In 2018, TSC began the process of logo design and it came down to two versions of stacked “building blocks”. They represented what would become the pillars of the organization: capacity building, grantmaking, and leadership development. We decided on the refined design over the “scaffolding” version that looked like an engineer’s sketch. We collectively exemplified what we envisioned our larger network could be. We moved forward creating the changes we wanted to see in our world and flourished in the coming years.
2024 became our year of changes. After providing capacity building to over 130 organizations and millions in grants and rapid response, we started seeing the wear and tear of our “building”. Our new, smaller, core group came together and did an overall internal assessment. We determined that we need to strengthen our number one offering, capacity building, and refine how we do grantmaking and leadership development. We then came to realize that in the busyness of the last few years, we didn’t recognize the model we have been creating: Resource, Expertise and Network (REN).
We view resources as beyond the dollars to include knowledge and skills among other intangible things. We recognized that expertise is a resource we have to share and something we need externally. And these are all available within our networks. Everything we do is interconnected and should feed back into the model.
That’s when the “scaffolding” version came back to mind. We’re not rebuilding or recreating TSC, we are retrofitting our building. We are revisiting our blueprint, the notes from our first faculty meeting in New York in 2019 and the concepts from our founders.
The concept of TSC began to form in 2017 to counter the onslaught of attacks on our people and we are once again in a very similar situation. The difference is that now we have more leaders and organizations that have the building blocks needed, through our work, and they are part of the larger movement who will make future changes.