Our areas of knowledge include:

Family Economic Success

Family Economic Success (FES) means that families can meet their immediate needs and are working to achieve a secure financial future for themselves and their children.  FES offers a way for leaders to build and strengthen strategies and efforts that create supportive communities.  This effort is divided into two goals: community action readiness and family-focused results.

Community action readiness focuses on a community's capacity for helping low-income families achieve financial security.  A community must understand current challenges and conditions of low-income working families in its economy.  The community must then commit to closing the gap by addressing its infrastructure and additional capacity needs.

Family-focused results help families come together and make progress in financial security.  "Earn It, Keep It and Grow It" is a strategy that concentrates on three levels of stability; the ability to earn an income, making good choices about borrowing and spending, and saving and increasing assets over time. 

FES is focused not just on the adults in the family, but on how their children are faring – and will fare – in the generations to come.  Children do well when families do well, and families do better when they live in supportive communities.

Read about CSG's Rural Family Economic Success work at: http://www.aspencsg.org/rufes/about/resources.html.

Regional Vitality

Small individual efforts can’t match the initiative of a group. Connectivity of regions, or regionalism, introduces creative ways of addressing vital issues that are too large to be taken on alone.  CSG helps organize and advance regional livelihood initiatives that bring together diverse leaders across geographic regions to discover common ground and devise action that will make their place better for all to live and work in.

We unite regions by helping them address their shared fate and issues facing the community at large. Persistent poverty, unemployment and poor schools are challenges that require coordinated efforts from experts and practitioners who can develop, test and share strategies that respond to such challenges. CSG helps regions build on these strategies to gain more allies, identify new policy directions, test new strategies, build new capacities and increase the momentum of change.

Community Foundations and Affiliates

Community foundations are one of the fastest-growing sectors of philanthropy.  While they vary in size and location, all the community foundations share the goals of serving donors, partnering with nonprofits and improving life in their communities.  They serve as a center for philanthropy, providing a link between the financial resources within a community and its charitable needs or opportunities for improvement.

The fastest area of growth in the community foundation field is that of geographic affiliates, which might be described as “branch offices” of larger, “lead” foundations.  These affiliates are generally located in rural areas, providing access to community foundation services to hard-to-reach communities. 

In an effort to improve outcomes in their communities and carve out a niche within the larger philanthropic field, many community foundations are actively taking on a leadership role in their communities.  This leadership role is becoming a defining characteristic of community foundations.

Read CSG's Growing Local Philanthropy: The role and reach of community foundations (2005) at http://www.aspencsg.org/rdp/_documents/resources/survey2b.pdf.

Read CSG's Growing Local Philanthropy: Community Foundations and Geographic Affiliates (2011) at http://www.aspencsg.org/survey/AspenCSGGrowingLocalPhilanthropy2011.pdf.

Community Development Philanthropy

Maintaining a locally governed institution for charitable investment from within and without the community is as important as having a good school, a place of worship, a bank, or any other key institution in order to transform a community.  We recognize philanthropy as a powerful community development tool, enabling communities to build assets that will produce community-driven results and foster an equitable development process.

Community Development Philanthropy (CDP) is a community-led approach that generates and subsequently invests locally-controlled assets to strengthen communities.  It builds a community's ability to shape a better future and promote the well-being of all community members.  CDP unites the tools of the community and economic and resource development, engaging all people to come together with their voices, ideas, strategies, talents and giving. 

The overarching goal of CDP is to produce wealth that sticks in communities over the long-term, to improve the lives for all the people who live there, to create more prosperous and sustainable economies, and to form a more just, fair and welcoming community.

Read about CSG's Rural Development Philanthropy work at: http://www.aspencsg.org/rdp/.

Rural Development

Rural communities are among the hardest-hit by development challenges. They are remote and often lack the necessary resources to face their greatest threats.  CSG designs individualized action plans with rural communities that build on their strengths and minimize weaknesses. We do this by bringing rural communities together to face regional problems and help them learn from one another.  Our work addresses issues of economic development, resource stewardship, human investment, workforce development and transportation.

We revitalize rural areas by helping them identify their unique opportunities for success. This approach combines deep passion with competency and economics, so communities can find their unique ‘Sweet Spot’ – the place where passion, competence and economics coincide.

Workforce Development

The massive restructuring of our national and global economy, and the subsequent restructuring of the labor market, underlie the biggest challenges experienced by urban and rural areas over the last generation.

We develop effective workforce systems by helping regions create individualized partnership designs and strategies. CSG works with regions to ensure that youth moving into careers, workers upgrading their skills and displaced workers all gain the skills they need for good jobs.

All across the U.S., urban and rural factory labor has declined significantly.  Family-sustaining employment that doesn’t require formal, advanced education – such as blue-collar jobs in manufacturing with decent wages and union protection – is largely a thing of the past.  Developing strategies to address the impact of globalization on low-wage jobs will require effective rural-urban alliances.

Rural-urban state alliances have spawned innovative efforts to support workers with little education and training who are confined to precarious, low-wage jobs without benefits or security, and their power has increased pressure for similar changes at the federal level. A critical precondition to developing effective workforce systems and partnerships in rural America is understanding that there are multiple rural Americas, each requiring a different partnership design and a different set of strategies to develop effective interventions. Models and strategies that work well in one area may be totally unsuited for others.  This difference in starting point means that workforce partnerships working in one area may have to take a vastly different approach than partnerships working in another.