The following terms are the areas in which we invest capital and strategic assistance and are the categories we use to assess progress. Here's how we define them.

Performance Culture Areas:

Expanded Thinking: The degree to which the organizations-leaders, board, and senior management-are thinking differently about their aspirations for their organizations, how they see and embrace opportunity, and how they envision their own role.

Improved Accountability and Better Governance: The change in how the leadership and board of directors think differently, have taken action, or demonstrated changes in the way things are done to improve accountability and have better governance.

Greater Management Rigor: The change in how management and the board have become information-based (the use of information) in how they plan, assess, and make decisions and how they act and perform with greater rigor and discipline in execution.

Increased Focus on Outcomes: The degree to which an organization plans, allocates resources, makes decisions, improves its programs and services, and delivers to achieve stated outcomes to improve the lives of the children and youth they serve.

Building Blocks for Organizational Development:

Clarified Mission and Goals: Creating greater clarity in the organization's mission, strategies, and goals that allows for an improved focus, guides future actions and decision-making, and serves as the basis for determining future performance milestones to gauge how an organization is progressing.

Stronger Senior Management: Senior management team is strengthened to ensure the skills, maturity, and experience essential to leading a high-performance organization. It involves better definition of senior management structure and roles, the setting of clear direction and expectations. Most importantly, it is based on having the right people in the right position, including development of the current executive management, addition of new executive talent, and better alignment of those in the organization with management potential.

More Effective Boards: Effective boards become better informed, are more rigorous in governance, become more engaged, and add levels of experience, influence, and access to funding by developing current board and adding new members.

Increased Capital and Financing: Organization establishes a more strategic approach to financing its growth and operations over the long-term by building its capacity and increasing its efforts in key areas-investing more to build their development capacity; securing public funding; leveraging non-traditional funding sources; using new financial instruments such as lines of credit and bridge financing; and forging innovative partnerships with governments, agencies, and NGOs.

Increased Financial Accountability: Organization increases its effectiveness through more rigorous financial management, tighter controls, improved reporting, and transparency. The result is more accurate and timely financial information on current and forecasted revenues and expenses, as well as their composition-and ultimately, improved financial integrity.

Improved Programs and Services: Improvements to programs and services to more fully and cost effectively achieve the stated outcomes for children and youth served, taking into account ways to improve the relevance, effectiveness, quality, scalability, and delivery of programs and services.

Established Outcomes Assessment Systems: Defining, implementing, and preparing the organization to define, collect, and report on metrics and indicators that allow outcome achievement to be assessed on a regular basis.