The Organization:
Tapestry Community Capital is a national nonprofit co-op supporting social purpose organizations and communities to raise capital through community bonds.
The Assignment:
Tapestry was at a point early in their development where they were looking for clarity on the best way forward. They sought Lynn’s guidance to develop a plan - a stakeholder-validated impact focus, graphic Theory of Change, and action plan.
Overall Outcomes:
Like so many of Lynn’s consulting engagements, with her guidance, the team gained a deeper understanding of the issue they aimed to address and the barriers to success. They committed to delivering a specific, measurable, stretch-goal social impact and developed the stakeholder-validated plan necessary to direct and communicate their work. Overall, they gained impact-focused strategic clarity and alignment to make a meaningful difference.
Outcome #1:
Through this work, Tapestry recognized their sweet spot - working with nonprofits and co-operatives to take ownership of iconic assets to scale their impact, while also creating more investment opportunities for Canadians wanting to make a positive social and environmental impact. In defining the impact of their work, they’d initially focused on the dollars being raised. This could have driven them to support a few organizations to raise a lot of money, vs a broader impact by supporting many organizations. With strategic guidance, they instead focused on the number of bond raises on iconic community projects - a number which seemed realistic but a stretch – as representative of the broad impact they sought to make. This became the focus of the organization, with quarterly and annual plans of each team member aligning to delivering this objective.
Outcome #2
Initially seeing themselves as the Community Bond people, they realized they were about something even bigger - catalyzing a vibrant community investment marketplace. This was in fact necessary to enable delivering their impact through community bonds. They needed an investor-friendly environment for community bonds to be successful. Promoting Policy changes became a necessary strategy to make it easier for organizations to undertake bond raises, and for Tapestry to meet its impact objective.
Outcome #3
To date, Tapestry’s work had been one-off efforts. If they were going to significantly grow, they recognized the need to document and formalize their playbook for onboarding clients and supporting them through the bond raise process. They created a standard approach from which to refine the process and be able to consistently expand to other customers, knowing turnkey delivery was critical.
Outcome #4
With a stretch target for the number of community bond raises, the team recognized the need to efficiently process clients and make it user-friendly. This work helped inform how their online platform solution needed to evolve, to support their impact goals.
Find Out More:
This foundational work set the organization on its path to focus and grow its impact, by uniting the team to focus on Policy, Process and Platform. You’ll find their graphic Theory of Change on their site, as it continues to guide the organization today.
Testimonial:
"Lynn was an invaluable support to Tapestry as we launched and grew our organization. She guided us in crafting key strategic documents, like our theory of change, and fostered a collaborative environment that engaged our entire team. As a thoughtful third party, she was unafraid to ask tough questions and push us to think deeper. We are deeply grateful for the role she played in Tapestry’s development.”
Ryan Collins-Swartz, co-Executive Director, Tapestry Community Capital