Funding Strategies - Whole Family Guide

This section of the guide offers funder and foundation resources for determining mission and vision fit, integrating strategies, developing partnerships, and evaluating results.

Incorporating Whole Family into Strategic Planning

Questions and considerations that can expand your thinking and analysis for strategic planning, and ultimately improve your outcomes.

Is Whole Family a Fit for Your Foundation?

Three board/staff exercises to help identify if and how incorporating and investing in Whole Family strategies will further your foundation’s vision and mission.

Options for Incorporating Whole Family into Your Strategy

A range of strategies—pilots, programs, intermediary role, policy – and mechanisms for investing—are included here.

Developing Cross-Sector Partnerships

A set of resources offering how to develop partnerships from a range of sectors and thought leaders.

Assessment and Evaluation Tools

A set of resources and tools providing guidance on how to identify family outcomes; build partnerships to collect data; and package results of Whole Family approaches.

A Word About Language

Whole family, multi-generational approaches meet the needs of and provide opportunities for children and the adults in their lives together. These approaches are highly contextual, and may be called “whole family,” “two-generation or two-gen,” and “multi-generational” approaches in some organizations, communities, and contexts. Particularly for Indigenous communities, an approach that supports multiple generations within a home or family is important. The goal of a whole family, multigenerational approach is to ensure economic, educational, and health stability and mobility for the whole family, using mechanisms and strategies that give both generations in the family a balloon, and not one a dead weight.

This guide uses “whole family” for consistency and ease of reading; and encompasses the meanings of these other terms.

This guide also uses “parents,” which includes caregivers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and others who are in the lives of children. Families are defined by the families themselves in our view, rather than by an outside agency, and the guide reflects this as well.