Michigan Community Resources
A National Landscape Scan of Nonprofit Intermediaries
Services: Landscape research, peer benchmarking, strategic guidance
Foresight conducted a landscape scan of nonprofit need and peer intermediary organizations for Michigan Community Resources, delivering a Learning & Assessment Guide to inform the organization's next chapter.
The Challenge
For 25 years, Michigan Community Resources has served as a connector for the state's nonprofit sector, linking philanthropy, law firms, and nonprofits. As heightened legal risk and financial uncertainty reshaped needs for both MCR and its clients, the organization wanted to understand whether its own services still fit, and what could be learned from how peer organizations elsewhere were evolving their programmatic and business models. MCR brought in Foresight Collective to help answer these questions.
Our Approach
We worked with MCR to scope the engagement before research began, defining terms and parameters, and clarifying priorities. From there, we:
Reviewed and synthesized secondary data on nonprofit need and service provision across Southeast Michigan.
Researched and catalogued 30+ capacity-building and intermediary organizations across the United States.
Conducted one-on-one "Learning Conversations" with leaders at nine comparable organizations, exploring how they define systems change, structure fee-for-service work, and fund their operations.
Researched trends and public discourse related to nonprofit capacity building.
Our team recognized that the many insights surfaced through the landscape scan on their own would not be enough to support the process of changemaking within the organization. We, therefore, synthesized our learnings into an assessment tool created to provide structured guidance on how MCR might use the knowledge gathered through it to evaluate: its current position (e.g., programs, services, operations); its level of interest and capacity in making changes to its programs and services; potential barriers and opportunities it might encounter in making those changes.
The Outcome
We delivered a Learning & Assessment Guide: Opportunities from a Landscape Scan of Nonprofit Intermediary Organizations, along with a full catalogue of peer intermediary organizations. In a final debrief, we walked MCR staff through how to use the guide, presented the catalogue, and shared our recommendations, highlighting the key themes from the scan and the realities MCR will need to reckon with as it decides how to evolve.
The Result
With the guide in hand, MCR has a structured way to evaluate its current position, gauge its appetite and capacity for change, and identify the barriers and openings ahead. It gave the organization a shared, research-grounded starting point for its next chapter — including genuine staff alignment around one of Foresight's key recommendations.