Report to Members
By Mary Jo Mullan and Garland Yates, Co-Chairs

What an exciting year this is turning into for NFG!

At our January retreat, the NFG Board finalized work on a three-year Plan for the Future. We grappled with ideas raised by members at our annual meeting in Detroit and examined our organizational competencies and the environment in which we do our work. We unanimously adopted a plan that will step up NFG's programs and activities and look forward to working with you to make it all happen.

The plan's highlights include four strategic priorities:

• Educating NFG members about public policy issues of strategic importance to urban and rural communities and encouraging philanthropic support of advocacy, community organizing, and related activities, particularly the efforts of community-based organizations.
• Enhancing the neighborhood and community-based grantmaking capacity of individual grantmakers and the entire grantmaking community.
• Increasing resources to community-based organizations in low-income communities.
• Strengthening NFG's internal organizational capacity to sustain present levels of activities and to provide new and more strategic program and member benefits.

The Board will be working with you and other grantmakers to continue many of our programs and adding some new activities, such as regional meetings. Organizationally, we will be calling on you to help us double our membership, raise grant dollars, increase our use of technology, add new staff, and develop new and better ways to communicate with policy makers, grantmakers and community-based organizations.

With regret, the Board accepted the resignation of Linetta Gilbert, who has devoted tremendous time and energy during her tenure. Thank you Linetta!

NFG Moves Its Office
The NFG office moved from McLean, Virginia to Washington, D.C. on March 1. Stop by and visit the next time you are in town! NFG staff will show you around. We have access to the Aspen Institute's conference and meeting rooms and look forward to being able to better serve our members from our new location.

Publications
We hope that you had a chance to read the last issue of NFG Reports, with its grantmaker interview on faith-based funding. We're also pleased to announce the release of NFG's second Toolbox, The Community Organizing Toolbox, described in greater detail on page 5. Thanks to the many people who made it possible. The Toolbox and other recent publications such as the case studies of site visits are available online at www.nfg.org. The Web site also lists information about NFG-sponsored activities at the Council on Foundations meeting in Philadelphia later this month. We hope to see you at the NFG reception. This year we will be screening the feature-length film, "Bread and Roses," on the eve of its May release in American theaters. As always, the reception is a great opportunity to network and socialize. We hope to see you there.

P.S. Mark your calendars for NFG's 2002 conference -- March 14 - 16, 2002 in San Francisco, CA! There will not be an annual conference in 2001.

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