Erin Rodriguez, Root Cause
Root Cause is a nonprofit consulting team that helps drive effective and enduring social change. Our mission is to empower communities to build, improve, and sustain social change initiatives that enable all people to thrive. Since 2004, we’ve helped over 400 nonprofits, public agencies, philanthropists, and other funders achieve their strategic planning, collective action, grantee capacity building and performance measurement goals while advancing racial and economic equity.
Philosophy/Approach: Root Cause supports our partners in creating strategies, structures, and processes that level-up their work and drive greater mission achievement. We do so through a “web” of services—each of which can stand alone or be combined with others to create a holistic approach to the challenge at hand.
Our approach to collaboration is intentionally inclusive and designed for lasting impact:
- We create a customized, participatory approach to engage your unique community members and organizational leaders.
- We provide capacity building that helps teams integrate a strong, explicit organization-wide commitment to racial and economic equity and social justice into everyday practices.
- We foster a culture of curiosity that fuels and sustains operational, programmatic, and other organizational improvements.
Types of clients: Private foundations, corporations, community foundations, individual donors, small to mid-size nonprofits, major nonprofits, universities
Issues/Focus: Economy, Education, Health, Social
Specialization:
- Collective Action: Root Cause helps nonprofit service providers, public agencies, grantmakers, and other stakeholders who share a common purpose (e.g., diversifying STEM pipelines or improving college and career readiness for high school seniors) come together to design, implement, and then measure the performance of collective action initiatives. Root Cause uses a proprietary Collective Action framework that is grounded in the best practices and ideas in the sector to build partnerships, foster teamwork, coordinate service delivery and performance measurement — and functions as a network manager (or backbone support) as needed.
- Continuous Learning & Improvement: We help organizations, networks, and their funders determine, collect, and use data (or measures of success) to engage in processes of continuous learning and improvement. Our services run the gamut from developing performance measurement tools, processes, and systems to performing evaluation assessments, making recommendations for improvement, and providing customized coaching and technical assistance to strengthen nonprofit operations, program quality — and ultimately, outcomes.
- Strategy, Design, & Implementation: Root Cause has a long history of guiding community members and organizational leaders in strategic planning, design, and implementation processes. We help partners develop roadmaps for the future, design and launch new initiatives, strengthen existing programs and processes, and implement strategies for greater impact. Root Cause takes a hands-on approach, providing effective project management and technical assistance in operations, HR, and other functions as needed.
How they operate is VERY different from traditional consultants. There’s a sense of partnership, of shared values and culture.
Erin Rodriguez, Root Cause
