Throughout September, Workforce Development Month, Siegel Family Endowment is examining the work that members of our grantee community are doing to create new skill building systems, and the work they’re doing alongside employers to rethink training, adaptability, and cross-sector collaboration.

We’ve developed a new multidimensional framework for infrastructure that delivers positive community outcomes and addresses the urgent challenges facing American society. In a new white paper drawing on experiences and insights from innovators in the public and private sectors, we explore how an ecosystem approach can help individuals and communities thrive.

In our ongoing “Context is Key” series, SFE's Executive Director Katy Knight explores the ways that different facets of context (from understanding the perspectives of the teams doing the work at a given organization, to the importance of building trust in funder-grantee relationships) inform our grantmaking strategy. We’ll share the questions and behaviors that we incorporate into our processes to make our understanding of context more actionable, effective, and impactful.

Being inquiry-driven means that we don’t think of ourselves as having all the answers. Meeting the challenges posed by the next stages of this crisis will require a lot of long-term thinking, and starting from a place of questioning. We think our question-driven approach is especially well suited to meeting that need.