to help strengthen the capacity of local nonprofit and governmental colleagues in their advocacy work to address the social drivers of health — social, economic and environmental factors that affect the health of children and families. Twenty-eight fellows from over 20 different local organizations have engaged in system-change work including: supporting the establishment of Iowa’s children’s mental health system, implementing a medical-legal partnership within a local health care system and passing federal stillbirth prevention legislation.

Seeking to address the rising cost of living in our community, Mid-Iowa Health Foundation brought 11 public, private and corporate funding partners together to support UpLift – The Central Iowa Basic Income Pilot, a two-year randomized control trial to study the health and well-being impacts of a $500 monthly basic income on low-income Central Iowa families in Dallas, Polk and Warren counties. This is the first study in the nation to incorporate metropolitan, micropolitan and rural geographies within one basic income study design. The results of the study will be available to the community in the summer of 2026 to inform conversations on effective and efficient practices to address poverty.

To reach a broad spectrum of community members to inform local collaborative research efforts, our foundation funded mini-grants to community-based organizations to increase participant awareness and engagement in the 2024 Community Health Needs Assessment process, resulting in 20 times the number of survey responses compared with the 2021 survey.

At Mid-Iowa Health Foundation, we seek to maximize the potential of philanthropy by using a data-driven, community-informed and collaborative approach. We believe that there is power in tackling the greatest needs in our community by using the resources and expertise that each sector brings to a project. We hope by our practice of catalytic leadership that our foundation will have a transformative impact on the health and well-being of the Central Iowa community, and we invite you to join us in our efforts!

What’s one trend you’re seeing with volunteer engagement?

There seems to be a residual strain on individuals post-COVID — both on their pocketbooks and in their time. Yet, there remains a growing need in the community around meeting basic needs — housing, food access, child care, etc. — and nonprofit service organizations are struggling to deliver services with reductions in revenue. Organizations must be clear about the impact their work has on the community in order to attract and retain volunteer time and investment in their organizations.