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Building Community Network 2024-2025

The Home Depot Foundation Building Community Network (BCN) was inspired by the Foundation’s belief that leaders working together can catalyze community change far beyond individual efforts. Through BCN, the Foundation seeks to engage and support the region’s top leaders in their work regarding critical causes important to the Foundation and the communities it serves.

BCN participation is extended by invitation only to senior leadership at more than 125 of the region’s premier nonprofit organizations. Participants engage in an annual series of impact speaker presentations and seminars organized around topics of critical importance to sector and community leadership in order to build understanding, enhance organizational response, and spur collaborative coordination.

Member engagement in annual leadership gatherings has created one of the longest-standing and most unique executive leadership programs in the country, which continues to drive innovation, understanding, collaboration, and goodwill among the organizations represented in the network. 

The Foundation and GCN welcome the 2024-2025 Building Community Network Participants, and we look forward to engaging with you as we learn and collaborate throughout the program year.

2024-2025 Program Focus

Collaboration

 

2024-2025 Program Schedule

DateTimeLocation
KickoffThursday, October 3111:30 am - 1:00 pmIn-person, TBD
Session 1Tuesday, January 2810:00 am - noonIn-person at GCN
Session 2Thursday, February 2010:00 am - noonVirtual via Zoom
Session 3Tuesday, March 410:00 am - noonVirtual via Zoom
Session 4April, date TBDTime TBDIn-person, TBD
Closing CelebrationMay, date TBDTime TBDIn-person, TBD
Register for the full series

Or register for individual events below.

 

2024-2025 Program Details

Session 1

Collaborative Leadership: Fostering High-Performance Collaborative Cultures

Tuesday, January 28th
10:00 am – noon

In-person at GCN (access instructions provided upon registration)

Presenters: Tim Huff, CEO with Turknett Leadership Group

  • As President & CEO of Turknett Leadership Group, Tim is an Executive Coach with a passion for helping leaders unlock their potential and lead with purpose. With over 30 years in high-stakes leadership roles across the U.S. Army and Fortune 500 companies, he brings a unique perspective to client challenges, guiding them in transformative growth. Previously TLG’s VP of Leadership Development, Tim coaches individuals and teams in values-based leadership, executive presence, and team dynamics. His mission: to help leaders be their best for their teams.

Differences in convictions, cultural values, and operating norms add complexity to collaborative efforts. But they also make them richer, more innovative, and more valuable. Unlocking that value is the heart of collaborative leadership. Leaders today must be able to harness ideas, people, and resources from across boundaries of all kinds. That requires reinventing their talent strategies and building strong connections both inside and outside their organizations. To get all the disparate players to work together effectively, they also need to know when to wield influence, rather than authority, to move things forward, and when to halt unproductive discussions, squash politicking, and make final calls.

Register for this session
Register for the full series


Session 2

Collaborative Architecture: Designing Systems that Leverage the Power of Outsiders

Thursday, February 20th
10:00 am – noon

Virtual via Zoom

Presenter: Jasmine Crowe-Houston, CEO of Goodr

  • Jasmine Crowe-Houston is an award-winning social entrepreneur, children’s book author, TED speaker, and determined leader working to make the world a better place one cause at a time. In 2017, after years of feeding people experiencing homelessness from her own kitchen, Crowe-Houston launched Goodr, a sustainable waste management company that leverages technology to combat hunger and reduce food waste. She has been featured on CNBC, in Oprah Magazine, Forbes, Fast Company, and The New York Times, and was named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the top 100 influential female founders. In 2021, Crowe-Houston released her first children’s book, Everybody Eats, that focuses on character building and educating kids about food waste.

Different modes of collaboration involve different strategic trade-offs. For example: Should you share successful models with the community or use them to expand proprietary services to fuel growth? Should organizations nurture collaborative relationships with a few carefully selected partners or try to work with anyone showing interest? What does it mean to harness the wisdom of crowds or listen to the voices of “outsiders” as a nonprofit? Nonprofits that choose the wrong mode risk falling behind in the relentless race to develop new programs and services, harness new technologies, and reach new supporters. 

All too often, organizations jump into relationships without considering their structure and organizing principles – what we call the collaborative architecture. To help leaders make better decisions about the kinds of collaboration their organizations adopt, we will explore a relatively simple framework. The product of 20 years of research and consulting in this area, this framework focuses on two basic questions: Given your strategy, how open or closed should your firm’s network of collaborators be? And who should decide which problems the network will tackle, and which solutions will be adopted?

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Register for the full series


Session 3

Collaborative Teams: The Science Behind Organizations that Sustain Productive Collaboration

Tuesday, March 4th
10:00 am – noon

Virtual via Zoom

Presenter: Tamara Erickson, CEO, Tammy Erickson Associates

  • Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and a renowned expert on workplace generations, leadership, collaboration, innovation, and the evolving nature of work in intelligent organizations. She has been recognized three times as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers globally by Thinkers50, a respected ranking of global business thought leaders. Currently, Erickson serves as an Executive Fellow in Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where she co-directs the Leading Businesses into the Future program for senior executives. She is also the founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a research-driven firm that offers insights and services to help companies adapt their organizational practices to today’s complex challenges. 

    Erickson’s ongoing research includes the impact of social enterprise software on work practices, the demographic implications on HR through Demography is De$tiny, the evolving employee-employer relationship in The New Employee/Employer Equation, and The Cooperative Advantage, a study of industry-based teamwork in collaboration with London Business School. Erickson’s blog, “Across the Ages,” can be found on Harvard Business Publishing’s website, where she regularly shares insights into generational dynamics in the workplace.

Times of stress and uncertainty can cause leaders to be driven by their fear of vulnerability and an increased sense of competitiveness, leading to a hesitancy to share knowledge, people, and resources. The focus on self-preservation and risk mitigation often prevents teams and individual players from making good decisions or taking long-term bets on the organization. This leads to decreased collaboration, creative thinking, and innovation. Empowered team members collaborate internally with cross-functional partners and externally with synergistic organizations that share the same values and stakeholder targets. This allows teams to do more with less and drive tangible and intangible impacts as staff feel more supported and confident in their decision-making and problem-solving abilities.

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Register for the full series


Session 4

Collaborative Success: Making Progress Through Collaboration

April, date TBD
10:00 am – noon

In-person, location TBD

“Collaboration is not an end in itself, but a means of achieving better results.” Successful collaboration requires more than simply bringing a group of people together to reach a common goal. There are certain key ingredients leaders must add to create a collaborative ecosystem ready to support the types of activities needed to spur innovation. These include: 

  • Building a dynamic team 
  • Fostering a collaborative mindset 
  • Harnessing the art of possibility 
  • Using the right tools 
  • Understanding the contributions of collaboration and measuring its tangible results 

We’ll explore each of these in depth using living case studies from the BCN universe.

Register for this session
Register for the full series


Closing Celebration

May, date TBD

In-person, location TBD

Join us to gather and connect, live and in person, with The Home Depot Foundation and your BCN colleagues, representing metro Atlanta’s premier nonprofit leadership, for drinks, dinner, and great conversation!

Registration link coming soon

Questions? Reach out to us at  development@gcn.org.