In July, the CSF’s leadership team gathered for a two-day retreat to strategize and vision-cast for the next 18 months of the CSF’s work. We caught up with Rob Whitten, CEO, to ask a few questions about the retreat.
Can you share a bit about the CSF’s recent leadership retreat?
A theme that surfaced during our retreat was “Quo Vadimus?”, which is Latin for “Where are we going?” The retreat itself was a chance for us to pause and think about where we want to go over the next 18 months. Some of that was thinking about what that means for the team—how we can work better together and build more cohesiveness across the organization. But we also spent a considerable amount of time really digging into our strategic agenda.
Strengthening leadership within the CSF was also an important aspect of our retreat. We want everyone to have ownership of their work. So, we brought together leaders from all four of our focus areas—Programs, Finance, Impact, and Health Equity—to make sure all voices were represented as we considered our strategic agenda moving forward.
What kinds of new strategic priorities came out of your time together?
Back in 2020, we set four strategic imperatives for the CSF: Invest in Children, Strengthen Partners, Honor Community, and Optimize Organization (which is focused on how our organization operates internally). Those four categories continue to be, in our estimation, the right descriptors. But we did think about how we operationally define each of those.
For Invest in Children and Strengthen Partners, our definitions remain largely intact. It really is about how we invest in services, champion children and families in our work, help our partner organizations carry out their mission and align those efforts at the community level.
For Honor Community, we’re doing some more thinking about how we demonstrate our impact by defining and measuring results and sharing those results with the community. And for Optimize Organization, thinking about how we build a diverse and innovative culture through both our operations and our governance, which focuses on being responsive to the needs of our partners and the greater community.
Can you share more about how you hope to measure the impact the CSF is making through their contributions?
Our goal is to be able to measure our impact on Jackson County beyond just the number of kids served and amount of dollars invested, but to really think about how the kids in the county look different because of our investment, while recognizing that we’re not the ones delivering services. How do we define our impact, knowing that the direct impact is being made by our partners, not because of what we do specifically?
As far as what that looks like for us—I don’t know yet. It’s a question across the world of philanthropy. How do you measure impact when you are delivering support but providing no services, and the support you’re providing doesn’t happen in a vacuum? For example, we can provide all the school-based services in the world, but if those kids are also facing food or housing insecurity, then no amount of mental health services at school will offset that mental impact.
So, we’re exploring what this could look like for us, while recognizing the realities that we operate within. We’re putting money into a system that’s not a closed system. So, we’re investigating: what is our impact to measure when we’re not the ones actually doing the work, and how can growing that understanding help us to increase our impact even more?
How is the CSF thinking about health equity in 2025 and beyond?
Health equity can be a challenging subject in a time when equity itself is kind of under fire. But we have to recognize that there are disparities in outcomes, and a lot of those disparities are driven by a child’s race or the zip code in which they live. To improve outcomes for all kids in Jackson County, we have to understand the drivers that are potentially inhibiting success for some more than others.
If you’re thinking about population health, it’s very clear to see that there is disparity in health outcomes. People of color tend to have poorer outcomes. People who live in zip codes that are more economically disadvantaged have poorer outcomes. And so, at a time when there is already tremendous strain on our health care system in general, and with sweeping changes likely coming to Medicaid and Medicare, which will drive changes to private health insurance, we have to focus on improving outcomes across the board. Mental health, physical health—a whole-person approach.
If you’re wanting to drive better outcomes for everyone, you have to understand what the barriers are that some people face. So for us specifically, that means working with partners around increasing access to care that is culturally responsive and appropriate, and navigating that in a time when there are members of our community who are going to be less likely to try to access care because of unique fears they’re facing due to policies and priorities from the federal government.
Are there other factors the CSF is considering in your strategic planning?
Our goal at the CSF is to be focused on human issues, not political ones. But in my 30 years working in the nonprofit world, I’ve never seen the federal climate pivot as quickly or as unpredictably as it has over the last six months. There’s been a tremendous amount of federal funding that has been pulled or is now in question for the organizations we partner with, and other programs that will impact both our partners and Jackson County kids and families—like Medicaid and SNAP—are being cut back as well.
The holes in the safety net are getting bigger. And sooner or later, if we continue down this path, it’s not going to hold. Long standing supports are going away. Federal obligations are being shifted to the state level. And in some states—Missouri being one of them—programs that help kids are losing funding because of tax cuts. These policy shifts happen quickly, and they change so rapidly that sometimes it’s hard to keep track.
The reality is that it’s a scary time for the people who do this work. We have partners who have already had to scale back their programs or their workforce. We’ve seen partners lose millions of dollars in funding. And these cuts are going to impact people in our community directly.
One of our hopes for the next 18 months is to try to be as consistent as we can be for our partners. We’re not making huge shifts in what we fund or how we fund, recognizing that partners are already navigating so much change. We’re trying to provide support where we can as they navigate that change and to be one stable, consistent thing they can count on. Our resources are finite and we can’t cover everything, but we’re trying to be a steady support in all the ways we can.
Anything else you want people to know about the CSF as you look ahead to the rest of 2025 and into 2026?
Ultimately, at the organizational level, we’re still driven by the same thing: how much we care about kids. Every single person on our team and on our board has a passion for making life better for Jackson County kids and families, and that’s what drives us to do the work we do with our partners. What drives us to do this work is a desire to make Jackson County a place where kids thrive. We know from the Children’s Services Assessment that there’s a lot standing in our way—kids have compromised wellbeing, the system of care is strained, and there are community and systemic barriers. But we’re going to keep working to tip those scales. Even when we face the kinds of headwinds coming at us right now, we’re going to keep working with our partners and across the community to make life better for kids in Jackson County.
